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We're Jammin', Hope You Like Jammin' Too
theodp writes "Slate ponders whether a climate where anything can be photographed or surreptitiously recorded means the once-esoteric world of cell-phone jamming will become mainstream. Sites now offer portable cell-phone jammers that can provide you with the same kind of security bubbles used to thwart industrial spies, hostage-takers and bomb detonators. While actively jamming a cell-phone signal is illegal in the US, a distributor reports most of his sales go to US customers, including universities which use the technology to stop students from diddling away on phones during lectures."
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
Cell phone jamming should be legalized, and it should become more widespread.
I'd specifically like to see cell-phones jammed in movie theaters, and schools. I'm pretty good about shutting my phone off when I go to these places, but sometimes I forget, and sometimes when I forget, I get calls... it'd be a whole lot easier if the building disabled the phone for me, so I don't have to.
CF and Memory Stick expansion is beginning to be commonplace in these camera phones. Jamming delays transmission from "100% Live", but does little else.
You want to shoot X-Rays strong enough to wipe Flash Mem? Be my guest!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
While it is clearly illegal to jam the signal their is nothing against constructing buildings that jams the signal by just the nature of how the radio signal travels through the building.
HEre an article on home to legal jam cell phones.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
One company, Iceberg Systems, is beta-testing a new technology that will remotely turn off the cameras in cell phones.
What? Wouldn't blocking the cell phone signal only prevent the person from sending the picture off? The photograph could still be taken and simply sent later, once the cell phone is away from the jamming signal, right?
This is true. But I don't think that's the primary application of cellphone jammers.
Yeah, well, Beethoven's Fifth, being played through a crappy 2" piezoelectric disk speaker as the ringtone on some Nokia in a movie theater. That's the best reason for jamming that I can come up with. (Why custom ring tones? Don't people know those things sound as stupid as coffee can mufflers on Honda Civics?)
I have had cellphones with work, and was glad to get rid of them when I did. I have no interest in being on an electronic leash, forced to be accountable to someone - somewhere. Or standing in the line-up at Wal*Mart, the ring and promptly following, "Hey, it's me. Whatcha doing? Wanna come over?" (Who is "me"? If I slept with this person, it must not have been very memorable.)
In short, I *hate* cellphones.
Quoting from article: including universities which use the technology to stop students from diddling away on phones during lectures.
Hey, if the student diddles quietly, it's his funeral when his GPA drops and he gets kicked out of school.
Cellphones with integrated digital cameras might have their place, though. I know a university student whose math professor puts excellent and comprehensive notes on the blackboard. So he started to bring a digital camera and a small tripod to class, and takes pictures of each blackboard full of material. He sent me a sample a while ago. An integrated camera/phone would never run out of available internal memory. Personally, copying the notes down would help me remember the material, but whatever works for him... there's a certain style of practical problem solving skill at work there: he's a second-year engineering student; I think I'll have to hire him when he's done. :)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
In the UK, all the major exam boards will drop you from every subject you do with that board if you so much as walk into an exam room with a mobile phone. THis is one of the few decent things AQA and Edexcel have ever done, ever (Jesus christ, they make Standard Oil look like Greenpeace).
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
My first thought when reading this was one of glee... I'd LOVE to jam those dolts that insist on yakking on their cell phones during the movie.
Also, where I work (critical care area of the hospital), cell phones are explicitly forbidden, so this might be useful to keep in my lab coat pocket ("What? your cell phone just cut out? Hmmm... must be interference from our cardiac monitors") Yes, I'm sure their conversation is critically important, but accurate telemetry from my unstable cardiac patients interests me far more than somebody telling their friends which bar they'll be patronizing when they get discharged from my ER. You wouldn't even believe how torqued (even violent) some people can get if you ask them to turn off their phone... it's not like you're telling them to STFU; you're just asking them to take their conversation outside. I have no problem with someone communicating with their family to apprise them of a patient's condition... but we have land-lines for that, folks; you just have to walk ten feet...
Now if they had one that only blocked outgoing calls...
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Sorry, I'm not 35 and I'm another cell phone hater.
Are the devices inherently evil? Of course not. However, in the vast majority of people who have them, they encourage behavior that ranges from irritating to extremely annoying to downright dangerous.
I know any number of otherwise nice people who will answer these things (or at least reflexively check the screen) in the middle of face-to-face conversations, which is the height of rudeness. Some of these people do it enough that I really don't enjoy hanging around them anymore. For one of them it's even caused problems with her marriage - her husband can't stand it either and she doesn't seem to be able to kick the habit.
On trains, the racket of cellphones ringing and getting yacked into has destroyed what was once a restful way to travel. Other public spaces have suffered as well. People who are able to maintain normal volume levels when talking with the person next to them are for some reason unable to resist screaming their stupid inane shit into the little plastic box. In fact, I think one of the upsetting things about cell phones is that by raising the volume level of conversations I'm exposed to, it's correspondingly raised my awareness of what morons most people are. I'd like to think it's just that the same people who choose to have cellphones are also subintelligent twits, but depressingly I've seen no particular basis for that.
And, of course, almost every time I look into the window of a car after it's executed some brain-dead maneuver on the city streets (last-minute unsignalled turns, cutting other drivers off, almost mowing down pedestrians in crosswalks, etc.), the driver has a phone stuck to his/her ear.
If the price came down to about $100 I'd happily buy a jammer and carry it always.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS