> unless of course there is leakage of that radiation affecting someone else outside of your private property.
There always is. Radio waves don't respect walls (unless they're made of metal). If you look at the linked document, it shows strong indications that the attacks did affect wifi networks from vehicles passing by, that is, fully outside of the property.
> Example: google “buy lawnmover” on your cellphone. Most likely other participants of the same LAN will sooner or later experience ads for lawnmovers.
I've spent my whole life sharing a wifi network with housemates, family, etc. and I've never once noticed this.
> Running wires through existing walls can be annoying, and they don't want to put that barrier to sale in front of them.
It also makes it more convenient to compromise the device from across the street (or across town with a directional antenna). Though of course that's not a problem if your security is up to par and the device continues to receive regular security updates, and we can only surmise that the author has discovered a rare outlier in this space where that is not the case.
>Actually its from further away than that with a high gain directional antenna
The idea that the parent poster was trying to point out is that at the point the feds are within 100 ft of your house in a truck or 1000 yards but targeting your house with an antenna, they'll find a way. How secure your Wifi password is irrelevant. At that point they've probably tapped your phones.
> your home wifi threat actor is your neighbors kid playing with aircrack.
When working for an ISP it came up quite a few times that customers had extensive questions about security because they were genuinely worried about their ex-spouse spying on them. Even if they were all just "paranoid" in their specific cases (I wouldn't know), I think it's a fair concern. If all it takes is some googling and a bit of money to rent cloud GPU's, well, scorned lovers have done way more expensive and less effective things to cause damage or violate privacy.
> The adversary has a limited ability to monitor short-range communication channels (Bluetooth, WiFi, etc).
That seems like a pretty big assumption. From what i understand there already exists deployment of wifi hot spots to track people (both for advertising purposes and for spying purposes) to the extent that phone providers started radomizing MAC addresses.
His argument was that you can reasonably expect people to know how to handle such technologies safely, not that he expects people to know how to build a WiFi Router from electronic parts themselves.
Using your analogy it would be sufficient for a person to know how to handle electricity coming from your wall or the plumbing under your house safely. And generally people do know how to do that.
Everyone who is regularly using WiFi networks knows that he/she can see the names of other WiFi networks in their vicinity. Therefore people using WiFi generally do know that this information is publicly broadcasted and available to be collected by anyone interested in doing so.
No one believes that he is the only person being able to somehow magically see the name of his neighbours WiFi.
If the mechanism is believed to be thermal, then this is 4-6 orders of magnitude more powerful than WiFi. It's like removing the cavity from a microwave oven and blasting it at someone. This is horrifying.
> Your data can be eavesdropped or modified by someone in the middle. This would be quite rare within a LAN
Literally every single public wifi network, which is a significant percentage of all internet traffic (including basically everyone working from a wework for example), is vulnerable to eavesdropping/mitm
> Yes, the mechanism is different, but the basic problem of interfering with others' communication is the same.
The legal problem isn't the effect of interfering with others' communication, its the active intent to interfere with others' communication.
So, no, a noisy environment because lots of people set up WiFi hotspots with no intent to prevent use (even though it may prevent some uses) does not pose the same legal issue as an environment in which someone is intentionally actively denying people the use of WiFi hotspots by spoofing de-auth packets.
Using a neighbor’s WiFi deprives the neighbor of using it at the same time, as using it diminishes capacity.
This is not true of light. As the article says, using a neighbor’s light is “free loading”. The article doesn’t really say whether the author thinks that is stealing or not.
Making your phone use max power to emit information is nothing like the wifi radiation you get from your neighbors.
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