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Pentagon and Wi-Fi Deal Reached
byteCoder writes "CNet reports that the US Military and the Wi-Fi manufacturers have struck an agreement on reducing the interference on military radars by Wi-Fi equipment. Basically, future wireless equipment will detect the presence of military radar and not transmit over the top of it. Additionally, as part of the compromise, defense officials will endorse the doubling of the number of allowed wireless frequencies--thus opening more spectrum to wireless users (as long as the FCC and Congress agree)."
Will WiFi equipment be able to tell the difference between military radar, police department radar, and other forms of non-WiFi radiation in the relevant frequency ranges? Will WiFi stop working if I wardrive near a police car? Will it stop working if a police car drives by my house?
Does this "agreement" allow anyone who wants to suppress the use of WiFi to turn on a device that simulates 'military radar"?
Just wondering.
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I guess this means the military won't be using 802.11 anytime soon... It would be a little tough for them to use it if their own radars keep turning it off!
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Isn't that a little dangerous for military secrecy? I mean, anyone can now take a wireless transmitter and modify it to detect military radar. As technology grows more and more connected, will we someday see people remotely using the cellphone transmitter on a military base or any sensitive area in order to look for flaws and holes in radar coverage? Just a thought.
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most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
A chapter in Lawrence Lessig's latest book, The Future of Ideas, covers the topic of spectrum as a controlled commons. Many feel with modern technology it should be de-regulated and simply sold to any of the highest bidders. Interference with military transmissions has been one key arguing point. His book discusses it well and raises the argument for easing government control of the spectrum commons. I highly recommend the book for anyone interesting in the ideas of the internet as a commons and how it should or should not be controlled.
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This seems like a win-win situation -- it doesn't have many technical details, but since the radar and WiFi spectrums overlap only somewhat, i'm guessing that WiFi devices will simply use the NON-overlapping spectrum with some safe zone when they detect radar. Which makes sense anyways, since interference would work on both the radar and the WiFi. It may reduce range or data rates but this seems like a pretty good way to solve the problem without having to get congress or the FCC involved. And adding more spectrum in the 2.4Ghz range might solve a lot more range/bandwidth problems than just those of military radar.
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With detectors comes jammers
Similarly, just by mimicking the signal of the military radar you could launch a Denial of Service attack against anyone trying to use Wi-Fi.
It would seem this compromise results in a serious trade-off of National security versus the security of the users' own systems. It could end up being a nasty tool for industrial sabotage if you could shut down networking at competitor's facility from a van parked outside. As a result, it could limit the acceptance of Wi-Fi as a replaced for wired LANs - and keep it as a mobile only technology.
(I know a lot of supposition went into that, but heck, I'm only posting to SlashDot).
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Which electronic magazine (or Phrack ?) will be the first to publish "Build your own WiFi scrambler/silencer for under 20 bucks" article.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
This could be a serious problem. At work last night, our inventory system used by order fillers lost all communications with the 802.11 radios in the warehouse. Everything came to a stop. We were totally dependant on that system for each order from the racks. About two hundred people, payed by the hour, were idle. $15 an hour * 200 people adds up real quick. I could imagine what a person across the street could do with some low power magic bullet.
You could put someone out of business in a hard way with a few dozen DOS attacks like this.
You've got that all wrong; the economical thing is to encase the speed trap instead, since it'll be smaller ;-)
(In fact, as others have pointed out, police use much higher frequencies - all 10GHz or higher - which won't affect any WiFi type kit. It's just the older military radars - as in aircraft - which use 5GHz, and would conflict with 802.11a's use unless you're careful.)
With thousands of Wi Fi transmitters around, couldn't the military use passive radar technology?
You need to send out a pulse of radio waves to capture the echo off of metal objects. If there are enough transmitters out there you might not need to send a pulse. You might be able to read the echo off of objects using the thousands of transmitters around it. You'd be able to use radar but keep your emissions to zero!
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The vast majority of earth's landmass is covered by military radars, most of the times by a multitude of radars overlapping each other. Many of those radars have a radius that exceed some hundreds of miles. Now, wherever someone fires up a future wifi-card, it WILL pick up those distant signals, so, will there be a threshold involved that overrides the whole "detect radar" thingie, or will wifi cards all over the planet stop working just because they detect a radar 500 miles away?
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What the military are concerned with is millions of such devices in the area of a radar raising the noise floor. It's a collective effect, rather than a jammer. To build an effective jammer, the jamming signals would need to be coming from all directions simultaneously.
Damned straight!
....and the list goes on and on. My personal opinion is that it is wonderful that we are able to take devices and inventions originally used to destroy and kill and turn them into things that better our quality of life.
Microwave ovens (radar research)
the worlds first electronic computer (for calculating artillery angles and trajectories)
the Internet (linking not only colleges and campuses, but military bases. The old original internet can still withstand a nuclear strike)
Pennicilin (an attempt to keep soldiers alive longer after being wounded, discovered via accident during this process)
Rocketry (advanced greatly by the Germans in WWII)
Most advances in radio technology and aeronautics were out of necessity during wars