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Cell Phone Jamming Devices Enjoy an Increase In Popularity
rullywowr writes "A story run by local new NBC10 of Philadelphia last Friday illuminated the fact that this particular rider of the pubilc bus system is packing a cell phone jammer and is not afraid to use it. Going by the name of 'Eric,' whenever he sees someone being 'rude' on the bus and talking loudly on their cell phone, he screws the antenna on and flips the power switch. Regardless of the steep civil penalites levied by the FCC (up to $16,000 USD), many (such as 'Eric') are still interested by these devices which can be bought on the internet for $40 to over $1000. Opponents of these devices say that not only do they interfere with mobile phones, they often can interfere with 'behind the scenes' communication, Wi-Fi, etc. Despite being illegal, TFA points out that they are readily available on the internet (what else is new?). Do you have an instance where you experienced the positive (or negative) effects of a cell phone jammer?"
This guy is my new hero, even though he later backed down and said he wasn't going to use it anymore. I for one am fed up with the constant assault of cell phone conversations from people who have no idea how to be considerate to those around them.
If someone was doing this while I commute to work, and I wasn't able to use my 3g connection, I would be pissed.
I saw designs on Limor fried's Site years ago that she made for her thesis I believe. It's a good read. Either way it's funny how long these things took to become popular http://www.ladyada.net/make/wavebubble/index.html TFL for anyone who can't google
I can tell you with what joy it is to live in a city where listening to B-grade hip hop music on tinny cell phone speakers is the norm. That you can't stop, but when I have to be subjected to a very lengthy screaming match between baby-momma and her baby-daddy, with a push of a button I can cut that nonsense out. If you want to do that nonsense, then get off the train at the next stop and have your bitch fest there.
I can't do much about the panhandlers that pass through the trains hocking bootleg DVDs, scented oils or begging for quarters, but I CAN do something about the chaff of society who can't keep their Jerry Springer drama to themselves, and so I shut them down with a jammer. If an emergency crops up, I turn the device off.
Movie theaters come to mind at first, granted I don't go all that often, but still.
They always have that announcement that everyone ignores to turn off your phone
This way they don't have to ask, they just stop working.
If there's some sort of emergency, I'm sure the theaters have a wired phone somewhere they can use quickly.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Do you have an instance where you experienced the positive (or negative) effects of a cell phone jammer?"
Yeah. I was having a stroke and nobody could understand why I was flopping about with half my face looking like it was ready to melt off. I reached for my phone, dialed 911... and nothing happened. Then I died. I had to submit this as a ghost because nobody thinks about what blocking a communications medium does to innocent people, they just want to get at the one asshole amongst the dozens or so in the area abusing it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Audio pollution isn't something you get to have control over. Feel free to tell someone they're being annoying, but sometimes you're just going to have to deal with someone talking on their phone in a way that annoys you. If it's not that, it will be someone talking loudly to the person standing next to them. Or a person honking their horn to much or for no reason. Or someone with their cell phone's speaker turned on as they listen to MP3s. Or jackhammers or machinery or the buzz of a refrigerator. How are you going to jam that?
Long signatures suck.
I've seen the effect upon drivers talking on their phones while driving. While talking on the phone, their speed is erratic and inconsistent, they wander around their lane. Once in range of such a device, they look at their phone for a second or two, put the phone down, and start to pay attention to the machine that they are controlling. Once their conversation ends, they have become much more responsible drivers, aware of those that are sharing the road with them.
Just an observation. I understand that jammers are illegal for very good reasons, and their abuse can lead to much more harm than good.
Obviously the potential penalties are not high enough. This is naked vigilanteism and should be stopped cold and hard.
YOU don't have RIGHT to interfere in MY liberty. If I'm being an asshole and talking loudly on the bus, then call a cop. That's how law and order works.
What's next, you firing an EMP gun at my house because my lights are interfering with your desire to stargaze?
Are you going to poison my dog because he barks too much or shits too much?
This one's a real slippery slope people.
Ooh, yeah! All right! We're jammin': I wanna jam it wid you. We're jammin', jammin', And I hope you like jammin', too. Ain't no rules, ain't no vow, we can do it anyhow: I'n'I will see you through, 'Cos everyday we pay the price with a little sacrifice, Jammin' till the jam is through.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
You must take classier buses than some of us...
Thaat depends
Are you talking loud enough to be clearly heard the length of said bus. It is about volume more thann anything. Talk softly and no one is likely to care.
For me i would put a jammer with a momentary switch so it only jams while being depressed. 5 seconds is enough to cut a call. And it looks like the provider dropped it.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
"A short cell phone call at a reasonable volume is not."
I agree, short cell call at reasonable volume is not a problem. What is a problem is 45 minutes of someone shouting into their phone. Which I get about twice a week on my commute.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
Folks, this is Slashdot, so I expect some more consistency in in your positions. Here we are supposed to be proponents of network neutrality, ardent supporters of anti-censorship methods, and unrepetent voices in support of freedom of information all over the world. We don't like governments mucking with DNS servers, and we hate the publishing companies trying to tell us how we should and shouldn't use our media.
Yet, here is a guy who passes swift judgment on others and renders their expensive cell phones inoperable for the sole reason that a single individual personally annoys him. He does this anonymously in public spaces, and the victims of his jammer have no recourse to repair their device. The loud, obnoxious caller suffers the same fate that the quiet girl chatting to her mother from three seats back does: everyone is silenced indiscriminately.
For some bizarre reason, the hivemind of Slashdot holds this one-man censorship czar in high esteem, but they would probably object to a public school, library, or hospital prohibiting cell phone use via means of a jammer for the same reasons he uses.
