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Paint Provides Network Protection
thefickler writes "Forget WEP and WPA; I'm switching over to the EM-SEC Coating System, a recently announced paint developed by EM-SEC Technologies that acts as an electromagnetic fortress, allowing a wireless network to be contained within painted walls without fear of someone tapping in or hacking wireless networks. The EM-SEC Coating System is clearly the most secure option aside from stringing out the CAT5, and can be safely used to protect wireless networks in business and government facilities."
I hope no one ever wants to use a cell phone in your house.
This is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine...
Someone is going to sue, either because they painted all the inside walls like a dumbass and wireless won't go room to room, or else they'll get cancer, and swear the paint magnified and reflected all the microwaves into their body.
Is living in darkness the answer to wireless security or do you just ground your aluminum screened windows and hope for the best?
contain WIFI, block GSM?
I hope it doesnt, else its a no-go in Wireless Office world.
Sure it is safe untill somebody needs to open a window or door? Or is this to keep the wifi signal in prison safe? Another fine example of security by obscurity: it never works and is only a good idea as a complement to a setup that is secure without it.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Is this some sort of lead-based paint?? Yeah, that's a safe alternative...don't eat the paint chips guys!
I got nothin'
it could also protect against cell phone brain cancer
The idea of containing electrostatic and electromagnetic fields is to create a Faraday cage. If you are within an unbroken metal shell, most alternating fields and all electrostatic fields can't reach you. Un-alternating magnetic fields can still pass through. The problem is that any break in the metal shell is a possible window for the fields. That means the shielding on the walls has to be completely bonded to the shielding on the ceiling and floor and windows. The doors use something akin to weather stripping.
The other problem is that wires pass through the faraday shield in most cases and those provide a path through it. The bottom line is that if you are relying on a coat of paint to protect you, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
So... what about Radios, Televisions, Cell phones, etc? I assume this paint makes your house into a sort of Faraday cage, so wouldn't those signals be blocked too? What a pain in the ass. I'd rather just set up encryption on my wireless network, than paint my abode in [i]Electromagnetic Fortress Blue[/i].
The EM-SEC Coating System is clearly the most secure option aside from stringing out the CAT5...
How is this more secure than a traditional (hardware) faraday cage? They are built into the walls at many workplaces (including mine).
More convenient, sure, but more secure?
The concept of this product is neat. With careful design you should be able to prevent much of the signal from an access point going beyond a certain area, thus allowing you to put more APs on the same channel closer together within the building than before. The number of users that can sensibly use one AP will be the same but the number of users per m^2 that can use APs(plural) will be much higher. Bandwidth still won't get close to Ethernet but that shouldn't be the issue as the few people who really need bandwidth in a corporate environment should still be wired.
As before, proper authentication and confidentiality is the route to a secure wireless network,
OK, I just ran pbrush.exe but I don't see any commands for establishing my network protection. It only gives me some tools for what seems to be a diagraming program.
Maybe I should read the article or the summary for more detail.
Nah...
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Already protects my network.
I wonder if this paint would block an EMP? I didn't see anything about it in TFA, but that would be a neat side effect.
Stop learning! Only you can prevent esoterrorism.
Assembling etherkillers for fun an profit
I work in a metal fabricated building. I'm sure most people do and have no problems with cell phone reception. While this paint may offer significant absorbtive properties, note that NO dBi attenuation ratings are provided. This paint will have to reduce the power level orders of mnagnitude before useable signal becomes insignificant. Remember, radio signal strength is logarithmic.
Isn't part of the reason people buy wireless routers is so that they don't have to run cable through their house? I want mine to go through walls so I don't have to run that wire through the walls. I mean if I am locking my wireless signal to a single room why not just run cable across the floor instead of buying a wireless router and one would assume expensive paint. This might be an OK solution for a business but if I were a business I would still rather just use plain old CAT-5 to avoid any possible security issues from wireless.
I work in a pretty specialized architecture firm, and some of our clients are slightly paranoid to say the least (Ting foil hats? More like Tin Foil Ceremonial Headpieces...) and we are working on a project that has a room that is set up to ward off an EMP during the coming apocalypse. I'm not kidding. The 'Safe Room' in this building is totally shielded, you can't get any type of electronic signal in or out. Coatings like the paint mentioned in the article are becoming more and more and common,and I think we're going to see a lot more multi-use coatings like this in the future. At the moment, they are extremely expensive, but as the price drops, this will become a pretty standards feature in a lot of new constructions where buildings are put up in close proximity to each other and interference tends to be a big problem. Conversely, you can always just get a few rolls of Reynolds Wrap and poster your walls with that.
