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There's no such thing as "tech" (Ten years later)

1•dtjb•27s ago•0 comments

What Really Killed Flash Player: A Six-Year Campaign of Deliberate Platform Work

https://medium.com/@aglaforge/what-really-killed-flash-player-a-six-year-campaign-of-deliberate-p...
1•jbegley•58s ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Anyone orchestrating multiple AI coding agents in parallel?

1•buildingwdavid•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Knowledge-Bank

https://github.com/gabrywu-public/knowledge-bank
1•gabrywu•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: The Codeverse Hub Linux

https://github.com/TheCodeVerseHub/CodeVerseLinuxDistro
3•sinisterMage•8m ago•0 comments

Take a trip to Japan's Dododo Land, the most irritating place on Earth

https://soranews24.com/2026/02/07/take-a-trip-to-japans-dododo-land-the-most-irritating-place-on-...
2•zdw•9m ago•0 comments

British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c205nxy0p31o
6•bookofjoe•9m ago•1 comments

BookTalk: A Reading Companion That Captures Your Voice

https://github.com/bramses/BookTalk
1•_bramses•10m ago•0 comments

Is AI "good" yet? – tracking HN's sentiment on AI coding

https://www.is-ai-good-yet.com/#home
1•ilyaizen•11m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Amdb – Tree-sitter based memory for AI agents (Rust)

https://github.com/BETAER-08/amdb
1•try_betaer•11m ago•0 comments

OpenClaw Partners with VirusTotal for Skill Security

https://openclaw.ai/blog/virustotal-partnership
2•anhxuan•12m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Seedance 2.0 Release

https://seedancy2.com/
2•funnycoding•12m ago•0 comments

Leisure Suit Larry's Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and Disney

https://spillhistorie.no/2026/02/06/interview-with-sierra-veteran-al-lowe/
1•thelok•12m ago•0 comments

Towards Self-Driving Codebases

https://cursor.com/blog/self-driving-codebases
1•edwinarbus•12m ago•0 comments

VCF West: Whirlwind Software Restoration – Guy Fedorkow [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLoXodz1N9A
1•stmw•13m ago•1 comments

Show HN: COGext – A minimalist, open-source system monitor for Chrome (<550KB)

https://github.com/tchoa91/cog-ext
1•tchoa91•14m ago•1 comments

FOSDEM 26 – My Hallway Track Takeaways

https://sluongng.substack.com/p/fosdem-26-my-hallway-track-takeaways
1•birdculture•15m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Env-shelf – Open-source desktop app to manage .env files

https://env-shelf.vercel.app/
1•ivanglpz•18m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Almostnode – Run Node.js, Next.js, and Express in the Browser

https://almostnode.dev/
1•PetrBrzyBrzek•19m ago•0 comments

Dell support (and hardware) is so bad, I almost sued them

https://blog.joshattic.us/posts/2026-02-07-dell-support-lawsuit
1•radeeyate•19m ago•0 comments

Project Pterodactyl: Incremental Architecture

https://www.jonmsterling.com/01K7/
1•matt_d•20m ago•0 comments

Styling: Search-Text and Other Highlight-Y Pseudo-Elements

https://css-tricks.com/how-to-style-the-new-search-text-and-other-highlight-pseudo-elements/
1•blenderob•21m ago•0 comments

Crypto firm accidentally sends $40B in Bitcoin to users

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/crypto-firm-accidentally-sends-40-055054321.html
1•CommonGuy•22m ago•0 comments

Magnetic fields can change carbon diffusion in steel

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260125083427.htm
1•fanf2•23m ago•0 comments

Fantasy football that celebrates great games

https://www.silvestar.codes/articles/ultigamemate/
1•blenderob•23m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Animalese

https://animalese.barcoloudly.com/
1•noreplica•23m ago•0 comments

StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/7/software-factory/
3•simonw•24m ago•0 comments

John Haugeland on the failure of micro-worlds

https://blog.plover.com/tech/gpt/micro-worlds.html
1•blenderob•24m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Velocity - Free/Cheaper Linear Clone but with MCP for agents

https://velocity.quest
2•kevinelliott•25m ago•2 comments

Corning Invented a New Fiber-Optic Cable for AI and Landed a $6B Meta Deal [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3KLbc5DlRs
1•ksec•26m ago•0 comments
Open in hackernews

Conversations remotely detected from cell phone vibrations, researchers report

https://www.psu.edu/news/engineering/story/conversations-remotely-detected-cell-phone-vibrations-researchers-report
96•giuliomagnifico•6mo ago

Comments

lolc•6mo ago
It's interesting that measuring speech vibration is possible, but on the whole I don't see this as viable attack. One would need to get real close to a target, the cited 60% accuracy is at 50 cm distance. At 300 cm they report 2% which seems on the level of guessing words randomly.

The "remotely" in the title is no warranted in my view. Of course there may be ways to improve on their results. But so far it seems to me that a highly directional microphone would outperform the radar at any distance. One interesting aspect here is how sensitive the attack is to ambient noise. So maybe sitting close to a target with a radar hidden in headphones, one could glean some words even in a noisy environment like a subway. But I'd still put my money on a microphone performing better in that environment.

