One day, WiFi might even be usable as a method for making a reliable network connection
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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Just imagine how much humanity could benefit if sharing and accessing knowledge was freely available for almost anyone
The problem is not sharing and accessing, but generating. If we had a system where people would be paid for generating knowledge, then they wouldn't have to charge for accessing knowledge.
That's why a lot more research should be paid for by the government. In exchange, government-funded research would be excluded from having patents and/or copyright.
Goverment funded research is paid for my public money via taxes but the research information is not publicly accessible, I can understand this if it's defense or other secretive research but there is no reason someone should have to pay for access to other research fields information when it is publicly funded
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One can dream. For now though it's the one radio my phone doesn't use. Mobile network tunneling through Bluetooth baby! My atrial fibrillation when remain between me and my meth dealer! Shout out to Craig!
Wifi sognals can read my heart rate, and be used to track me around my house. But I still can't get a signal in my room one floor up from the router.
This is the key point - these have to be clear signals in the same room.
This is really cool and will be useful. My second thought was oh great now my smart TV can see how excited I am watching their injected ads and how many people saw it too. One of the many reasons to never connect modern TVs to the Internet.
The next headline will be "wifi connecting to internet-no modem needed"
This tech scares the hell out of me.
Great if we can make MRI quality imaging eventually available, but being able to monitor where people are in their homes remotely and their health status in our world is fucking dangerous.
Real question: how do you stop this?
I don't use wifi at all in my home but I live in an apartment and all my neighbours obviously do.
How in the hell do I stop this from getting into my home?
Turns out the tinfoil hat gang was right the whole time.
Innocuous radio signals are one thing but if my apartment is inundated with radio waves that can literally be used to track my movements and monitor my heartbeat, being forced to allow this is a perverse and sickening invasion of privacy.
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Own the network. Run OSS.
That's about it.
"Howdy neighbour. Your wireless modem/router combo is mine now. Thxkbye"
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Damn. “TikTok would like to access WiFi”
We need new permissions for this shit. WiFi can do presence detection and now heart rate? What next? Eye tracking?
I'm pretty sure applications can only send and receive data, with the finer details being handled by the OS.
But yes, there should be a specific permission to access biometric information.
That makes sense. I assume these exotic ability’s require precise control of the radios. So, for now, until an API made, we should be safe.
"Google enters the chat"
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Insurance companies...sorry you're denied for being a health risk....we can see from your home internet that you're an unhealthy person
Remember kids, you can buy your own home fiber router! Don't live with someone else's equipment between you and the internet.
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The Paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11096342/metrics#metrics
This is very cool and useful, but at the same time very concerning. While I see a lot of good use cases for this ranging from hospitals to stress recognition in animals I Am also quite scared, that big corporations will use this to spy on us. Luckily currently it is only possible to measure the pulse at about 3m, but it should be possible to increase the range. It may fall short when multiple persons are in detection range, but as far as I have read from the paper they did not test this.
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Inb4 the cops starts doing nonconsensual "polygraph tests" using wifi
Those 5G Conspiracy Theorists probably feel vindicated after reading this lol
https://wballiance.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/WBA-Wi-Fi-Sensing-paper.pdf
Comcast knows when you masturbate.
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Is this good? I can’t tell if it’ll just be used as one more invasive information gathering data points for Amazon and google
Wow, all that with an esp32. No fancy hardware needed.
Which means we can have that data in Home Assistant sooner or later🤔
How much longer until I can be like "Hey, Google; scan the area for lifeforms?"
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And I guarantee some organization will figure out how to use this for some police state bullshit.
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Capitalism asks whether you are the kind of person harvesting people's health info without concent or selling aluminum mesh underwear with fearmongering campaign. No other choices.
Is this good? I can’t help but think it’s just another datapoint for google to scrape
2026: Major grocers found using customer heart rate to personalise prices - higher the pulse, higher the price
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Cool tech but I question it's usefulness. They focus on clinical in their language but anybody who's on telemetry orders needs waveforms not beats per minute. I care if they're suddenly in afib, not that they're a little tachy after getting up to go to the bathroom.
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So how long before our phones can measure heart rate from your pocket, or being held in your hand?
They already can by putting your finger on the camera and lighting up your finger with the led light. Then it detects the rhythmic changes picked up by the camera... At least 10+ years ago. It was a good novelty feature, but turns out, for most healthy people, checking your heart rate gets old after a few runs.
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So the tricorder in Star Trek was just a fancy, battery powered wifi hotspot??
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