Et In Arcadia Ego
I agree with this article completely. I have been using MS products for years and I found that MS Paint is the one program that has never had any exploits. If I could somehow run everything through Paint, I'm sure my network would be much more secure.
If you're going to go to the trouble of repainting your entire office/building/whatever so your wireless network can be secure, why not just string cables instead? Unfortunately, the article is light on details, such as the price of this high-tech paint and whether it has any (undesired) side-effects like blocking cell-phones. The real question as I see it is, if you have to factor in the price of repainting your entire workplace (and don't miss any spots!) to the already high expense of going entirely wireless, why not just string some cable and be done with it?
Disclaimer: I'm just hip-shooting here. I've never been in charge of a company so I don't know all the factors which would affect a decision of this type. I just don't get why you'd ever go wireless if security is important to you.
Sure, paint three walls and knock out the fourth so you can get access in the next room (or the same room now). Repeat until wireless signal is available *only* throughout office or home. Quick, shut down the wireless network, I need to open the front door. Why's it so dark in here ... oh ya we painted over the Windows.
If NASA can receive data from a ~10 watt transmitter at a distance of 10 billion miles, I'm sure that it's possible for someone to read the leakage from any signals inside the building from a distance of 1 block, no matter how much "shielding" is slapped onto the walls.
I wont even read the article. How do you figure you can contain a WLAN signal? What about the windows? And the doors? Can you still make cell phone calls from within? Or listen radio indoors?
I think the idea is stupid. I hope they didn't blow much VC money with this.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Blog article links to another, dated February 2007 on how to hack a WEP network. Gee, 2 years ago Tomshardware had a tutorial, and by then it was already old news. ForceFieldWireless (among others) has had a "wifi paint" product on the market for years.
Not too useful for many people, I suppose. I mean, a properly secured wireless network with a sensible admin should be able to monitor break ins. For stuff you want to restrict on site, Cat-5 (or -6) works pretty well, and there's much less RF crap to shield.
It conducts electricity, so it will act as a Faraday shield. Considering that it's not particularly popular now, you can probably "secure" a room for considerably less that this paint will cost.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
When 14 or so people were to be moved to adjacent building, it was my job (ITmanager) to make sure they had all there network services.
So I asked for wires to every room and one wireless spot in the middle, the DECT repeater in the hallway not far off was enough to get good reception in every room.
A week before they change places I checkt the new cables, new fiber to the spot, the wireless, it all works.
The day they move, I get scrambled calls about the wireless not working properly and the phones even worse.
What happened? The last day the creative head decided everybody needed one or more magneticly painted walls so they can hang work/memos/etc without having leaving little holes in the wall everytime.
So I needed a new DECTrepeater (and new cables from the PABX, which would have cost a little extra when the fiber was laid in place; but now costs as much for the work) and even now 3 rooms down the phone service isn't great, wireless in those rooms sucks.
How good is WPA these days, anyway? If I put a strong password on the router, use WPA-PSK with a strong key, turn off SSID broadcast, and allow connections only from specified MAC addresses, how safe am I? (This is a home network in an apartment complex; I can see 10 or 12 other SSIDs from here. So I'm inclined to think that turning off SSID broadcast will keep me under anyone's radar, since there are other, less well secured networks in the vicinity. Still it would be nice not to be completely counting on that.)
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
...at blocking 2.4GHz WiFi signals, or 850 & 1900MHz cellphone signals either.
I've tested this inside a completely metal covered travel trailer (an Airstream) with aluminum screened windows, at an RV park that offered free WiFi to its customers and more than enough 2.4GHz and cellphone signal gets inside for the devices to work just fine, although the signal level is reduced a fair amount. If enough RF gets inside, then you can surely bet that enough signal can also get outside to be "useful" to someone else too.
I placed my WiFi router in my basement. I can pick up the signal anywhere in my house and about a 10-foot perimeter around my house. Anything beyond that the signal is too weak (including the road) with the several WiFi adapters I've tried. Forget WEP...don't need it!! This allows friends to easily use their laptops inside my house without bothering with WEP setup.