Now I wonder whether the attack would work better on headphones. They are smaller and should vibrate more. On the other hand the surface is smaller, so on the whole they might not provide more signal to a radar.

nine_k•6mo ago
A microphone could work together with a radar; correlating the two signals may help tell the sound from the noise.

I suppose that at certain radio frequencies human bodies are mostly translucent, while the small metal membrane is still resolvable. When a head of a person covers well the acoustic signal (the phone is at the opposite ear), a microphone is helpless, but a radar us still fairly usable.

lolc•6mo ago
Note that in this study the radar targeted the whole phone, not the membrane.
bcrl•5mo ago
Most humans would assume that giving an app permission to use the accelerometer is not the same as giving the app permission to use the microphone. It's yet another form of permission confusion that allows for unintended privacy violations.
4gotunameagain•5mo ago
MEMS accelerometers found in phones don't have nearly enough sampling frequency to encode meaningful audio
kibwen•5mo ago
Researchers have managed to produce photos from the theoretically 1-bit photosensor on your phone (which is similarly permissionless), so don't make that proclamation so hastily. Even if it can't decipher a conversation, it may be able to detect things about your environment that leak bits of entropy about you.

https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-smart-devices-ambient-light-...

4gotunameagain•5mo ago
Single pixel imaging is a well known method that depends on injecting known information (light patterns) and capturing the same scene multiple times in order to reconstruct.

Audio is by definition a time varying signal. If you cannot sample it fast enough, the information is gone. The fundamental Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem has proven the concept of the critical (Nyquist) frequency. There are ways around this in special cases: for band limited signals undersampling is a method to reconstruct them using sampling lower than the critical frequency, and for sparse signals compressed sensing can be used. Real life audio is neither band limited (as sampled by any device on the phone), nor sparse. I think it is a physical impossibility with the current sensors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...

kibwen•5mo ago
To reiterate, I'm not suggesting it should be able to listen in on conversations, but rather that it may plausibly be able to detect recurring environmental vibrations. For example, let's say your phone is left on a table unnattended, then if your house is near a train then it may be able to sense the regularity of the train's passing (whose schedule itself varies throughout the day, providing a unique fingerprint for both determining which train it might be and your position along that train's route).
4gotunameagain•5mo ago
Yes, for sure you can sample and detect lower frequency vibrations. That's the whole point of an accelerometer :)
cess11•5mo ago
As I understand it, this technology would pick up the remote end of the conversation, are you sure your directed microphone could accomplish that?
lolc•5mo ago
Yes why not? I often hear the other side when somebody is on the phone.
_trampeltier•6mo ago
I think the thing with a camera, and detecting the movment of plants and chipsbag around to recreate the sound was much more impressive.
smcin•5mo ago
'chipsbag'??
schoen•5mo ago
https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vib...
smcin•5mo ago
'potato-chip bag'

Scary tech.

Eisenstein•6mo ago
You can do something similar with a laser. The laser is reflected off of an object and into an receiver where it is converted into audio. The two techniques differ in methods, but they both rely on measuring the movement of secondary materials affected by sound waves which can then be used to infer speech.

* https://hackaday.com/2010/09/25/laser-mic-makes-eavesdroppin...

SoftTalker•6mo ago
Formerly TLA-level technology that you can now build yourself.
lelandfe•6mo ago
(three letter agency, eg NSA)
ysleepy•5mo ago
Benn Jordan has a cool video about a laser microphone he built:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=mEC6PM97IRI

hoherd•6mo ago
Benn Jordan of The Flashbulb fame (who showed up here on HN recently for saving a PNG to a bird and then retrieving it) has a YT video where he shows off several interesting techniques for capturing audio using only video capture, which seem similar to this technique. https://youtu.be/mEC6PM97IRI
suddenlybananas•5mo ago
...to a bird?
SiempreViernes•5mo ago
He got the bird to repeat the sound he encoded the png into.
tomsmeding•5mo ago
Appropriate username.
thrown-0825•5mo ago
i remember a poc that showed using the phones accelerometer as a microphone and bypassing app permissions.

if i remember correctly it was a defcon demo and the guy ended up getting hired by facebook.

ethan_smith•5mo ago
That was likely Gyrophone (2014) from Stanford/Rafael researchers who demonstrated accelerometers and gyroscopes could capture speech frequencies at 80-250Hz - sufficient for speaker identification and some speech recognition without requiring microphone permissions.
thrown-0825•5mo ago
Thanks, do you know if the claim about members of that team winding up at metabook is true?
rurban•5mo ago
Of course Penn State. See Geschickter Fund (an CIA cover for MKULTRA research) and the School of International Affairs (SIA) (another CIA recruitment front).
BobbyTables2•5mo ago
Feels more like an advertisement for the radar than a practical application.

We already have highly accurate sensors for detecting vibrations a few feet away — EARs!

Seems like laser bounce on the phone’s glassy screen/back would be more effective…