Scientists Use WiFi to See Through People's Walls

Also VR nerds. Current tracking is either based on the headset, so you can't move your arms unless the headset can see them, or your arms have to be seen by lighthouses, or you rely purely on gyroscope and accelerometers for tracking, which tend to drift. So either you have blind spots, have to deal with occlusion, or will slowly drift and have to recalibrate periodically. Wifi-based tracking seems like a neat idea tbh.

Edit: considering wifi is just photons that aren't wiggling fast enough for us to see, I'd be surprised if the government doesn't already have this technology behind closed doors.

Home automation nerds would also cream their pants if they could get their hands on this. Imagine you could use your existing wifi router to detect presence in your home. Say goodbye to shitty IR sensors that forget about your existence within 3 seconds, no more finicky radar modules that are either too sensitive or not nearly sensitive enough.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be at all shocked if uncle sam and his favourite three letter agencies have been playing around with this tech for years.

Same, but the fantasy miniatures are sex toys and the paint is my butt.

In more than one sense, yes.

Applicable nick there...

I lick that 👍

paint myself in lead paint to become invisible. got it. /s

All the information you want to know is available at: REDACTED

Article is from a year ago. Government tends to be ahead of the curve. As an uninformed guess, they have been using it in high value situations for 4+ years.

(Dear FBI, the above is a guess based on public information. I don't know shit.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)

Here's a video summary of the paper I thought did a good job too from two minute papers.

https://youtu.be/kBFMsY5ZP0o

We only have to enter his name to be safe.

And everyone thinks Batman was the good guy.

starts putting paint on face

Yes, but he specifically used cell signals.

Came here to say this!

... that you CANT see through walls? Seems like a downgrade to me...

it became understood that merely because someone can get a photo of you they have the legal right to do so.

What jurisdiction is this true? There are certainly times that there is an expectation of privacy and getting a photo of you would be illegal. Easy example: and owner of a store can't photo you in the dressing room, the even tho they could put a camera in there. It's the same thing here, there is an expectation of privacy in your home (or for many enclosed and private spaces), so this kind of "picture" would likely already be a violation.

I'm an EE, and I have serious doubt about this actually working nearly as good as they are putting it. This sort of stuff is hard, even with purpose built radar systems. I'm working with angle estimation in Multipath environments, and that shit fucks your signals up. This may work it you have extremely precisely characterised the target room and walls, and a ton of stuff around it, and then don't change anything but the motion of the people. But that's not practical.

Full body vr tracking without sensors?

The human presence sensors based on this are already on the consumer market, we just need to dial up the sensitivity.

There are already smart light bulbs you can buy off the shelf that use radio signals to see when somebody is in the room. Then it can turn on the lights automatically, without a camera or infrared sensor in the area.

Here's what they're putting in the goggles that Infantrymen wear now.

I don't care to guess what the drones are packing.

Based on the cell phone reception in my house, I already suspect it's a Faraday cage.

near future building insulation will include enhanced EM spectrum insulation, to prevent or distort leakage into the environment

Nope, that's what they want you to think. Just wait a few decades and we'll find out tin foil hats will actually have some use

The tech is even far older than the article. I remember seeing this being demo'd at least a decade ago. Though, it looks like the fidelity has improved significantly from the early proof-of-concept videos that were floating around for a while.

Sorry, I didn't notice the date when I posted. I can take it down if requested.

I highly doubt it, here is something that might interest you on the topic

Interesting! It could theoretically act like a Kinect if it were advanced enough, and you wouldn't need any additional hardware.

The "glass is a liquid" thing is a myth. The reason why old windows tended to be thicker at the bottom (which is usually the cited reason for this myth) is because windowpane making techniques weren't very good and so they would always have one thicker side. The builders would naturally install the pane with that side on the bottom because it was more stable. Glass doesn't "flow" over time, it's a solid crystalline amorphous material.

They bounce a laser off the glass and can hear what's happening in the room by capturing the vibrations of the glass. I seem to remember the US embassy was caught spying on the Canadian Prime Minister using this technique.

Yes that's possible and it has some years but there's some conditions. The glass needs to have a sticker onto it for the trick AFAIK is to reflect a laser or infrared light onto it and track the less than milimétric vibrations of it and depending on where is the sticker and how big is the window it affects the quality of the recording. Given this wifi trick I think it would have to do with signals not passing through water clearly or some thing on the likes and more over it should need some specific equipment to pull out the trick, I don't imagine you could just hack a router and patch surveillance in the firmware.