Yeah yeah yeah...so it ain't perfect and maybe someone could use a super-sensitive receiver, but if someone is gonna try that hard to sniff my network, they might as well break in my house when I'm not home.
The product's datasheet lists 60-70 dB attenuation as a function of frequency, going all the way up to 2GHz. It's interesting that they don't document attenuation in the 2.4 GHz ISM band (802.11b/g, Bluetooth), nor any other higher frequencies. Assuming that the attenuation is similar for 802.11ish frequencies, I question this thing's effectiveness.
Throw in a few extra dB for the wall, and this shield probably won't prevent an attacker with a directional antenna from listening in to a maximum power transmitter protected by the shield. Maybe not even from a normal 802.11 card.
That said, it sounds like a nice supplemental technology.
But now you're talking diminishing returns.
Let's take wireless in a corporation, for example. There's a great value-add to having wireless in places like conference rooms - and as I've found in my work, even in the cube-realm. I can take my laptop into any office and stay connected. It's so nice that I've given up use of a PDA for the first time in 6 years or so, and no more need to sync.
Anyways, from my experience the corporation knows about the flaws in wireless and would love to be able to ensure that there is an almost 0 chance of someone getting on the network unauthorized. This paint would help with this. However, would it subvert someone from grabbing the signal with a laptop and a basic WiFi card? I'm betting so. Would it help someone on the building top of the neighboring business with a yagi pointed at the building? Maybe not... but then again, that's what we place other safeguards in place for (WPA with authentications; centralized AAA, paging on "odd" attempts to connect)
In the end, it's all about diminishing returns. If you want to go the complete extra mile (as someone like the Government would) - you'd take any precaution to make sure that no one outside the specific area would be able to connect at all. You would have a specific team who would do a security audit and try to break in. For a standard company, you'd probably attempt to tie everything back to one place and use higher encryption with AAA. That's my experience, anyways.
Karnal
http://www.rustoleum.com/product.asp?frm_product_i d=644&SBL=1
painted my daughters room with it OVER 3 YEARS AGO and it does the exact same thing. we lost cellphone coverage in that room (aluminum screens and storm windows complete the circuit)
The overpriced paint mentioned in that article and I have see elsewhere for the tinfoil-hat crowd is no better than the el-cheapo rustoleium primer applied as 3 coats so that fridge magnets happily adhere to the wall.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When you talk about grounding the walls and floors and ceilings, you have also to talk about how you are going to do the grounding. Any conductor that you use will act like an antenna or at least it will have significant impedance. Really, the only way to do a Faraday cage is to have an unbroken metal shell. Your comment about wavelength is correct; again as far as it goes. For instance, the window of a microwave oven consists of a bunch of holes which are too small for the RF to squeeze through. On the other hand the gap can be long and narrow so the shield on the wall and the shield on the floor won't work if they aren't bonded every inch or so at the frequencies you mention.
I take note that the grandparent is modded as a troll. Somebody should have to explain that one. I'm guessing that whoever modded it that way would have trouble with Ohm's law let alone RF circuits.
I actually thought while first reading the article that you were supposed to cover the wireless router with it. I was thinking "How would that help? Is that even HEALTHY??" If someone really wanted to hack a wireless network, they could stick a repeater in an outlet right next to a door or something like that. I think that no one should be stealing the government's WiFi anyway... They're inefficient as it is, they need all the bandwidth they can get.
The only difference is the wavelenght: a few cm's versus 400-600 nano's.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Anyone who needs their network to be more than casually "safe" needs to run cat5. Running some cable is too much of a problem, but repainting your house and installing some specialty doors and windows is somehow easier?
We are all just people.
Airborne RF signals, wtf does that mean?
So, if you have a disgruntled employee, all they need to do is stick a tack in the wall. Instant nearly invisible outside access. I bet even a pushpin holding the latest calendar up on the wall would do the trick, and not even need to be intentional.
:)
Oh, and there are those pesky doors and windows to deal with too.
But look at the bright side, you cant be paged or get a SMS call when the servers go down.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't see how some newfangled paint could protect you more than an army of CATS, even if they were "strung out".
A bit off topic, but a friend just set up his new MRI scanner and of course the room it is in is well shielded. You need to keep its magnetic waves in the room and you don't want anything interfering with the machine. However, so they can do functional MRI, they need to project video into the machine (e.g., you can watch a video while getting scanned).
