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The article casually and dismissively mentions living inside a Faraday cage... but can we entertain this notion for a moment? If one is already building a new
by boring_twenties 6y ago
The article casually and dismissively mentions living inside a Faraday cage... but can we entertain this notion for a moment?
If one is already building a new house from scratch, it would seem trivial to make the whole thing a Faraday cage while you're at it, no? Am I missing something?
Retrofitting an existing house would be harder, but still doable if one is committed to the cause, like a couple thousand bucks tops? (Guessing here.)
It doesn't seem that one would have to give up ANY actually desired functionality. Wired internet piercing the cage is not an issue, right? After that you can just have your own secured wifi inside. If one is okay with using VoIP for voice calls, the problem is now solved, yes?
Add a second AP outside if you also need Wifi in the backyard or whatever.
- thatcat 6y agofaraday windows seem kinda weird though, I guess not any worse than a window with a screen. https://hollandshielding.com/High-performance-Faraday-cage-windows https://hollandshielding.com/High-performance-Faraday-cage-w...
- boring_twenties 6y agoI guess you would actually want a separate screen, so you could open your windows and still enjoy the protection of the Faraday cage. Still though, so far so good, I think?
- Shared404 6y agoIsn't the point of the screen that you leave it closed to keep bug's out? Or is that just in my bug-infested homeland?
- boring_twenties 6y agoRight, you would want to have a screen that stays closed at all times, even if the window is open. The windows pictured seem to have the cage wires inside the glass.
- Shared404 6y agoAh, my bad.
- thatcat 6y agoYea, just like regular screen windows, but with a finer mesh. Makes sense to me.
- cozzyd 6y agoThere are all sorts of web sites catering to people who are scared of non-ionizing radiation. See for example https://www.lessemf.com/ https://www.lessemf.com/
- hakfoo 6y agoThe stucco houses you see in the US Southwest have chicken wire as part of the wall material, and it provides a significant Faraday-cage factor for free. We discovered this around the 2009 DTV transition when we realized it was outdoor-antenna-or-nothing.
- toast0 6y agoIt really depends on the wavelengths you want to suppress. Purpose built faraday cages are very tight. Socal houses with stucco siding do a pretty ok job at blocking cell phone frequencies though.
- ultimoo 6y agoThe devices could simply send all that cached data when out of the faraday cage.
- pavel_lishin 6y agoDepends on the device. I don't take my TV out for walks.
- myself248 6y agoThe poor thing!
- sellyme 6y agoIf you have extremely reliable home internet I suppose it's viable, but personally I've found the redundancy of being able to fall back to hotspotted mobile data when required extremely important.
- tdeck 6y agoThere's also the matter of using a cell phone as an actual phone.
- boring_twenties 6y agoJust configure the cell phone to use VoIP.
- saagarjha 6y agoIf your carrier supports this, of course.
- Nextgrid 6y agoOr vote with your wallet and switch carriers or use third-party VoIP as your primary number.
- boring_twenties 6y agoI don't think this has anything to do with the carrier? On Android you would just add a SIP account and then set it as the default for outgoing calls.
- cozzyd 6y agoGet a dual sim phone and run your own cell phone network inside your home. (don't actually do this).
- garaetjjte 6y agoCarrier support vary, but you could use VoWiFi.
- dec0dedab0de 6y agofrom what I understand a Faraday cage needs to be different sizes depending on what frequencies you want to block, and the only way to really get it all is to make it solid. I'm sure someone with more in depth knowledge is on here.
- dheera 6y agoOkay so there is something I actually do desperately want. I want a way to spoof GPS signals within my own home such that devices e.g. my phones cannot geolocate themselves using GPS, or get a reading with a pre-defined wrong location. At the same time, I don't want to affect devices outside my home. It doesn't need to fill my home either, I'd be happy with a PCB that be stuck to the back of my phone or in a backpack that does this for a 30cm radius.
- XorNot 6y agoKind of pointless though - you'll still get datamined the moment you step outside.
- boring_twenties 6y agoFor Android at least there's XPrivacyLua which can spoof things like GPS to apps that request them.
- dheera 6y agoYes, but there are idiot apps like WeChat that now ban you arbitrarily if they think you're interfering. I got banned once for running Xposed plugins on WeChat. It would be nicer if no software on the phone had any way of telling that it is being spoofed, and instead spoof the actual radio waves. Or maybe I should just desolder the GPS chip, if I can figure out which one it is.
- tomjen3 6y agoOr stay the fuck away from WeChat and anything else made by the Chinese state.
- dheera 6y agoUh this has nothing to do with China. Tencent does some horrible things with software beyond the laws of China. Apple does too -- that's why I don't use an iPhone as my normal phone. But I have to use an iPhone for certain test apps and I'd like to be able to spoof GPS for Apple and Tencent at the same time. I'm much more concerned about these companies invading my privacy than the US or China government.
- kenneth 6y agoI was actually thinking that reading the article. You could build yourself a faraday cage around the house, and inside you have wifi and a femtocell. The issue comes when you have balconies / patios / laws that you want connectivity in, but the solution here is to set up wifi access points both inside and outside and you should have full coverage. A while back, my family living in the countryside of Europe were upset about a cell tower going up right next door. My uncles are a physicist and a microcontroller chip designer respectively, so after trying to fight the build for a while, they worked out at the time that the 50cm distance in the rebar in the house construction would work as a somewhat effective faraday cage for the frequency bands of the tower. I'm not sure if that was actually that effective, and is likely no longer the case, but I do remember having pretty nasty reception indoors in the early days.
