The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it has developed a four-legged robot designed to jam the wireless transmissions of smart home devices. The robot was revealed at the 2024 Border Security Expo and is called NEO. It is built using the Quadruped Unmanned Ground Vehicle (Q-UGV) and looks a lot like the Boston Dynamics Spot robot.
According to the transcript of the speech by DHS Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers (FLETC) director Benjamine Huffman, acquired by 404 Media, NEO is equipped with an antenna array that is designed to overload home networks, thus disrupting devices that rely on Wi-Fi and other wireless communication protocols. It will thus likely be effective against a wide range of popular smart home devices that use wireless technologies for communications.
So this is the ‘mechanical hound’ that RayBradbury was referring to in Farenheit 451.
I forgot about that… The black mirror episode with them was terrifying.
Looks like Ethernet cams are the answer after all.
Sounds like cops are getting sick of being shown during their raids on home camera systems.
That is terrifyingly true. Wired cameras all the way.
Looks like Ethernet cams are the answer after all.
Always have been. 🌎🔫
Jokes on them, Uptime Kuma pings my doorbell cams every 5 seconds and starts the self-destruct sequence if they aren’t reachable.
Apart from the fact that I don’t believe you :) What would your self-destruct routine actually destroy?
the PhotosOfRealNature folder…and browsing history because they don’t deserve the memes
The antidote
Certainly not any evidence, as that would be illegal
It actually only checks every 30 seconds and sends an email if it fails for 3 minutes. But don’t tell the feds.
Now this is some watchdogs 2 shit
Might be time to hardwire my doorbell camera.
Yeah I’m glad you brought up the doorbell. Once the jammer dog is jamming, it’s impossible to ring most doorbells and choose the polite option. It’s 110% murderville from that point onwards.
I keep forgetting to do this. I just upgraded my panel, time to pull another cable …
Now ppl just need to jam the controller/video frequencies it uses to counter it.
Disclaimer: don’t do this unless you want the FCC knocking on your door too
Or just shoot it.
Make sure all your cameras are hard wired.
…. and display/video
D’Oh!
I always tried to prefer hard wiring where possible, so this shouldn’t block my cameras. However it just hit me reading this that all my displays are wireless. I’ll get the video but won’t be able to see it
Cool, so my hardwired cameras won’t be affected, and they’ll be announcing themselves with tons of suspicious radio activity. I’ll know exactly when to react to their arrival.
Police will do everything to hide their wrongdoing but they won’t obey the laws they claim to enforce.
ACAB
Right, can’t have records of illegal raids, theft or murder uploaded somewhere before they can destroy/confiscate them…
wtf, I bet it would work equally well for thousands of dollars less if their jammer didn’t come with a robot dog.
activating the HVAC system to introduce chemicals into the environment and cause a fire or explosion
Someone’s been reading comic books and raiding the edibles again
This roaming robotic jammer was first contemplated after a child sexual abuse suspect used his doorbell camera to see FBI agents at his door serving a search warrant. The gunman opened fire on them from behind the closed door with an assault-style rifle, killing two veteran agents and injuring three more.
Fuck pedos and abusers, and I’m sorry for those agents’ families’ losses, but it sounds like they went in without having done their homework on who they were arresting.
And now the rest of us have to pay the price for half-finished police work—on a single case—with an authoritarian ”solution.”
ACAB.
I have the same attitude for cops as I do Zionists.
Zionists - if you hate 1200 dead, wait til you hear about the 40k dead in Palestine.
Cops - If you hate the ~50-60 murdered cops over the last year, wait til you hear about the 1100 or so civilians murdered.
I can be sympathetic to deaths of any kind, but not when they’re martyred explicitly to dehumanize and justify violence against the masses.
Okay, I’ll just use wired devices from now on then.
For real security, you basically have to. Even without this, jammers can be used by thieves to disable wireless cameras and security systems.
WPA2 (and I believe 3 as well) are notoriously easy to crack the passwords to. Wired is truly best for security, and for wireless WPA Enterprise can help with securing the network
I don’t believe this is the case. 3 is fairly robust, and 2 is still just brute forcing, though rapidly on a local CPU. The one that’s trivial is trivial to crack is WEP.
WPA2 is pretty trivial too. Not as easy as WEP since you do have to locally brute-force the PSK (password), but that’s pretty quick on modern systems. We had multiple assignments when I was in college that had cracking a WPA2 password as a step (in the interest of time, the instructor used passwords from the RockYou list but still)
Yeah, if you’re using common words or variants thereof, you’re gonna have a bad time. But a 128 character string of random characters is going to be functionally safe from such an attack, for now.