Since the video projector can't be in the room... they created a wave guide which is a metal tube of a size (width and length) that doesn't allow anything harmful in or out of the room (electro-magnetically speaking) but is effectively a literal hole in the wall that they can project through. In some studies about taste they can also run long tubes filled with "flavors" so that they can allow a person in the scanner to "taste" while being scanned.
http://www.hawknest.com/
Come on, wireless networks are for convenience. The security involved is a neccesity. If security becomes just inconvenient, people (non-sysadmin people) will work around it. With WPA encryption, security isn't an inconvenience as much as a must - people cannot in any way access the WLAN without the right key installed. Replacing all access points with ones that don't penetrate special paint will only make people (with the right key) angry and annoyed. And failing to convince the sysadmins, they work around it.
;-).
Where I work new access points are installed all the time, just to make all areas accessible. If one room doesn't have coverage, someone is sure to stretch a cable, and install a new access point. They don't even bother to tell anyone; it's WPA protected anyway.
In short: go ahead, paint away. But if I want WLAN access in _this_ meetingroom, I'm going to make it happen
Please please please cinema's all over the world, put this stuff on your walls... (I hope it helps against mobile phones as well).
If there's an emergency, I will walk out and tell someone who works at your place.
Wasn't there some sort of big regulatory brouhaha (e.g. blocking E911 signals) when movie theaters tried this to silence cell phones? I could just imagine the fan-excrement collision when one of the employees turns out to be a ham radio nut and starts quoting chapter and verse out of the ARRL handbook. I saw this happen once when my college tried to institute a blanket ban on antennas hanging out of dorm windows (a number of students had small dishes out the windows to pirate satellite TV). Apparently there are some strict FCC regulations about interfering with "lawful communications" on licensed bands, so the Uni relented in a hurry (ok guys, antennas are fine, just don't mount them in a way that damages the building [e.g. no drilling holes]).
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Governments have a great habit of wasting money by trying to dot every 'i' and cross every 't'. Of course, you can never achieve perfection, but their endless quest does have the effect of each extra step costing enormous amounts of extra money with minimal incremental benefit.
In this case: WPA (and many other layers of encryption) = free. Painting a building with special paint = £$massive.
What's scary is that someone from a government department will mandate this kind of tosh - and suddenly every government building (including leisure centres) will have to have it.
Of course, the irony is that - once they get paint like this, people will feel overly secure - reduce the more sensible types of encryption - and then leave the loading bay doors open, right next to a wireless repeater, pouring forth their unencrypted secrets.
If it blocks cell phones this could be a very good thing for public places like movie theaters. Too many people still haven't figured out how to turn off their cell phone or even worse they talk loudly during a movie. Sure if they are talking you can get someone from the staff to remove them, but it is still interrupting the movie.
-- Slashdot, making the Left look conservative since 1997.
can be safely used to protect wireless networks in business and government facilities.
Funny, I work for the government and there is no directive saying that we can install wireless if we use EM-shielding paint. We still have to do far more fancy things to secure our wireless infrastructure.
This is a nice slashvertisement, though.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Just paint three of the four walls and it should act a massive wifi reflector. I'm using a piece of foil that's only about 8" X 8" as a reflecter and it gives me about 10%-20% more in both signal strength and quality and ends up extending the range (in one direction) 50 feet or so... having an entire room as a reflecter would be awesome!
This is probably ineffective against anyone with a decent antenna. All it takes is a slot bigger than a wavelength and RF will leak through. You might not be able to pick up the leak with the tiny omnidirectional antenna on a laptop, but a directional antenna, even the classic Pringles can, will provide significantly more gain.
Real TEMPEST-shielded rooms are solid steel, with welded seams, mesh over any opening, fiber optic data connections, filters on the power, and an airlock-type arrangement with copper fingers to make an RF-tight seal. It's not that hard to make a conductive wall. It's making the surface electrically seamless, without gaps, that's hard.
It's straightforward to test a shielded room, with a transmitter inside and a receiver outside. All the gear is available from ham radio outlets.
