transpute

Ordinary WiFi can "see" through walls/corners with biometric fingerprinting of humans, https://gizmodo.com/researchers-issue-warning-about-tech-tha...

  Researchers collected WiFi signal recordings from nearly 200 participants as they walked through a WiFi field using different walking styles. The data was recorded from four different perspectives using both the BFI method and an older WiFi sensing approach relying on channel state information, or CSI. 

  “This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance,” said co-author Julian Todt in the press release. “If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later – for example by public authorities or companies.”

  The researchers are urging the IEEE, the organization that sets industry standards, to include stronger privacy safeguards in the upcoming 802.11bf standard, which is meant to standardize WiFi sensing applications.

  Google will launch Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices in Q2 2026, following the successful expansion of Chrome to Arm-powered macOS devices in 2020 and Arm-powered Windows devices in 2024.. Google is partnering with NVIDIA to make it easier for DGX Spark users to install Chrome. 

Android desktop mode: https://x.com/sahajsarup/status/2031963143082295610

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/whofi_wifi_identifier...

Researchers in Italy have developed a way to create a biometric identifier for people based on the way the human body interferes with Wi-Fi signal propagation.. can re-identify a person in other locations most of the time when a Wi-Fi signal can be measured. Observers could therefore track a person as they pass through signals sent by different Wi-Fi networks – even if they’re not carrying a phone.. their technique makes accurate matches on the public NTU-Fi dataset up to 95.5 percent.

WiFi Sensing is part of Wi-Fi 7 and present in most recent laptops and smartphones. Local NPU machine learning can be combined with WiFI radar. Malware can attack phone and radio basebands and exploit this capability. It can uniquely fingerprint human biometrics, measure breathing rate, record keystrokes and more. Thousands of academic papers have been published in the last 15 years on "device free wireless sensing", before the capability was ratified by IEEE as 802.11bf. It's being rolled out commercially. Mitigations include drywall or insulation with a layer of RF shielding.

"Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion", 500 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44427986

"Wi-fi signal tracks heartbeat without wearables", 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45488908

2022 laptop demo of respiration sensing, https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/research/respiration... | https://community.intel.com/t5/Blogs/Tech-Innovation/Client/...

2025 biometric signature, https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/22/whofi_wifi_identifier...

Researchers.. developed.. a biometric identifier for people based on the way the human body interferes with Wi-Fi signal propagation.. CSI in the context of Wi-Fi devices refers to information about the amplitude and phase of electromagnetic transmissions.. interact with the human body in a way that results in person-specific distortions.. processed by a deep neural network, the result is a unique data signature.. [for] signal-based Re-ID systems

  locked/frozen during boot
  until the drive has been power-cycled

HBF, like expensive HBM, is targeted at AI data centers.

  The KAIST professor discussed an HBF unit having a capacity of 512 GB and a 1.638 TBps bandwidth.

The current title uses 79 characters of 80 character budget:

  75% = title written by first author
  22% = name of second author, endorsing work of first author

The rootkit now disables SELinux enforcing mode on-demand when the ICMP reverse shell is triggered, leaving zero audit logs.

Is this independent of the Linux Security Modules policy, e.g. RHEL default policy for SE Linux?

I understand why they dropped [Photon] in favor of Qt and later Web technologies

The arrows of time branch and spiral, so it's possible that "later" could require some properties of "earlier".

If Photon could not be open-sourced, it could be licensed to a third party for custodian maintenance. If QNX is abandoning Photon forever, would Blackberry object to Photon being cloned for Linux or FreeBSD? That could preserve a future option for QNX to use it again, like XFCE.

Enthusiasts still use Blackberry keyboards on handheld devices in 2025, which sell out in minutes. In a parallel universe, Blackberry.com offers embedded SBC developers self-service purchase and global delivery of the legendary Blackberry keyboard, with Bluetooth for convenience or USB-c for security.

black screen

Try disabling content/ad blockers.

$100M+ last quarter, split between QNX and endpoint device software, https://www.panabee.com/news/blackberry-earnings-q3-2025

275M cars with QNX, https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2025/12/19/blackberry-...

AI/robotics, https://qnx.software/en/industries/robotics

From the Wikipedia page

  Developer:  BlackBerry (formerly QNX Software Systems)
  
  On April 9, 2010, Research In Motion (later renamed to BlackBerry Limited) announced they would acquire QNX Software Systems from Harman International Industries.

Still present in Debian stable 12 (trixie), detected by outbound network firewall OpenSnitch.

Related 2012 report: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=675710

What do you think of https://bughunters.google.com/open-source-security/patch-rew...?

For ~100K authors with content on Github Pages, Liquid conformance avoids learning new template syntax or a programming language.

