Salon.com > WiFi

X-ray vision, coming soon

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 22:20:00 +0000

Aspiring burglars and perverts, you're in luck. Thanks to MIT professor Dina Katabi and her graduate student Fadel Adlib, X-ray vision may no longer be the exclusive domain of comic books. The pair have devised a new low-cost technology that uses reflections of wireless radio signals to track a person's movements in an adjoining room. An MIT news release explains:

The system, called “Wi-Vi,” is based on a concept similar to radar and sonar imaging. But in contrast to radar and sonar, it transmits a low-power Wi-Fi signal and uses its reflections to track moving humans. It can do so even if the humans are in closed rooms or hiding behind a wall.

As a Wi-Fi signal is transmitted at a wall, a portion of the signal penetrates through it, reflecting off any humans on the other side. However, only a tiny fraction of the signal makes it through to the other room, with the rest being reflected by the wall, or by other objects. “So we had to come up with a technology that could cancel out all these other reflections, and keep only those from the moving human body,” Katabi says.

The X-ray vision device uses the same wireless antenna that helps connect your laptop to the Internet at Starbucks, so it could potentially be built into your mobile phone in the future. This means it probably will, so enjoy your baths in private while you can.

Via Tech News Daily

New York pay phones’ new calling

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:08:00 +0000

The winners of a city-sponsored contest to redesign New York’s payphones have been announced, and it looks like the clunky yet iconic — and these days, often broken — booths of decades past will soon be replaced by slim, digital screens offering wifi, summaries of weather conditions, a chance to pay your parking tickets, and much more.

Smart Sidewalks

Free Wi-Fi from the government?

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 21:43:00 +0000

The Federal Communications Commission wants us all to have really powerful, free Wi-Fi whenever we want. The proposal, reported Sunday by the Washington Post, sounds too good to be true:

The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.

... Cities support the idea because the networks would lower costs for schools and businesses or help vacationers easily find tourist spots. Consumer advocates note the benefits to the poor, who often cannot afford high cellphone and Internet bills.