TEMPEST specification it's a misleading lie.
t m
http://www.fas.org/irp/program/security/tempest.h
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
2 issues: 1 The article is weak on details or quotes from anyone aside from the company that made it. 2. "The EM-SEC Coating System is clearly the most secure option aside from stringing out the CAT5" screams I am a paid advertisement. I don't know the original website should I trust the content? When we looked into putting in WAP's at work there was a way to tune the signal strength to be dead as near the external walls as possible. I know this isn't perfect because you can always get a bigger antenna but it should stop the average person that is driving by. If you add good Wireless security, and good physical security to this doesn't it solve most of the problem?
This signature would be better if I was creative.
Am I the only one disapointed that this article is NOT about MS Paint havign some, previously unkown, abilities to secure a network?
cmon, it is one of MS's best programs yet after all...
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
I can finally take off my tinfoil hat indoors! oh the thought of sleep, sans dreams of crackling death propagated by my thought-helmet.
I am excited about this. Not because it "protect wireless networks in business and government facilities" but that it could be used to help protect me from business and government facilities. Not me personally but protect the people, in general, against what seems to be an every increasing attack on privacy from within our own government (the USA).
It seems that this would have a lot of applications beyond simple WiFi blocking and should block or reduce RF in general. I'd like to know the spectrum it has been rated to block. I did not see that in the article. But, given that it does block RF it might have uses beyond it's stated purpose. Specific rooms that are required to be kept more secure than others could greatly benefit from this. Computers give off all kinds of RF that talented hackers and government employees have learned to pick up on and convert back into meaningful data. If all or at least some of this could be blocked it would surely make for a more secure environment. Not to mention that it should be less costly and easier to deploy than say a lead lined room.
I have not kept up on the latest requirements for securing and maintaining an authorized certificate authority but I imagine the room in which your CA was housed would be an excellent candidate for this type of paint.
I wish they would have gone into more detail about the specifics of the paint itself. Is it oil or water based? I would assume it maintains a high concentration of water as it absorbs RF more than most other substances. That is why people have difficulty with a LOS (line of sight) WiFi connection when there are trees surrounding the LOS because the water inside the trees absorbs the RF (trees are made up of mostly water). So, if you have any land around your property a good WiFi and general RF blocker would be to plant as many trees as you can between you and your neighbors and public access points as possible. Though, water wouldn't be the only material that could be reduced RF leakage. The paint could be doped with other materials such as lead. I bet many of those older homes that used lead based paint were pretty darn secure from WiFi leakage. Just try and keep your kids from eating the paint chips as lead causes dementia.
If it is water based then it somewhat limits it's application because of the potential items that you could not paint. Like anything outdoors. I don't imagine this would help against laser detection but if it were some kind of oil based paint or plastic polymer then one could paint their vehicle with it and it would be much more stealthy. Especially against law enforcement with older, non laser, radar.
This sounds a lot like the paint used on stealth aircraft. If so then I would really like to get some of that. Not only is it designed to be used outdoors but it has to put up with rigors of up to super-sonic speeds.
I wonder, does it come in red? Hmmmmm.......
Nick Powers
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
This story was on slashdot about a year ago...
/ 14/0028208
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
Let's see... where to begin...
First off, if someone wants access to your wireless network that badly, they will get in. Simple as that. And why would you want to limit your network (speaking of purely a home setting, with only the typicall "one-wireless-router" setup) signal to the insides of your home. Poor Billy can't sit outside of his house in the sun and do his homework on his Laptop anymore.
Secondly, I have to admit that nowhere in the article does is mention the word, "Faraday Cage."
Thirdly, and lastly, painting your house with a paint that essentially works as a Faraday Cage is only an after-construction idea for most businesses. If they really wanted to stop their precious wireless signal from reaching the outside, and limit their employees to land phone lines, they should look into building the building itself with a wire-mesh inside of it, so it acts as a Faraday Cage; paint, in my honest opinion, is generally less effective by any standard than an actual cage setup.
Oh, and for most places that have thousands of wires in the building's walls, I ask, why pay? You can just turn on WEP (Or WPA hopefully) and then you've got a structure than can block cell phone calls, and a internet that is much harder to "hack" into.
Or people will get pissed off that their cell phones don't work.
Hey, maybe they should paint theaters with this stuff...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
This is the solution so that you can use a wireless network - with the advantage of not having to keep wires in supply without physically limiting your movement to a single room - limiting you to that single room after spending loads of money on paint. It's like a wireless remote that comes with a power cable so you won't even need to recharge batteries.
Does anyone else remember the EM device that can decode the signal from a traditional tube monitor from outside a building?