For a greenfield site where Jekyll/Liquid compatibility is not beneficial, Zola may be an option, https://github.com/getzola/zola

  Conformant: Incompatibilities with strict shopify/liquid are bugs to be fixed.
  Flexible: Liquid embraces variants for different domains and we want to follow in that spirit.
  Performant: Do the best we can within what is conformant.

Compiled cobalt with liquid-rust on iSH is fast enough for static blog publishing and browser-based offline site preview on iOS/iPadOS, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46220227

Cobalt + Liquid-Rust + iSH enables offline writing with iPad portability, lockdown mode security and battery life, retaining interoperability with Linux static publishing toolchains. No jailbreaks or sideloading required.

Due to lack of JIT on iOS, Jekyll is too slow to run on iSH. Liquid-Rust (https://github.com/cobalt-org/liquid-rust) templates, even with partial compatibility for the Ruby-based Liquid template engine, reduce the cost of migrating from the Jekyll Ruby static site generator used by Github Pages.

On Debian x86, build a cobalt static binary for use on iSH (Alpine Linux /w musl libc) on iPadOS:

  sudo apt install rustup build-essential
  rustup target add i586-unknown-linux-musl
  git clone https://github.com/cobalt-org/cobalt.rs
  cd cobalt.rs
  cargo build --release --target i586-unknown-linux-musl
  cp target/i586-unknown-linux-musl/release/cobalt /mnt/usb

  ./cobalt --no-watch --host 0.0.0.0 --port NNNN

"SARLink: Satellite Backscatter Connectivity using Synthetic Aperture Radar" (2024), https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.09682

  SARLink is a passive satellite backscatter communication system that uses existing spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging satellites to provide connectivity in remote regions .. As the first technique for passively sending information bits from the ground to a SAR satellite — and with some SAR systems offering open-access data — this system could enable anyone to send information without expensive licenses or subscriptions. 

  Thus, it provides an accessible way of sending messages in areas without connectivity or in censored environments where active radio transmissions cannot be used. Furthermore, SARLink requires no modification of the satellite infrastructure.. We demonstrate our system using the European Space Agency (ESA) satellite Sentinel-1A, as the data is freely available and the system regularly images all the land on Earth .. a 5.5 ft by 5.5 ft modulating corner reflector could send 60 bits every satellite pass, enough to support low bandwidth sensor data and messages.

Nvidia evaluated Rust and then chose SPARK/Ada for root of trust for GPU market segmentation licensing, which protects 50% profit margin and $4T market cap.

"Nvidia Security Team: “What if we just stopped using C?”, 170 comments (2022), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42998383

If you don't need speed, you can bifurcate one 4-lane M.2 into 4x 1-lane M.2 slots.

Bring back the Intel Compute Stick? https://liliputing.com/this-cheap-intel-n150-mini-pc-is-smal...

Arm RK3399 SoC is blob free and some (Pinephone Pro, N4S, Chrome tablet) devices are small enough for sidecar usage.

Could you recommend make/model? Quality seems variable at those price points.

HSI report on that box would be useful.

Some N150 systems have integrated LPDDR5 from Chinese memory suppliers, who have been increasing production capacity, unlike Korean memory suppliers who have decreased production and increased prices in the face of higher demand. More NAND supplier competition needed.

Would you mind sharing the Linux hardware platform security report ("fwupdmgr security") for those Beelink boxes, e.g. what is enabled/disabled by the OEM? N150 SoC supports Intel TXT, which was previously limited to $800+ vPro devices, but it requires BIOS support from OEMs like Beelink. Depending on HSI status, OSS coreboot might be feasible on some N150 boxes.

https://fwupd.github.io/libfwupdplugin/hsi.html

Found while seeking Linux laptop emulation of USB OTG HID kb/mouse on USB-c cable to iPad/iPhone/Pixel, like a remote KVM.

Once KB/mouse emulation exists, it can be integrated with Linux window manager to treat a tablet/phone as external "display", e.g. move Linux mouse pointer to the right edge of laptop display, push to the right with a bit of physics delay, then activate kb/mouse emulation and send all keystrokes and mouse movements over USB-c cable to the external device.

This would avoid the travel weight cost of a dedicated keyboard for tablet or phone.

A related challenge is encryption of removable flash storage.

Linux has FUSE read-only support for decrypting APFS. iOS can read/write encrypted APFS that is formatted on macOS.

Would be nice to have encrypted ZFS support on multiple platforms, including iOS and Android.

Any recommended enclosures that work reliably with Linux?

This USB SSD boots Debian Linux 6.1 kernel on HP Ryzen laptop, https://www.pny.com/PNY-DUO-Link-V3-USB-3-2-Gen-2-Type-C-OTG...

Thanks for the correction.