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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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@gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works @nebula42@lemmy.zip If a neighbor has this thing, it doesn't matter if your router is yours, because theirs will still "infiltrate" (and see as well, as I'll say below) your house as microwave-length (both the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz) electromagnetic waves can and will trespass the walls separating the two...
...except if all your house structure, including walls and the floor and the roof, are layered with a metallic plate and/or a metallic mesh spaced exactly 12cm/x (the wavelength and its harmonics, such as 6cm (4.8GHz), 3cm(9.6GHz), etc) apart, but then it must not be electrically grounded, which then requires the plate/mesh to be something internally "glued" or bolted (with bolts made of non-conductive material) to the wall tiles and floor tiles rather than something buried inside concrete walls. Or, to summarize in two words, Faraday cage.
Why? Because the main problem with this technology is that it's not restricted to wall boundaries. In fact, it's used for some applications (military, police, etc., possibly even Google Streetview did this because they use wardriving to "improve geolocation services") to literally "see through the walls".
Or, to make this more ominous and menacing, "you can be seen in the dark"... And I mean this phrase in a literal sense, because the Wi-Fi transmitter acts like a lamp so a specialized array of Wi-Fi receivers can "see"...
So, actually, even your own router will end up being an involuntary lamp to your house for an external "Wi-Fi eye" (the aforementioned array of Wi-Fi receivers), except if you use other frequencies allowed for ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical radio ranges) such as 433MHz.
The solution is simpler yet still involving some complexities (such as math behind electromagnetic wavelength, harmonics, electrical conductivity, etc): Faraday cage all inside the house. Having no neighbors is also an interesting mitigation factor (although increasingly difficult as people are used to gather in neighborhoods, as well as the ongoing verticalization of cities).
As long as we're carrying cellphones with us at all times, none of this is particularly damning in comparison.
Signal attenuation is crap compared to directional homing in on the transmitter in your pocket.
@rumba@lemmy.zip
The technology works by measuring the interference provoked by obstacles, including (but not limited to) walking human bodies. As we walk within the range of two or more devices communicating with each other, our bodies momentarily alter the signal, reflecting and absorbing and diffracting the original 2.4GHz wave.
Now, say I live in a condo, sandwiched between two different neighbors (Alice and Bob), and both use this Xfinity thing: while Alice wander around her apartment while doing a VoIP call on her phone, Bob's router is also broadcasting it's SSID which is then received by Alice's phone, even though Alice's phone is connected to Alice's router. The same goes for Bob's phone, which will receive the Alice's router SSID broadcast. And I, wandering around my own apartment, I'll be between the invisible crossfire. I don't even need to be carrying a phone, nor do I need to have a router. I just need to have at least two neighbors with routers and mobile devices sandwiching me between their radio signals.
Now, there are more sophisticated "WiFi vision" (used by military and police) which needs just a single Wi-Fi hotspot which will act as their "lamp". The signal will bounce all around the place, and it'll also pass through the walls, reaching the soldier's equipment, which is composed of several small Wi-Fi receptors arranged in a grid (akin to "pixels" from a DSLR digital camera sensor).
Both can be mitigated with Faraday cages. Some kinds of chicken wire, used to make chicken coops, work beautifully and they use to be cheap (as strange as it may sound, a few-dollars thing can beat a thousand-dollars thing).
You are greatly exaggerating how the system works and what it can generate, and you're conflating this service's ability with that of professional espionage gear.
Alice's router is reading the signal between Alice's devices and her router. As part of the wifi protocol, the router can get precise recprical information about the signal strength of the devices connected to it. It's not radar, it's i know the thermostat is connected and has -10db singal, it's at -11db now so there's something in the way, we have movement. Say she has a wifi TV and a wifi on her cellphone, if she's in between one of those devices or one of them moves closer, they can sense a change and movement. While they could try to listen to everything in the neighborhood, all they'd get is noise and fluctuations they're not building a picture, move of a corkboard with thumbtacks and string, but they have no idea what direction any of the tacks are in just how hard it is to get to them.