You need to paint your walls with some of this stuff to block that as well...cat 5 won't help you there.
Hey, maybe they should paint theaters with this stuff...
Fuck that, I'm all for painting cars belonging to people caught using cellphones while driving with this crap. I mean, windows and everything. Maybe we could arrange a dunking vat, you know, for quick, easy and thorough radio-wave proofing.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
The manufacturer publishes sample data that a 6 mil (0.1524 mm) thickness attenuates signals in the 30-2000 MHz range by at least 58 dB (Shielding Effectiveness) and up to 78 dB.
This 'solution' creates another problem - it prevents communication from happening.
It is one thing when a person in a cinema uses their phone - lack of education. And it is another thing when someone receives an SMS, being notified by vibra, without disturbing anyone. What if the SMS bears news about an emergency, or something that is of a critical importance?
Do you think it is 'cool' when you have a problem and your doctor is notified via SMS while they're watching a movie in a cinema or having dinner in a restaurant that uses this uber-paint?
We need to solve the original problem, not substitute it with a different one. My guess is that the answer lies within ourselves - self improvement, educating our children, etc. Paint will not change the human nature, only humans will.
The saddest poem
Tin foil paint! Can you paint your head with it? If it blocks EM radiation then it has to be great to keep them from reading your thoughts. I might even paint the dog with it.
I'm sure schools would pick this up very quickly if it blocked cell phone signal. I can almost factually say that my school would.
If creativity is the field, copyright is the fence.
It's easier to pay some one to repaint the house than secure their wireless for many people.
:)
Plus, it is like a tin-foil hat, for the whole house. So the CIA and the aliens can't beam thoughts into anyone's head.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
You're right. This is all hype. It reads like it was written by the PR department of a paint maker.
Poly Shiled http://www.polyshield.ca/ will do something similar. Along with stopping thermo imaging devices (infra red guns) it'll also kill a cell phone signal. At least it made my cell phone lose its siganl when I stuck it into a box covered with the poly.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I lived in an apartment at one point which didn't allow my DirecTV dish, but one of my windows had a clear view of the southern sky. OK, I decided, I'll just set the dish here on the floor and point it out the window! Well, that didn't work. At first it was the metal screen blocking the signal, but the apartment complex manager was nice enough to have it replaced with a non-conductive fiberglass screen when I asked. But it still didn't work. With the window open so the dish was only looking through the screen, everything was fine. Close the window, though, and my signal dropped to zero. Signals at those frequencies are known to pass through ordinary glass, so I'm guessing that the windows were coated with some type of glazing, possibly metal-based, that blocked the signal. Heat was included in the rent at this place, so the apartment complex had a direct interest in energy efficiency.
My solution was to build a double-paned window out of two sheets of clear acrylic separated with spacers and insulated all the way around with foam tape. I cut it to fit the open window perfectly and unless you looked very carefully, you'd never notice that the "real" window was wide open and the "fake" window was filling the space. It was well-insulated enough even in the winter that the heat loss was no problem. But the important thing was that the satellite signals passed through the acrylic with no problem, and I was probably the only person in the whole complex to have satellite TV. Plus, I earned geek points for having a working satellite dish on my living room floor. Yes, I was single at the time; why do you ask? Heh...
see subject.
... gee, I'd better not throw mine away!
Do they need a blue screen?
I read about this stuff nearly a decade ago. Why is this news now?
It would be a shame if your mother were to be grated "accidentally". My friends and I, we might be able to provide "protection" from such an "accident".
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Officer: Oh no, someone's jammed the radar!
Dark Vapor: What? Impossible!
Officer: Look, there it is, it's jammed!
Dark Vapor: What flavour is it? *tastes* Strawberry! Only one person in the Galaxy users Strawberry! *waves fist*
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
Back in 2004 Kevin Rose demonstrated DefendAir Radio Shield paint on The Screensavers. It sounds like the same kind of paint.
-Rich
Almost factually? Is that like being sort of pregnant?
--Obyron
Sometimes, you aren't trying to keep something in, but keep something else out.
There are lots of reasons why blocking a signal would be better then mere encryption. Information can be garnered about a connection even if you do not know the content of the information. Besides, more options is almost always a good thing. For stupid people this will do nothing, for smart ones it will be the right solution in the right situation.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
Open up the Yellow Pages. Find a painting service, and find out how much it costs to have a room painted. Then call and find out how much it costs to have a CAT5 wall jack installed in a room. I would be very, very suprised if you can get a room painted (and that isn't counting the cost of the anti-wifi paint), for less than you can get ethernet jacks installed.
