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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

If only they could do the same thing for airports (e.g. LAX) where they don't explicitly block your signals, but they also don't allow any cell towers to be built in the area...

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I'm convinced that LAPD has a few Stingrays set up at LAX - my phone shows full service but the connection is terrible and I always lose about 30% of my battery life between touch down and getting in a car.

Phone bars typically just measure signal strength. You can show full service but have a poor connection because there's a lot of noise or because the tower is overloaded.

Maybe you can confirm this if you live in LA? That would be a cool catch.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/12/31/snoopsnit...

Well, airports charge carriers a lot of money to have a cell site at the airport.

Roaming customers are very, very profitable and devices will frequently connect to the first, strongest signal they see.

>> devices will frequently connect to the first, strongest signal they see

That is worrisome, someone could build a portable station to hijack people's phones, do some phishing then move on to another location.

That's the entire basis of Stingray devices.

You literally just described the Stingray devices. It is very worrisome.

Not only could you do that, but government officials and others have been doing it for a long time.

most structures like that will have repeaters in the building for each vendor. they are common in many buildings which have site line issues to include basement level boosting

To add insult to injury, they usually give me free WiFi. The bastards.

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