alt Hacker NewsThe speaker in the video was extremely difficult for me to understand but the idea seems quite clever.
What I'm most surprised about is just how well it actually works... I did not think such EM fluctuations would be usably detectable from several meters away... but I suppose this may be moreso due to improper/lack of shielding in the first place, which I would think should be easily fixable in most products to mitigate this type of detection.
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> The speaker in the video was extremely difficult for me to understand but the idea seems quite clever.
With a bit of practice it's actually quite easy to understand the accent of Chinese speakers as they have some typical patterns and speak slowly.
I must say, I loved listening to him because this was genuine human work. Human made slides (with lots of ugliness coming with PowerPoint), human typos, human grammar mistakes, all of it. It may be flawed in some ways but this fully removed any doubts that a slop machine came even near it. So refreshing in this day and age!
Youtube subtitles can help in situations like this. Although they're not able to understand perfectly either. Example (1m0s) speaker means to say 'they can be disguised' but subtitles are:
> they can be disgusted
I think the speaker genuinely gets that word wrong; a malapropism (as opposed to the auto-generated English subtitles getting it wrong).
Shielding is addressed in the paper. They did some testing covering it with aluminum sheet (from coke can not aluminum foil) which decreased detection range from 30 to 2m. That's still not a bad range compared to other similar projects attempting to detect hidden cameras using EM. But with a properly designed shield the detection is probably even worse. Within limitations section they mention, they had problems detecting some smartphone cameras due them using low power memory and in general being better shielded.