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Touching the back wall of the Apple store

https://blog.lauramichet.com/touching-the-back-wall-of-the-apple-store/
48•nivethan•3d ago•16 comments

I made my VM think it has a CPU fan

https://wbenny.github.io/2025/06/29/i-made-my-vm-think-it-has-a-cpu-fan.html
447•todsacerdoti•14h ago•114 comments

Cell Towers Can Double as Cheap Radar Systems for Ports and Harbors (2014)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cell-tower-signals-can-improve-port-security
50•transpute•6h ago•26 comments

The Book of Shaders

https://thebookofshaders.com/
61•max_•3d ago•9 comments

My home servers are not a homelab

https://blog.nradk.com/posts/homelab/
32•nradk•2h ago•37 comments

Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

119•david927•7h ago•429 comments

Amber insect fossils reveal "zombie" fungi likely lived alongside dinosaurs

https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/24/science/amber-insect-zombie-fungi-fossil
19•jackgavigan•3d ago•2 comments

Revisiting Knuth's "Premature Optimization" Paper

https://probablydance.com/2025/06/19/revisiting-knuths-premature-optimization-paper/
83•signa11•3d ago•42 comments

Show HN: Octelium – FOSS Alternative to Teleport, Cloudflare, Tailscale, Ngrok

https://github.com/octelium/octelium
297•geoctl•16h ago•122 comments

We accidentally solved robotics by watching 1M hours of YouTube

https://ksagar.bearblog.dev/vjepa/
85•alexcos•11h ago•68 comments

Bloom Filters by Example

https://llimllib.github.io/bloomfilter-tutorial/
201•ibobev•16h ago•30 comments

Finding a former Australian prime minister’s passport number on Instagram (2020)

https://mango.pdf.zone/finding-former-australian-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-passport-number-on-instagram/
91•guiambros•5h ago•30 comments

4-10x faster in-process pub/sub for Go

https://github.com/kelindar/event
118•kelindar•12h ago•26 comments

WorldVLA: Towards Autoregressive Action World Model

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21539
10•chrsw•4h ago•1 comments

The $25k car is going extinct?

https://media.hubspot.com/why-the-25000-car-is-going-extinct
88•pseudolus•11h ago•170 comments

Nearly 20% of cancer drugs defective in 4 African nations

https://www.dw.com/en/nearly-20-of-cancer-drugs-defective-in-4-african-nations/a-73062221
76•woldemariam•4h ago•42 comments

The Chan-Zuckerbergs stopped funding social causes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/06/29/mark-zuckerberg-priscilla-chan-school-closure/
58•1vuio0pswjnm7•2h ago•28 comments

Many ransomware strains will abort if they detect a Russian keyboard installed (2021)

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/try-this-one-weird-trick-russian-hackers-hate/
223•air7•9h ago•128 comments

Anticheat Update Tracking

https://not-matthias.github.io/posts/anticheat-update-tracking/
25•not-matthias•6h ago•4 comments

China Dominates 44% of Visible Fishing Activity Worldwide

https://oceana.org/press-releases/china-dominates-44-of-visible-fishing-activity-worldwide/
102•scubakid•6h ago•57 comments

Commodore acquired for a 'low seven figure' price – CEO from retro community

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/commodore-acquired-for-a-low-seven-figure-price-new-acting-ceo-comes-from-the-retro-community
53•amichail•4h ago•11 comments

Show HN: Rust -> WASM, K-Means Color Quantization Crate for Image-to-Pixel-Art

https://github.com/gametorch/image_to_pixel_art_wasm
33•gametorch•3d ago•4 comments

The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

https://interlisp.org/documentation/young-ccece2025.pdf
80•pamoroso•13h ago•7 comments

Error handling in Rust

https://felix-knorr.net/posts/2025-06-29-rust-error-handling.html
107•emschwartz•7h ago•90 comments

Loss of key US satellite data could send hurricane forecasting back 'decades'

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/28/noaa-cuts-hurricane-forecasting-climate
266•trauco•10h ago•121 comments

Ask HN: Is the header CSS broken for you?

20•LorenDB•2h ago•6 comments

Use keyword-only arguments in Python dataclasses

https://chipx86.blog/2025/06/29/tip-use-keyword-only-arguments-in-python-dataclasses/
8•Bogdanp•3h ago•1 comments

Modelling API rate limits as diophantine inequalities

https://vivekn.dev/blog/rate-limit-diophantine
44•viveknathani_•2d ago•5 comments

Reverse Engineering the Microchip CLB

http://mcp-clb.markomo.me/
24•_Microft•6h ago•5 comments

Raymond Laflamme (1960-2025)

https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8949
18•stmw•2d ago•2 comments
Open in hackernews

Cell Towers Can Double as Cheap Radar Systems for Ports and Harbors (2014)

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cell-tower-signals-can-improve-port-security
50•transpute•6h ago

Comments

timewizard•5h ago
No? It's significantly smarter and easier to use AIS.
zomiaen•5h ago
From the first paragraph: "Without radar installations, it can be hard for port employees to detect small ships like those employed by pirates or by the terrorists who attacked the USS Cole in 2000"

I don't think this is intended to track the type of folks who leave their AIS broadcasting.

jchulce•5h ago
AIS, like ADSB, is secondary surveillance - not radar. It's a mechanism for cooperative targets with functioning electronics to identify themselves and provide operational information. However, it does not detect uncooperative entities or those not equipped with the electric transponders. For example, AIS won't show you an enemy's invading fleet, and ADSB won't show incoming missiles. Those needs are fulfilled by primary surveillance radar, like the passive solution from this article.
timewizard•1h ago
If you're honestly worried about being bombed then you need to buy radar.