- praptak 6y agoAs a technical solution to a social problem this has at least two downsides. It puts the cost on the consumer and it's a battle fought on unfavorable terms. I can easily imagine that it will be harder for you to get the stuff repaired/supported, as in "I cannot see your dishwasher in our system and it's your problem". I'm not saying you should not do that, I'm saying that it has little power compared to political action.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoI believe it was Nato's invasion of Kosovo that I last believed political action has power.
- jeegsy 6y agoIt really sucks that you are correct.
- praptak 6y agoWe don't have to invade anyone to get privacy protection. Regulation like GDPR is sufficient.
- mschuster91 6y agoRegulation is worth only as much as its enforcement, and ... not all EU countries are up to that challenge. Just look at how lax the enforcement against Facebook is.
- praptak 6y agoThis doesn't counter the point that political action beats private countermeasures.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoI wish I understood how Europe blunted the political power of large business lobbies to such a larger degree than the rest of the capitalist world. I wonder whether a key factor is the British use of crown corporations in expanding its empire and the legacy that left in the English speaking world. In any case, I suppose GDPR is a hopeful sign, but here in NorAm it actually seems more plausible to become an oligarch first and then make one's political wishes known then than to have any kind of political impact as a middle-class citizen.
- sumtechguy 6y agoYou have a point. But a full cage is probably unnecessary for some devices. Back when I worked on things like this we had a bucket. It was the 'out of coverage' test metal bucket. You had to be careful to get the whole wire harness inside the bucket or it still could sneak in there (as cell coverage is sneaky). I think someone picked it up at local Tractor Supply chain. Someone else had found a small decorative bucket that was meant for plants that just happened to fit perfectly over our smaller IoT devices. It was maybe 5 bucks of materials. Also you might be able to get away with a simple shed that is made out of tin. Havent tried it so your mileage may vary. Retrofitting a house would probably mean taking down the existing exterior or interior walls. The materials would not be that expensive. Most of your cost would goto hiring someone to do it right. The big downside to my approach is heat dissipation and servicing.
- myself248 6y agoAs someone who's built commercial RF test enclosures on the scale of a house, "trivial" is not a word I would use. Putting shielding foil in the walls is quite straightforward. Putting mesh in the windows and doors, or using solid metal doors, too. Connecting the moving parts of the windows and doors, to the walls, in a continuous way that maintains a useful amount of RF shielding, is absolutely devilish. Basically you end up with conductive doorjambs, which can't be aluminum because it makes a thin oxide layer over itself which is not conductive. They can't be stainless steel, which does the same. They can't be plain steel, because it rusts, or copper, because it tarnishes. You're left with brass, gold, or silver as your options. (Or, try aluminum and just use massive contact areas, so the joint functions as a capacitor across the oxide layer, which is effectively a conductor at RF even if not at DC.) The corners of everything are murder. The soft flexible bits of "weatherstripping" are most subject to damage, and everyone who opens the door has to be trained on what parts not to touch, or how to re-fluff and repair whatever happens. You can make a notched overlapping sort of structure, but you end up with a 4-foot-wide door that opens on an articulated hinge to reveal a 3-foot-wide opening, or a bank-vault-style giant lever that operates a mechanism to engage the door seals. Or a fairly normal looking door with substandard performance and you put a few of 'em in series in an "airlock" sort of structure. Doorjambs are a special challenge, since you want the jamb to be fairly low so you don't trip on it, and so you can roll equipment in and out. But that means all the sealing has to be part of the door, and you really want that vault-style compression mechanism. Or, you have a small high-jamb door that humans can step over, and a separate large equipment opening that you only open once in a while and just re-seal the perimeter with copper tape every time you close it. Getting wires in and out is also a chore, though there are products for this, they're expensive. Without a proper passthrough, every wire that penetrates the envelope is basically an antenna that re-radiates signal on the other side. A single fire-alarm wire is enough to pass quite a lot of wifi signal! And good luck getting the fire AHJ to accept your notion of shoving a bunch of additional components on their wire to filter this RF stuff that they have no idea about. Got a safety cert for that? AC likewise needs filtering, and the more power you're moving, the beefier the filters are. And the bigger they are in a physical-dimension sense, the harder it is to get them to perform at high (GHz-plus) frequencies, because the individual geometric features are resonant. You can't throw money at this problem, it's physics, so you just have to get clever. One approach is to put the breaker panel outside the enclosure and pass individual circuits through, since each individual one has lower current requirements and the filters are smaller. Mind you, this is not a theoretical or absurdist "we want to block everything" exercise. Until the guy with the spectrum analyzer showed up, our quick test during assembly was just firing up a phone and seeing if we could link to the wifi AP on the other side of the enclosure wall, exactly the real-world scenario you propose. Every measure I've described here was necessary, and if we screwed up a single detail, we'd get wifi signal back. It can be done. It's neither cheap nor easy. It helps if you have good test equipment and a lot of intuition for how RF behaves. And a massive, massive box of copper tape.