Bobs router is reading his stuff and ignoring alice's stuff. otherwise bob would get false positives.
Any radio emission in your house could be used like this with the right receivers.
They're not getting any directionailty from this, the router has no idea what things are in what direction, just that there are changes in field strength. The condos below you or above you would also set it off if they were trying to just listen to everything.
You keep referring to it as a lamp. It's less like a lamp and more like a speaker. the sound can carry through walls, but it's muffled. The directionality is severely reduced even if you had fine tuned directional antennas to pinpoint it. It's a little better than sound, but far closer to sound than light. The router is more like a mic. It's in one static spot and is simply omnidirecional.
It's only abile to see a table liket he following
MAC1:098324F3C40E89 -11.1 MAC2:19834F3C440E62 -12.9 MAC3:398321F3C40E28 -110.1 MAC4:4983423C440E15 -25.3 MAC5:598323F3C40E98 -16.8
if one of the numbers change and the rest don't, that's movement. They're not building pictures out of this.
Now, let's talk faraday cages.
at 2.4GHz, your hole size would have to be about 6mm maximum. better off a three or less (like a microwave door)
at 5G that would be 3mm max You're going to want brass mesh or something.
Then if you wanted to block mains, that's powerful enough that you could be detected through changes in the the magnetic b field, good luck blocking that.
Hot take:
Live far enough away from your neighbor for their wifi not to reach.
You need about an acre. Just live in the Boonies. Solve your network and physical security at the same time.
@Patches@ttrpg.network
Yeah, it's an interesting mitigation for sure, but it's becoming increasing impossible not to have neighbors, especially due to "verticalization" (i.e. corporations buy some old houses to demolish 'em and emerge a whole new condominium building; even "boonies" (TIL this word) are undergoing verticalization, as I'll say below).
An acre is around 4000 meter squared, or a land whose size is ~63.6 meters on each directional axis. If we consider a circular 1 acre (because radio signals often propagate omnidirectionally), it's a circle whose diameter is ~70 meters (inverse of pi radius squared). In rural areas where I lived, my phone could detect and even connect to hotspots 500 meters distant from where I was, roughly 7 to 10 times those distances.
We don't notice this in urban places because there's a saturation of Wi-Fi channels (especially 2.4GHz still in use), so our phones tend to pick up the closest, and the closest within urban places will be really close, whereas rural areas lack this saturation, allowing for hotspots really far away to be connectable.
Brazil, the country I reside in, could be considered "boonies" (a rural country). Practically all Brazilian states, with few exceptions (Rio de Janeiro state, Distrito Federal the federal district, São Paulo state and Goiás), have more than 10% of rural density (as per 2010 IBGE statistics), yet Brazil is getting more and more condominium buildings. Even rural areas are getting significantly denser due to a significant phenomenon of urban exodus from capital cities to small farmsteads in smaller towns that started during the COVID-19 pandemics, something that ends up fomenting urbanization and verticalization of those towns.
Also, "boonies" countries like Brazil are getting increasingly reliant on state-of-the-art tech. So I bet there are routers capable of the same USian Xfinity thing in Brazil. As a sidenote, I already saw EVs in small rural cities I visited.
There are still plenty of real estate where there's little to no neighborhood, but it's getting increasingly expensive unfortunately, so people end up going where their pockets can afford, and it's often places where there are more people.
As far as I'm aware, the same verticalization, real estate inflation and influx of high tech are happening in other rural countries as well.
Just have a jammer doing destructive interference problems solved
@DeathsEmbrace@lemmy.world Jammers are against most (if not all) the telecommunication regulations around the world, including FCC regulations, because it can interfere with and disrupt important infrastructure (such as government, military, but also hospitals and aviation, etc). If one is caught using jammers, it can even lead to one's arrest on most countries. Meanwhile, Faraday cages aren't illegal (at least yet in this dystopian world we exist). Hence why I recommended a Faraday cage rather than destructive interference through jammers.
Just works like a lamp again, receiver doesn’t need to transmit
then you cant use your own wifi. Besides a jammer you need to use cable internet only.