With your logic all I have to do is take the additional step of disabling your cellular infrastructure before I steam up to your port.

This is not a tactical solution. It can only be for convenience or cost savings. In that realm, AIS is the obvious answer.

timschmidt•1h ago
It can also be used for defense in depth. Each additional sensing system which must be disabled before an attack is an additional barrier.
denkmoon•16m ago
Ukraine war shows improvised capability from cots hardware can have a meaningful impact. Probably easier to get 5g cell tower infrastructure than dedicated military radars.
ImPostingOnHN•5h ago
I spoke with a startup that is using 5G cell towers as radar. They said it is high-enough resolution to perform gait recognition.
userbinator•5h ago
The 5G conspiracy theorists are paying attention.
toomuchtodo•4h ago
Depending on node density of a 5G network (think street lamp cells), it is not outside of the realm of possibility that you're going to be able to obtain radar derived point clouds from cellular networks doing double duty as phased array radar networks. Greater density = greater observability and surveillance capabilities through SDR (limited by hardware frequency band operating tolerances).

https://electronics360.globalspec.com/article/14127/micro-5g...

bee_rider•5h ago
Hmm. I wonder how big a different the whole 24Ghz vs 6Ghz thing makes, when used as a radar.
polalavik•5h ago
There's a whole host of radar research using OFDM/ Wifi (I wrote a paper on the topic a while back where i implemented it with some software defined radios).

The best paper on the topic is Martin Brauns[1]. It's insanely comprehensive and easy to digest.

[1] https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000038892/2987095

stefan_•4h ago
Doesn't the thesis assume you are the one sending out the OFDM signal, while the OP is about a passive radar thing? Maybe I got one of those mixed up.
makeitdouble•5h ago
To properly understand, how much resolution is needed for that ?
supportengineer•3h ago
I seem to recall reading (on HN, no less) that advanced passive radar technology is classified as munitions, by the US Government and is under export controls?
syedkarim•2h ago
Yes, they are on the BIS Commerce Control List. It doesn't need to be particularly advanced to be export controlled.

5A001.g Passive Coherent Location (PCL) systems or equipment, “specially designed” for detecting and tracking moving objects by measuring reflections of ambient radio frequency emissions, supplied by non-radar transmitters. Technical Note: For the purposes of 5A001.g, non-radar transmitters may include commercial radio, television or cellular telecommunications base stations.

https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/documents/regulations-docs...

charcircuit•2h ago
You are probably thinking of this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33581696

gene-h•1h ago
There are proposals for the 6G standard to support Integrated Sensing and Communication(ISAC)[0]. So the hardware might natively be able to support gait recognition. The use cases given are UAV detection and localization. It sort of seems like this could bring Vernor Vinge's localizer mesh to reality, privacy implications be damned [0]https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2024/6/integrated-sensing-a...
nelox•4h ago
Also flood forecasting

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/world-first-5g-spy-will-...

toomuchtodo•4h ago
https://archive.today/krT4z
westurner•3h ago
Flood sensing with 5G?

> [...] New South Wales State Emergency Service (NSW SES) and the NSW Government, University of Technology Sydney (UTS) researchers working with industry partner TPG Telecom [...]

> “We want to tell people exactly how high [the flood] is. We’re now down to accuracy of 0.1 metres.”

> [...] “Currently, residents will receive the warning that the water is going to come, and they’ve got to get their cattle to higher ground. But how high is high?” she said.

ofalkaed•4h ago
With how cheap radar has gotten in the past decade I would be curious to know if any ports/harbors actually use cell towers?
transpute•4h ago
More coverage of RF sensing, including laptops/phones with radios+NPU to sense their human:

2025, "Espargos: ESP32-based WiFi sensing array", 30 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43079023

2024, "How Wi-Fi sensing became usable to track people's movements", https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/02/27/1088154/wifi-sen...

2023, "What Is mmWave Radar?: Everything You Need to Know About FMCW", 30 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35312351

2022, "mmWave radar, you won't see it coming", 180 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30172647

2021, "The next big Wi-Fi standard is for sensing, not communication", 200 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29901587

Animats•20m ago
Right. The longer range versions of multistatic radar are used to detect stealth aircraft.[1][2] All that careful stealth geometry to minimize direct reflections doesn't help much when the emitters and receivers are in different locations.

[1] https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2024/11/18/737423/guardians-of...

[2] https://www.yiminzhang.com/pdf/radar13_passive.pdf

soundpuppy•4h ago
The gap between the people demanding these systems and those who design it it is so large, it’s vulnerable to corruption in infinite ways, let’s be honest.
knetl•2h ago
It underscores how important cybersecurity is in mobile, IoT and Wi-Fi systems. A few critical exploits chained together is all it takes for physical surveillance or bio-sensing[1].

A 2007 NSA hacking toolkit catalog leaked by Snowden[2] shows what state-of-the-art was 18 years ago. Just imagine what a remote attacker can do with today's commercial hardware.

[1]https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/24/7/2111

[2]https://www.eff.org/document/20131230-appelbaum-nsa-ant-cata...

blendo•1h ago
I wouldn't go so far as to call this RF "pollution", but it is a reminder that the EM spectrum is getting a lot busier.

Me? I just want a car to be able to detect me so they don't run me over.