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A lot of people here seem to have fundamentally misunderstood what Sidewalk is, which is understandable with that headline. The key thing to understand is that
by jon-wood 5y ago
A lot of people here seem to have fundamentally misunderstood what Sidewalk is, which is understandable with that headline.
The key thing to understand is that devices providing access via Sidewalk aren’t broadcasting a wifi SSID. They’re using LoRA, a low bandwidth (kilobits/second at the most) long range radio protocol. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t connect to the network with standard consumer hardware to compromise your network.
On top LoRA Sidewalk implements what is essentially a tunnel to specific configured endpoints hosted by AWS. Traffic is routed without you having any control over that, so all a Sidewalk device can do is send packets to an endpoint associated with that device family.
- ashneo76 5y agoThat doesn't matter. I don't get paid for providing a service to amazon for free. So they can get another billions in tax credits to fund Jeff Bezos' pet projects.
- phone8675309 5y ago> They’re using LoRA, a low bandwidth (kilobits/second at the most) long range radio protocol. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t connect to the network with standard consumer hardware to compromise your network. Can we as a society for once stop making the airwaves proprietary?
- URSpider94 5y agoLoRA isn’t a “proprietary” standard. It’s open to everyone to use. It operates at 900 mMHz, though, so the point is that your average WiFi or Bluetooth device can’t transmit or receive it. That 900 MHz spectrum is unlicensed, so buy a dev kit from Adafruit and go make some RF noise!
- phone8675309 5y agoThe first sentence on the LoRA article on Wikipedia is: > LoRa (Long Range) is a proprietary low-power wide-area network modulation technique. It is based on spread spectrum modulation techniques derived from chirp spread spectrum (CSS) technology. It was developed by Cycleo of Grenoble, France and acquired by Semtech, the founding member of the LoRa Alliance and it is patented. It's proprietary, patented, and not open. It shouldn't be on the airwaves.
- akiselev 5y agoSo are 3G, 4G, and 5G. So is WiFi. "Proprietary" just means you need a to buy a licensed LoRa radio chip to use the protocol in a commercial product - something you can do on digikey for $5. The implementation of the protocol itself is well known and you can easily interact with LoRa devices using an SDR [1]. [1] https://github.com/myriadrf/LoRa-SDR https://github.com/myriadrf/LoRa-SDR
- webinvest 5y agoHelium cryptocurrency miners also utilize LoRaWAN to form a connected network
- webinvest 5y agoHelium cryptocurrency miners also utilize LoRaWAN to form a connected network. You get paid in HNT to run these.