YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Your TV can see through walls

58 points Curiositry 2 hours ago 16 comments

thopterek 1 hour ago | parent

Thank you for more paranoia

rightnutwingjob 1 hour ago | parent

π RuView turns commodity WiFi signals into real-time spatial intelligence, vital sign monitoring, and presence detection — all without a single pixel of video.

https://github.com/ruvnet/RuView

ThePumpkinGod 1 hour ago | parent

So, a bad actor can now know when I'm at my house or not, I'm sure that's fine and won't be problematic

rightnutwingjob 58 minutes ago | parent

Even having three security cameras around the perimeter of your house can allow quite precise location and activity detection inside the house via their audio steams.

Those mics can be quite sensitive.

ThePumpkinGod 38 minutes ago | parent

I don't have security cameras in my house but that's actually interesting to see how things most people have in their house can (and does?) used to spy on them.

cowlevel 46 minutes ago | parent

They already knew this from your cell phone not being in airplane mode.

lencastre 37 minutes ago | parent

there is always the risk of the isolated Faraday caged house

ThePumpkinGod 37 minutes ago | parent

If I ever try to hide (which is probably impossible at this time and age), I will probably just break my phone not like I can use it anyways every single act in it sends data to too many places to count.

gbxyz 1 hour ago | parent

See also: Van Eck Phreaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking

fzeindl 41 minutes ago | parent

Amazing book about similar topics: “Silence on the wire” by Michal Zalewski

https://www.amazon.de/Silence-Wire-Passive-Reconnaissance-In...

walrus01 33 minutes ago | parent

see also, presence detection of humans via wifi signals: https://arxiv.org/html/2308.06773v2

swerner 32 minutes ago | parent

As anyone observed who had a TV with just basic analog terrestrial antennas, before cable and satellite dishes - it does make a difference to the signal, when and where you stand and countless pieces of physical comedy in TV shows incorporated that.

armcat 26 minutes ago | parent

I recall there being an MIT study where they were literally using rf signals to see through walls like an X-ray.

I even had a startup that used path loss and scattering from rf photons to accurately estimate traffic flow using 4G [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.09143

numlock86 22 minutes ago | parent

Wait for people to learn about that you can listen in virtually anywhere through fiber-optic cables, as sound waves are enough to redirect the light in the cable to a measurable degree by "bending" the cable itself. Special devices to filter these variances out and transform them back to audio signals are a thing. It's only per line though, as any repeating device will just output a new cleaned up signal again.

Oh well, there have always been ways to snoop on someone like that. Back in the day it was CRTs emitting measurable waves through the neighborhood, with some papers even going as far as restoring the displayed image through a wall. Nowadays it's fiber and WiFi, and those seem to be much easier to work with even. Plus everyone carries a device that is tracked by their mobile provider's cell network. shrug

1e1a 14 minutes ago | parent

See these for a very low cost (<$10) method for observing WiFi and some LTE spectra:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922674

https://espargos.net/espsdr/