Meshtastic is still radio just the same. It is a transmitter and will get triangulated, but that is irrelevant to what I said. What I am talking about is how all radio devices you actually use are easily logged. Cell towers are one way, but the device is easy to log more locally. For instance most big retail stores are logging people in the door and their movements. Heck, it has been a few years since the papers about how people can be tracked based on changes and response times within WiFi coverage using standard consumer hardware. It would not surprise me if this is used by some now. The air tags nonsense, that is the same type of thing. The real reason you do not have removable batteries in mobile devices is so that you cannot turn them off. They are never fully off. That is how stuff like air tags still work. Stuff like Intel’s ME, AMD’s PSP, and ARM’s TrustZone are the systems that are used. It is a whole extra operating system running in the background on your hardware. These have a lower root level access to everything on your hardware. It is trivial to log signals from all mobile devices that pass a given point. It may still require some coordination to correlate cellular and video manually but I highly doubt that. In all likelihood, the current generation of hardware is already collecting this data. Look at all the stories of people getting caught a few days after crimes. That was unheard of 2 decades ago. Now it is practically a given. If you are in public and transmitting radio signals now, you are fucked. We would all need to dress up as Tusken Raiders to have any chance at anonymity now.
I do agree that radio triangulation does happen and this is happening with cell phone all the time. My GrapheneOS phone pretty much stays in airplane mode most of the time.
I know very little about Meshtastic but a one thing seem fairly obvious:
Meshtastic is unlicensed, therefore operates outside the frequency range of commercial equipment such as cellphones. Cell towers can’t be used to triangulate a frequency they aren’t designed to detect.
I have no doubt that Iran’s military has the gear to detect and triangulate Meshtastic.
RodgeGrabTheCat@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
Meshtastic works via cell towers?
j4k3@piefed.world 11 hours ago
Meshtastic is still radio just the same. It is a transmitter and will get triangulated, but that is irrelevant to what I said. What I am talking about is how all radio devices you actually use are easily logged. Cell towers are one way, but the device is easy to log more locally. For instance most big retail stores are logging people in the door and their movements. Heck, it has been a few years since the papers about how people can be tracked based on changes and response times within WiFi coverage using standard consumer hardware. It would not surprise me if this is used by some now. The air tags nonsense, that is the same type of thing. The real reason you do not have removable batteries in mobile devices is so that you cannot turn them off. They are never fully off. That is how stuff like air tags still work. Stuff like Intel’s ME, AMD’s PSP, and ARM’s TrustZone are the systems that are used. It is a whole extra operating system running in the background on your hardware. These have a lower root level access to everything on your hardware. It is trivial to log signals from all mobile devices that pass a given point. It may still require some coordination to correlate cellular and video manually but I highly doubt that. In all likelihood, the current generation of hardware is already collecting this data. Look at all the stories of people getting caught a few days after crimes. That was unheard of 2 decades ago. Now it is practically a given. If you are in public and transmitting radio signals now, you are fucked. We would all need to dress up as Tusken Raiders to have any chance at anonymity now.
RodgeGrabTheCat@sh.itjust.works 1 minute ago
I do agree that radio triangulation does happen and this is happening with cell phone all the time. My GrapheneOS phone pretty much stays in airplane mode most of the time.
I know very little about Meshtastic but a one thing seem fairly obvious:
Meshtastic is unlicensed, therefore operates outside the frequency range of commercial equipment such as cellphones. Cell towers can’t be used to triangulate a frequency they aren’t designed to detect.
I have no doubt that Iran’s military has the gear to detect and triangulate Meshtastic.
AnchoriteMagus@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
It does not.
RodgeGrabTheCat@sh.itjust.works 17 minutes ago
I didn’t think so.