Is there a way to use a paint material like this to capture the extra radio energy not among the tiny fraction actually received by an antenna? Sure, it's a tiny wattage, but if it could be collected for periodic recharging the wireless antenna, then the whole system could run a lot longer off batteries - if it were efficient.
--
make install -not war
Waaaait a minute here.
Did you say six mils ? I think people aren't understanding how thick that is. That is one whoppingly heavy coat of paint.
That's not really "paint," that's more like a sprayed-on or rolled-on coating. Just to compare, that's like seven layers of household (0.02mm) aluminum foil.
Now, maybe it's still easier to put up than gluing sheets of a solid material in place, but the quantity of this stuff that's going to be required to coat a large space is going to be enormous. And unless it has some sort of quick-drying solvent base, it must have to be sprayed in multiple coats, particularly onto ceilings, just to keep from dripping.
I could see a lot of problems in using this stuff in anything but secure areas; it's not just a drop-in replacement for current, conventional house or office wall paint.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The parent comment was not intended to be flamebait. Nor do I think it unintentionally became flamebait, as no flames were produced in reply to it. It has the superficial appearance of a troll, but I don't think it was even that, if I may say so myself. By exaggeration, I was making fun of the perceived slashdot groupthink regarding Microsoft and Windows. Additionally, this tied in quite nicely via a pun on both the previous comment and the overall topic of the article. Please, try to notice these things. Overrated mods, perhaps. This was not my magnum opus. Troll mods, perhaps. As I said, it superficially resembles many poorly done trolls. Flamebait mods, no. Not at all. I hope you can't sleep tonight over your wanton cruelty to the innocent comment.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
The problem isn't necessarily trying to dot every i and cross every t, or even government in particular. How hard is it to picture a good number of PHBs in the private sector reading this article and thinking "paint will make our network secure!"? The difference is that rather than your tax dollars being wasted, investment/operations dollars will be. Cost subsidized by the consumer in less competetive or more collusive markets.
To be pithy, the ultimate problem is "zeal without knowledge" -- or, to be a bit more verbose, quick institutionalization of specific rules and practices for their own sake, rather than the development of an institution with intelligence and introspection built-in and distributed throughout.
Tweet, tweet.
I have the opposite problem. My house seems to destroy any RF signal in sight. I have 4 wireless access points and can barely get a decent signal throughout my house. I don't so much care for wireless security -- everything I do is encrypted anyhow. For somebody to get a signal they would have to be at my front door or patio in which case they are trespassing....
I have tried wireless repeaters and have no luck getting a decent signal even on my patio (where I like to do my coding).
Do many people really have to worry about stealing a signal when they have to be right on top of your property to do so?
One of my colleagues was once shown round this strategy room which had EM shielding - he was very impressed ... until his mobile phone started ringing.
I'd like to see all movie theaters get a coat of this paint.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
You know, just because you don't understand why the army needs this, doesn't meam they're automatically complete idiots.
Here's a thought for you: any good defense is built in layers. So if one layer fails, the others are there to prevent a complete catastrophe. This doesn't mean they won't enable encryption, maybe even an extra layer of encryption on top of WPA, it means that they'll _also_ have a physical EM shielding layer to pick the slack if someone made a mistake.
Additionally, the army has a long history of using and dealing with counter-measures. You don't see people trying to actively jam your home network, but in case of a war, that's exactly what the army might have to deal with. Whether actual pure jamming, or just an EMP from a nuke frying all your electronics, if the shit hits the fan big time. So when that happens, you'd rather most of it was shortcircuited by the building being a big Faraday cage.
Additionally, the army has to deal with EM radiation out of the building in more ways than some wardriver surfing for porn on your home network. It can be someone intentionally placing a transmitter somewhere, to some spy leaking the encryption keys, to being basically tagged for an EM seeking missile. While a Faraday cage won't make any of those 100% impossible, it gives you one extra chance against it. E.g., if someone left the door open near a repeater, you can notice you suddenly detect EM radiation around a building that was supposed to have none. E.g., sure, someone could climb on the roof and place their emitter for the missile there, but there's a chance someone will see them, whereas a modified laptop/clock/whatever in a drawer might not even get noticed until it's set to activate at midnight in anticipation for an enemy strike. Etc.
