in my observation: when humans are automated out of a process due to the human element being inconvenient, the perceived efficiency gains are often because wronged individuals have less recourse in the automated system.

it won't start as a mass deployment -- just focused on stadiums, airports, government buildings, etc.; maybe some authoritarian states will attempt mass deployments, but the cost will be an obstacle. also, my read is that western telcos aren't interested in owning a surveillance tool because they know their governments won't let them keep it.

hopefully 6G won't be the end of physical privacy. but it will prototype the end of physical privacy -- and i think it will end up being just a matter of time from that point on, unfortunately.

there is a working group at 3gpp, an EU-funded research group (6th sense, Open6GHub), universities (NCSU, Bristol), and many companies working very hard right now on proposals to include "integrated/joint sensing and communication" (ISAC/JCAS) in the 6G spec.

ISAC means adding mmWave to 6G (ostensibly for speed, but also) to build a high-fidelity 3d realtime "digital twin" of the real world that can see through walls, owned and operated by your telecom provider.

> A very exciting innovation that 6G will bring to the table would be its ability to sense the environment. The ubiquitous network becomes a source of situational awareness, collating signals that are bouncing off objects and determining type and shape, relative location, velocity and perhaps even material properties. With adequate 6G solutions for privacy and trust, such a mode of sensing can help create a “mirror” or digital twin of the physical world in combination with other sensing modalities.

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/newsroom/articles/nokias-visi... https://www.bell-labs.com/institute/blog/building-network-si...

there's been a testbed deployment in a German hospital for "non-invasive" monitoring of vitals; which sounds to me like it can literally see a heartbeat.

https://www.nokia.com/about-us/news/releases/2024/12/17/noki...

truth is, this is the nature of wireless radios. we can't keep improving bandwidth and latency without also turning the radio into a camera. i'm disturbed by the inevitability.

is anyone calling it that? to me, "pickle bomb" would imply abusing compression or serialization for a resource-exhaustion attack, a la zipbombs.

"pickle bomb", the way you're using it, doesn't seem like a useful terminology -- pickles are just (potentially malicious) executables.