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FCC Orders a Brooklyn Man To Turn Off His Bitcoin Miner Because It Was Interfering With T-Mobile's Wireless Network (arstechnica.com)
A New York City resident was ordered to turn off his bitcoin miner after the Federal Communications Commission discovered that it was interfering with T-Mobile's wireless network. From a report: After receiving a complaint from T-Mobile about interference to its 700MHz LTE network in Brooklyn, New York, FCC agents in November 2017 determined that radio emissions in the 700MHz band were coming from the residence of a man named Victor Rosario. "When the interfering device was turned off the interference ceased," the FCC's enforcement bureau told Rosario in a "Notification of Harmful Interference" yesterday. "You identified the device as an Antminer S5 Bitcoin Miner. The device was generating spurious emissions on frequencies assigned to T-Mobile's broadband network and causing harmful interference." The FCC told Rosario that continued interference with T-Mobile's network while operating the device would be a violation of federal laws "and could subject the operator to severe penalties, including, but not limited to, substantial monetary fines, in rem arrest action to seize the offending radio equipment, and criminal sanctions including imprisonment."
This dude had better move his miner, or the FCC might send him another harshly worded letter.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
This machine was highly modified. They guy is also a tinfoil hat type who thought he was creating free energy with his modifications.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
It's good to hear of the FCC doing their job for a change.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
How much you want to bet that the Antminer S5 has no FCC ID, because they never bothered to get one.
He could turn it back on, he just needs to put his miner inside a faraday cage of some kind.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
The letter states he can operate it if he fixes the interference. TFS makes it sound like the FCC won't let him mine bitcoin at all.
Forget mining Bitcoin, run a micro radio station. The FCC will never notice that.
Disrupting emergency services, helping global warming, distributing child porn... Is there anything Bitcoin CAN'T do?
700 MHz is in the 10s of cm range as far as wavelength. Should be easy to construct some kind of Faraday cage to block the interference (while still allowing for air cooling), with filters on the AC line and Ethernet to prevent them from radiating as antennas.
Why would he have radio emissions while running a bitcoin miner?
You insolent MORON. "Ground" is COMPLETELY ARBITRARY. If he shielded the device thoroughly in foil and took care of the cords in and out, none of the EM would have been able to escape.
Don't bother posting. You have NO IDEA what you're talking about, fool.
And he was sure to make a MILLION dollars with that mining rig!
was turned into the big 'ole beast that was the Turbografx 16. I kinda liked the itty bitty PC Engine, though I've also heard the larger size appealed to Americans.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
A little judicious shielding might easily fix the problem, but then there is the heat... I had a friend up north who heated his house with his Bitcoin miner system until his electric bill made it not worth the trouble anymore. Maybe the FCC is doing him a favor.
It might be simpler for the person in question to build a faraday cage around the Antminer using some brass wire screen and pine slatting. I'm just saying.
-Casey Annis
...I mean, isn't this one of the FCC's core missions?
They're not chasing him because he's interfering with T-Mobile per se (and honestly, their mentioning of it was stupid). They're chasing him because his device was generating interference, full stop.
-Styopa
that is uncertified and in violation of fcc emissions standards; can they now go after the manufacturer, the importers and retailers, and even other (especially large-scale) purchasers/users of it? and shut 'em all down?
why doesn't he just put it in a faraday cage?
That's the real story. FCC actually paying attention to it's own rules.
Now if only we can get them to do something about 7.200Mhz.....
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
Now everyone throw out your cheap CFLs and LED bulbs. You are screwing up my ham radio. Come on, FCC. Where is your van when we need it?
Have gnu, will travel.
If a single non-radio'd IoT device can reek havoc to Brooklyn's LTE, could a rouge entity--government or otherwise--use millions of compromised devices to bleed all over the 700MHz channel across the country, perhaps in a coordinated attack? Could our smart thermostats and doorbells take down our mobile communications?
This could really be fixed with aluminum foil and a few ferrite toroids. Of course a nice metal box would be neater and better ventilated.
Bruce Perens.
USA well on its way to becoming a police state(country?), didn't even recuperate the guys losses.
America! Fuck yeah! Land of the enslaved!
Can we turn off the fcc since they're interfering with the internet?
"When the interfering device was turned off the interference ceased,"
It's always that way in these cases.
I guess the FCC is represented by lawyers from No, Shit & Sherlock.
Put a Faraday Cage around it....
Place the miner in faraday cage: wrap miner in the foil, or properly shield it. Using that metric every single electric engine may become the source of interference.
This is basically a bench-top prototype. I LOL at the CE Mark visible on the PCB.
First, the open enclosure top. Really? The panels are all painted with no way to connect each other electrically. Even if you masked the screw heads from paint, and still have some long seams, it would be a significant improvement at 700MHz.
Connecting modules together with unshielded, unfiltered harnesses. This is almost certainly emitting most of the noise. Clamping a ferrite bead around each one would help tremendously.
Given the rest of the sloppiness, I'm sure the PCB design is junk also.
As purchased, it's pretty much open to the outside air and it's gonna be transmitting. The person most likely purchased the miner, a power supply, and then connected them together without bothering to purchase a case to install both items. So you have a naked PCB without shielding connected to a power supply. Yup, it's gonna be giving off radio emissions.
I used to have 6 of these S5's. It didn't interfere with my smartphone even at point blank.
Btw S5's aren't remotely profitable at the moment so no big loss there.
OEM vendors have to, and small computer dealers building their own are supposed to.
However, each individual component has FCC certification and due to the FCC kit rules, so long as the end-user assembled it, and it doesn't cause harmful interference, it AFAIK falls under the 'up to 5 identical device' personal guidelines which allow you to build up to 5 identical electronics devices *NOT INTENDED FOR RESALE* and use them so long as they cause no harmful interference without the device being FCC certified.
Since computers are normally required to have their cases open during FCC certification, the individual components are generally well shielded enough to make personal assembly not cause interference with outside sources, and when combined with a properly grounded case effectively reduce that below background noise.
The above is also why most small computer manufacturers have you buy the parts individually and then charge you an assembly fee instead of giving you a flat price for the system itself. It allows them to avoid FCC sanctions/recalls since they were only hired to assemble the device and did not 'manufacture' it themselves. Hackaday or Adafruit or some other places discussed this a few years back.
That's the real story. FCC actually paying attention to it's own rules.
Now if only we can get them to do something about 7.200Mhz.....
Yea.. The "man" died who started that AM broadcasting mess down there before they could extract their fines from him. Took them almost 20 years to actually pull his ticket and get him off the air, even after his making a name doing daily broadcasts... Shesh...
The FCC doesn't have the manpower to fix what ails 7.200Mhz at this point so I guess they are choosing to wait for all the geezers like me to die and vacate the frequencies so they can auction them off for some coin.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
If that complaint came from anywhere other than a hugely deep pocket, it'd have gone no where.
If a consumer complained about TMobile affecting his TV.... He'd die of natural causes before TMobile was made to fix it.
Just put an ethernet to fiber adapter inside the newly installed faraday cage and run some SMF/MMF through the case into an identical fiber adapter.
Gigabit media converters are only 100-200 bucks now, a pair, if you buy them from china/amazon. And fiber would eliminate interference possibly caused by it. Now if the power lines are radiating, that sounds like a PSU whose caps have failed, although I have never seen hardware continue running reliably in that situation. Maybe with one of those 1kw-2.3kw Chinese mining PSUs it is possible though.
Can't he just build a Faraday cage or something around his rig to alter his RF transmissions?