Additionally, the army is a bigger target than your home network. A wardriver will just go for whatever unsecured network is in the neighbourhood, and not even bother to crack your encryption. You're not worth it. You're one of millions of networks, each perfectly equivalent to any other, for his purposes. Even with the old WEP, chances are noone stood around long enough to gather packets and crack your keys, because, again, it wasn't worth the effort. A spy isn't as easily deterred. He won't go for Aunt Emma's home network instead. And he can devote disproportionate computing power and manpower to cracking the codes of a potential enemy superpower.
Of course, you can stick your head in the sand, put a big "WAP can't ever be cracked" poster and feel secure. What if you're wrong? Even for WEP it took two years for the vulnerability to be published. Plus, for the standard WW2 example, the Germans didn't think Enigma had been cracked either. (Nor did the civillians in most allied countries, for that matter. It was top secret.) What if some bright chinese mathematician comes up with some brilliant new way to decrypt it? Would you rather bet on that never happening, _or_ have an extra layer of defense just in case? Because from where I stand, given high enough stakes, the latter looks like the much smarter choice.
Basically, get your head out of the ass, and out of the "I'm teh genius, anyone doing things otherwise than me is automatically an idiot" mentality. Most often that should just be your hint that you don't actually understand what's happening there, and you're operating on just wild assumptions and pseudo-data pulled out of the ass to support that "I'm teh genius" preconception. And, as they say: Garbage In, Garbage Out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://www.lessemf.com/plastic.html
Data block windows for EMI protection.
The truth shall set you free!
But cheaper and easier to pay someone to secure their wireless.
Is blocking such RF against FCC regulations?
[quote]Of course, the irony is that - once they get paint like this, people will feel overly secure - reduce the more sensible types of encryption - and then leave the loading bay doors open, right next to a wireless repeater, pouring forth their unencrypted secrets.[/quote] This is government we're talking about. Reducing encryption would require /repealing/ previous mandates -- and the government (ANY government) never likes to do that. They'll just keep piling them on, like layers of ... uh, old paint.
Ok. And when the "weak and stupid" kill the non-"weak and stupid" because of careless driving? What then Mister Phd of Natural Selection? What then?
Perhaps, we should make a law so that the "weak and stupid" don't kill the rest of us with [drunk driving|cellphone use|speeding]. Wait a sec...that's what we're doing. I believe the laws are there (aside from providing income for municipality) not to protect the "weak and stupid", but to protect the rest of us from the "weak and stupid".
But then, since you feel that EVERYBODY should be allowed to [drive drunk|use cellphone|speed], I'm wondering which camp you're in.
Whew, that tin foil hat was always hot and uncomfortable anyways...
Forget expensive paint, WPA2 is more secure than this snake oil bullshit.
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
If you want to reduce accidents due to distracted driving, the best thing to do would be to look at the list of distracted driving causes and discourage each one of them (perhaps by outright outlawing, but that need not be the only option) from the most common down to the level at which the inconvenience is worth the risk.
? button=disdrv the most common cause is events outside the vehicle, followed by the radio, followed by a few other inside-the-car activities, including eating while driving.
i.e. don't set speed limits to 5mph and require all cars to be made by Nerf. A certain number of driving fatalities is acceptable in a functioning economy.
Now, If you're looking at the list just about the least common cause is cell phones. According to http://www.aaafoundation.org/multimedia/index.cfm
All of which, before cell phones, are very plebeian activities. Which ones get banned? Only the one with the class-warfare implications. It's an order of magnitude less common than changing a radio station and an order of magnitude less than talking to passengers, yet we haven't even suggested people should drive in blissful silence.
So who is protecting whom from what?
*I am not suggesting that cell phone use while driving shouldn't be banned, only that if we're not going to go after other far more common, and equally easily bannable, causes, that we as a society have de facto declared that the reduced risk isn't worth the nuisance.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
seems to me this story was posted several days early (should have popped up on April 1st)
~Hal
Are people counting the cost of that into their equations? Or is this stuff only intended for use in a closed room with no windows?
What is the potential user of this technology supposed to do when a family member carelessly opens the door and fails to close it when they leave?
Seems like it might be a just a little bit early to ditch WEP/WAP.
Finally, will the paint be available in hot neon pink?
~Hal