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https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/whofi_wifi_identifier...

> Researchers in Italy have developed a way to create a biometric identifier for people based on the way the human body interferes with Wi-Fi signal propagation.. can re-identify a person in other locations most of the time when a Wi-Fi signal can be measured. Observers could therefore track a person as they pass through signals sent by different Wi-Fi networks – even if they’re not carrying a phone.. their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent.


That’s 95.5% accuracy with a 16 person dataset in a highly constrained environment.

Wi-Fi uses long wavelengths, you can cancel out the noise with one person but crowds are all distorting the same very weak signal here. 5Ghz = 6cm, visible light is 380 to about 750 nanometers.


WiFi Sensing is part of Wi-Fi 7 and present in most recent laptops and smartphones. Local NPU machine learning can be combined with WiFI radar. Malware can attack phone and radio basebands and exploit this capability. It can uniquely fingerprint human biometrics, measure breathing rate, record keystrokes and more. Thousands of academic papers have been published in the last 15 years on "device free wireless sensing", before the capability was ratified by IEEE as 802.11bf. It's being rolled out commercially. Mitigations include drywall or insulation with a layer of RF shielding.

"Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion", 500 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44427986

"Wi-fi signal tracks heartbeat without wearables", 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45488908

2022 laptop demo of respiration sensing, https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/respiration... | https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tech-Innovation/Client/...

2025 biometric signature, https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/whofi_wifi_identifier...

> Researchers.. developed.. a biometric identifier for people based on the way the human body interferes with Wi-Fi signal propagation.. CSI in the context of Wi-Fi devices refers to information about the amplitude and phase of electromagnetic transmissions.. interact with the human body in a way that results in person-specific distortions.. processed by a deep neural network, the result is a unique data signature.. [for] signal-based Re-ID systems


  locked/frozen during boot
  until the drive has been power-cycled
There's a fixed time window for accepting secure erase, after power cycle?


I suppose arguably the kernel, or at least some component of the OS, should be freezing/locking drives as they come online. The firmware doing so as one-off operation during boot is a workaround for the lack of this being done by the OS.


HBF, like expensive HBM, is targeted at AI data centers.

  The KAIST professor discussed an HBF unit having a capacity of 512 GB and a 1.638 TBps bandwidth.
PCIe x8 GPU bandwidth is about 32GBbps, so HBF could be 50x PCIe bandwidth.


The current title uses 79 characters of 80 character budget:

  75% = title written by first author
  22% = name of second author, endorsing work of first author
HN mods can revert the title to the original headline, without any author.


> The rootkit now disables SELinux enforcing mode on-demand when the ICMP reverse shell is triggered, leaving zero audit logs.

Is this independent of the Linux Security Modules policy, e.g. RHEL default policy for SE Linux?


> I understand why they dropped [Photon] in favor of Qt and later Web technologies

The arrows of time branch and spiral, so it's possible that "later" could require some properties of "earlier".

If Photon could not be open-sourced, it could be licensed to a third party for custodian maintenance. If QNX is abandoning Photon forever, would Blackberry object to Photon being cloned for Linux or FreeBSD? That could preserve a future option for QNX to use it again, like XFCE.

Enthusiasts still use Blackberry keyboards on handheld devices in 2025, which sell out in minutes. In a parallel universe, Blackberry.com offers embedded SBC developers self-service purchase and global delivery of the legendary Blackberry keyboard, with Bluetooth for convenience or USB-c for security.


> black screen

Try disabling content/ad blockers.


Thanks, you're correct. The cookie banner script at [1] was blocked and somehow it crashes the whole site. I only see the black background.

[1] https://qnx.software/scripts/global/cookie-consent.js



Exactly. And there’s a huge community of the old Blackberry qnx device owners as well still trying to survive.


From the Wikipedia page

  Developer:  BlackBerry (formerly QNX Software Systems)
  
  On April 9, 2010, Research In Motion (later renamed to BlackBerry Limited) announced they would acquire QNX Software Systems from Harman International Industries.


And the bb10os was based on this. I still use it and it’s the ultimate phone that supports few android apps still.


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