I for one am fed up with the constant assault of cell phone conversations from people who have no idea how to be considerate to those around them.
While you're sitting there like a fat little smug antisocial nerd who thinks the world revolves around him and reading his Ayn Rand in peace and quiet, the psychologist three seats in front of you is desperately hoping that none of his patients are feeling suicidal at that particular moment.
I have friends who are doctors, some of them psychologists. They're on call a great deal of the time, and people don't call their psychologist to talk about the weather. They call with things like "I'm having suicidal thoughts."
I have a friend who is an eye surgeon. When she's on-call, she sometimes gets patients who have hours or less before they could permanently lose their eyesight from an injury or complications from an earlier surgery.
I'm not saying THEY are more important. I'm saying their PATIENTS are. You have not seen panic until you've seen a psychologist who has a private practice and discovers her cell phone ran out of battery at some point, and she's an hour from a charger...
I've actually seen a psych emergency unfold, too - the psychologist-friend working with 911 operators and the police and EMS to find the patient and get them to a hospital. That can't happen unless they can reach their doctor to ask for help. Too bad for them some fat asshole nerd is sitting there giggling with his cell phone jammer.
Please help metamoderate.
1990 called
OMG, did you warn them about the '93 World Trade Center attack, '95 Oklahoma City Bombing, or Sir Mixalot?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Now if only they could invent a jammer for people who have their headphones cranked up to 11 until I swear their ears must be bleeding. If it is loud for me sitting next to you I can only imagine what must be left of your hearing.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/09/16/why-are-cell-phone-conversations-so-distracting/
Seriously think that through. What happens if the tables are turned and the abuser is the one with the cellphone jammer? What happens if a person delusionally believes that they are entitled to extreme revenge over a minor slight? If you are going into a situation and want to prevent your target calling the police for any reason, you are on very, very dangerous ground.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
You're also jamming the receipt of said important calls, which the jammer has no knowledge of. For instance, what if there's a doctor on the bus who doesn't get the call saying he's needed in emergency surgery, or there's an undercover cop on the bus watching for trouble (we have undercover cops in Boston for instance) who doesn't get a call saying that he's needed for something.
Why is the right answer to jam them and everyone around them? Why not walk up to them and ask them to bring the volume down? Why must we resort to under-handed/passive aggressive techniques that affect others that aren't violating the social rules?
Secondhand smoke is clinically proven to increase the occurrence of lung cancer. A short cell phone call at a reasonable volume is not.
"A short cell phone call at a reasonable volume" is not the problem that people who use jammers are trying to solve.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Cellphone jamming does not have to be dickish to everyone else around it.
Here is how I personally would make a cellphone jammer:
Take an ordinary quad band cellphone, preferably an android one with a well documented radio, with a rear facing camera, and a custom rom image running with root.
On the phone is the "jam this bastard!" Application, which I will have written myself. What it does is put the phone into promiscuous mode to capture datagrams not directed at it, and take signal to noise ratio measurements, along with a camera distance estimate from the rear facing camera. Using some inverse cube rule math, and some fuzzy metrics from the camera, it identifies the "bastard" you are aiming the phone at. You simply pretend you are texting away.
Once it identifies the "bastard", and their uuid (iemi, ssid, mac, whatever the network uses), and the tower+protocol used, it starts spoofing RST datagrams from the tower, sent as unicasts over the cellular band being used by the "bastard", with headers indicating that it is for the bastard's handset. The rate of injection is configurable.
This causes the "bastard" to lose connection with the tower as his handset obeys the connection reset command. A combination of this and some clever and fast spoofing on the part of the jamming phone to impersonate the jammed handset to send the "hang up" signal to the tower, will force a targetted dropped calls. At least in theory.
It would not impact any other cellular users, since it would use spoofed unicasts.
In the event that it can't directly interface with the target network, it would use the camera for range finding, and look for "noise".
It would then use a combination of the internal antennas broadcasting raw bit patterns to poison a specific noise source. (Say, using a multiplexed 2.4ghz wifi signal with an 800mhz signal to create a psuedo-broadcast at some other frequency via partial wave reinforcement, done using timed broadcasts of a user data pattern.)
The partial wave reinforcement to create the false effective signal would have a radically short range. It might interfere with other nearby devices, but would be quickly and effectively attenuated by environmental obstacles.
(Basically, you create a "beat" frequency emission using two frequencies on either side of the target frequency. The overlap of the two signals creates a 'false', or "beat" frequency in the desired band. If either of the source emissions falls off or gets deflected/reflected, the resulting beat freq will not be in the target band.)
This means the signal would still not leave the bus.
This might not force a disconnect, but would degrade QoS, and might improve the chances of a natural disconnect, especially if the bus is moving, since it could disrupt tower handoff.
(The second method is for, eg, a verizon smartphone using "bastard", and a quadband T-mo using jammer. The jammer cannot see the raw data traffic on verizon's spectrum, since the phone antenna is not able to pick it up. No radio emission is completely discrete, especially with multipath interferences and other randomizing sources of attenuation, so communications on that foreign band should be detectable as noise on the native band from the local environmental attenuation. This is similar to an att gsm phone making a home stereo buzz. The phone is not really broadcasting on such a low frequency, the signal just attenuates there/causes a signal induction, creating noise.)
In europe, where practically everyone uses gsm, the android smartphone based jamming app would be surgical and effective. In NA, where there is cdma and gsm, the dirty second option is needed.
Granted, very few handsets have radios with such capabilities, or are sufficiently well documented publicly to bastardize them for this purpose.
In the first case, anybody else on the bus will be totally unimpacted by the DoS exploit.
In the second case, some nearby (within maybe 2 to 5 meters) people might be effected, but only if th