Wireless Network Modded To See Through Walls 161
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by
CmdrTaco
from the still-can't-see-through-pants dept.
from the still-can't-see-through-pants dept.
KentuckyFC writes "The way radio signals vary in a wireless network can reveal the movement of people behind closed doors, say researchers who have developed a technique called variance-based radio tomographic imaging which processes wireless signals to peer through walls. They've tested the idea with a 34-node wireless network using the IEEE 802.15.4 wireless protocol (the personal area network protocol employed by home automation services such as ZigBee). The researchers say that such a network could be easily distributed by the police or military wanting to determine what's going on inside a building. But such a network, which uses cheap off-the-shelf components, might also be easily deployed by your neighbor or anybody else wanting to monitor movements in your home."
Worried about people spying on you? (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds like a job for... Aluminum Oxide Paint! [slashdot.org]
Re:Tinfoil House (Score:2, Interesting)
While a coat of aluminum oxide does count as a Faraday cage, I believe thickness is real issue with the protective power. Paint is only a few molecules thick (relatively) to the more traditional wire mesh. If you were going to build a new house, I think you'd be better including a brass mesh in the walls of your house.
Re:Worried about people spying on you? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Kids (Score:3, Interesting)
I would think that many of the early hacker culture geeks sneaked out a lot at night - for phone phreaking, to find computer parts etc.
Seymour Hersh hinted at this a few years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Something the community can get into (Score:5, Interesting)
You can get xbee-equipped computers (mostly with pics, avrs, basic stamps, etc) for super cheap, like three for a bill. I'm considering them for a remote monitoring and control application where wifi is overkill in some ways and inadequate in others (line of sight issues.) Current xbee modules all seem to support mesh networking, which is really the big draw to me of the protocol itself here, or at least the most readily available implementation. Being able to put out a sensor net and get a sort of meta-sense out of it would be all the more exciting. I'm sure the same thought has occurred to everyone, of course. This seems like the kind of thing that would give the [para]military types a massive hard-on given that they're already playing with the idea of gigantic numbers of drones and communications devices scattered across the battlefields of tomorrow... and our homes and cities.
Too cumbersome. (Score:3, Interesting)
by "interrogating" this volume of space with many signals, picked up by multiple receivers, it is possible to build up a picture of the movement within it.
As I understand, the researchers used 34 receivers. You will need a whole lot of receivers. More than you might want to buy and maintain to offer you what is at best a poor resolution of moving things beyond walls.
Re:Kids (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes...
Actually buddies of mine weould make a late night pilgramage to Benton Harbor, MI to tresspass on the HeathKit compound to go dumpster diving. WE almost got caught about 8 times. I got enough out of their dumpsters to build my first IBM-XT and a HERO-I robot back in the late 80's.
In fact it was my buddies that started heathkit destroying things they put in the trash. One of them got greedy and started selling the crap we got out of the dumpsters.
Re:Kids (Score:2, Interesting)
My dad worked for Heathkit, wrote the user manual for the Hero 1. We had one in our house for a while when I was a kid. I was too young to do much with it though.
Re:Kids (Score:3, Interesting)
Depending on your decade and location ... Fry's was a grocery store that was open all night...and had this large tech section.
Now it's an electronics store with the emphasis on consumer, and it's no longer open all night. But that's one place where it started around 1960. (I was just too early, and just too far away...but I sure heard about it!)
Winter evenings will fly by... (Score:2, Interesting)
'But' (Score:2, Interesting)