Mast fire probe amid 5G coronavirus claims | Hacker News Reader

Mast fire probe amid 5G coronavirus claims

bbc.com

33 pointsfrereubu70 comments

There are tons of gullible people out there. Twitter for instance is rife with accounts that spread this nonsense around as though it is gospel. Social media has been weaponized to get people to distrust anything they see or read online, alternatively to believe nonsense to the point that the real news starts to feel like nonsense too.

This is the flip side of the coin, universal access to information and universal capability to generate information is a power that comes with a lot of responsibility and so far we are failing at that.

Similar things are happening here on HN, there are accounts whose sole purpose it seems to be to derail any normal conversation or to bait others in to crossing the rules so they can be eliminated resulting in a lower signal:noise ratio.

It's up to all of us to call this nonsense out and to relentlessly aim to stop it from spreading because at some level this is a fight with consequences reaching much further than just out little fora and comment sections of blogs. It is a war for mindshare of bogus ideas vs ideas with a basis in fact, the final prize is the votes of the gullible and to paralyze societies to be able to respond to crisis, man made or natural.

The funny thing is that as soon as you go down that rabbit hole far enough the conspiracy theories end up being peddled by the ones who are actually conspiring. See for instance pizzagate.

On this topic though I think we have to be huge grateful to HN, its community, and its moderators, who keep it - in my opinion - one of the least ridden with unsubstantiated nonsense sources on the net.

Yes, but it is a constant battle.

So xkcd 386 but with global consequences?

I'm not a big fan of xkcd. It is used as a thinking persons' reaction gif around here and usually carries about as much substance. That you'd refer to it 'by number' already presupposed everybody has seen them so frequently you need say no more than that.

As such it is part of the problem, not part of any solution that I'm aware of.

I do actually happen to agree with your general position of needing to fight disinformation, but I don’t know through what effective means. The xkcd position is the old usenet “don’t feed the trolls” defence. When the trolls are nation-state actors, is ignoring them still the best we can do? Remembering that one objective of the trolls/psyops-trolls is to divert resources and attention from more important issues.

Don't feed the trolls has been superceded by the trolls feeding themselves. So they no longer need you or me to feed them, they're more than happy to set up opposing sides so that they can keep their fake debate alive.

Ignoring them is probably no longer an option, but it would take more than just a small effort to put this down. To think that we haven't even dealt with spam effectively makes me super skeptical about whether or not this problem can be contained without simply cutting off entire countries from the net.

Even that might not be enough, enough of these troll fires have been started now that they will continue to burn long after the firestarters have moved on or pushed out. And that's before we get into Western political parties doing this sort of thing to each other. Fox News for instance is worse than anything 'Pravda' would have dared to come out with in the good old days, but there is this huge campaign going trying to equate it to the right side of the street's version of CNN, ditto with the attacks on the credibility of the BBC (which makes mistakes, but is not a dark side operator) and so on.

The one pattern that I have noticed is that when it comes to reporting the news about a particular country it is usually best to get your information from anywhere except the news organizations in the country itself and to filter out anything that has Murdoch's dirty little fingers near it.

Unfortunately I think the problem we need to solve is not technical, and it doesn’t reduce to “source A can be trusted, source B cannot”. Feels like the answer is to increase the critical thinking abilities of the population at large, and it feels we’re about 10,000 years into that project.

I think we're actually going in the other direction, and that we were only maybe 300 years or so into that project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

Even the news outlets themselves are the ones spreading fear and non-substantiated claims. Just look into BBC's reporting of Molly Russell and how they use words like "Instagram helped kill my daughter", in quotes, to try and add substance to their piece.

They are willing to lay the blame squarely at Instagram's foot and yet offer no critical analysis of how her dad or teachers or society may have failed to help her - she may have tried reaching out, or showed signs of distress, but that's just glossed over because fuck instagram, they clearly have all the blame.

And that's a very dangerous narrative that people soak up - no critical thought, no attempt to try and offer thoughtful analysis whatsoever.

Those of us wise enough can see through their ploy, the agenda's they push, the propaganda they peddle. Just look into the BBC during the last election and you'll soon understand that disinformation, or out of context reporting is everywhere. Videos, quotes, images and basically all speech is being manipulated, to lure an unsuspecting reader into believing what they're ingesting, and has happened since civilization began.

YOU, as a human being, need to analyze and think about what you believe; are masks "ineffective" during this pandemic? News sources will tell you yes, others with experience will tell you no.

Stop relying on bots and algorithms to try and fill your world view, they're geared to feed you what you want to believe.

> Stop relying on bots and algorithms to try and fill your world view, they're geared to feed you what you want to believe.

That's super good advice and it would be actionable too if only we knew who are the bots and what the algorithms do. But presence/absence of the filter bubble need not be disclosed, bots are plentiful but masquerade as regular accounts and plenty of bots are meatware or the gullible themselves spreading the mental malware like any other infection.

The mainstream media here in the UK have also been misleading people into thinking sites like Facebook are to blame for a measles vaccination crisis they themselves created. About two decades ago the entire British press repeated bogus claims by a certain Dr Wakefield that caused a massive dip in MMR vaccinations, and now that gap in vaccinations is in danger of creating a measles epidemic. Sites like the BBC blamed this on antivaxxer communities on Facebook, quoting childhood vaccination statistics out of context to make it sound like there'd been a massive dip recently when in reality the percentage of kids getting their MMR vaccines in the UK had hit an all-time record high in 2017 and barely dropped since.

Was it obvious at the time that Wakefield‘s claims were bogus, or did that come out after the initial media panic? I don’t blame non-scientist reporters from believing an apparently-credible study, but I would blame them if they continued to push the debunked position after consensus had debunked it. Clearly the current Facebook groups have no such excuse.

The full extent of Wakefield's abuses didn't come out until later but it was clear at the time that the research did not support Wakefield's claims. Even if you ignored the methodology and simply accept the study's results, what it found was that the measles virus was present in the guts of 12 children with autism. This does not support the conclusion that autism is caused by the MMR vaccine (nor that the single vaccine Wakefield was promoting would be better). And indeed is too small scale to suggest much of anything except perhaps more research. At the press conference Wakefield was the only researcher suggesting MMR should be stopped.

The Private Eye and the Daily Mail were the ones to take the story and run with it. Turning it into a political "Wakefield vs. The Establishment" fight, rather than a scientific one.

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/ official site of European External Action Service that tracks and responds Russian Federation’s ongoing disinformation campaigns.

It's just amazing how much of all disinformation you can be tracked back to Russian sources. Russian disinformation is not trying to create consistent counter-narrative to the West. They just throw out stuff wildly to sow confusion, doubt and distrust. You can see people in HN who have been caught into this net of disinformation and start parroting same narrative.

Throwing coronavirus disinfo at the wall to see what sticks https://euvsdisinfo.eu/throwing-coronavirus-disinfo-at-the-w...

Yes, it is a barrage of trash, where they even support opposing viewpoints just to derail any normal conversation about a subject. You'll see one wave of accounts support the 'USA engineered this as a weapon' and another that 'China engineered this as a weapon', then using that fake controversy to rule out the middle ground or third option (that nobody engineered it) and instead try to polarize the discussion by only allowing either the one or the other viewpoint. Madness.

The internet grew up very fast, faster than we are able to cope with the degree to which it has been weaponized, and that of course in itself would be a nice conspiracy.

Of course, if I were a conspiracy nut I'd question your credentials, wonder why after 7 years on this site you haven't bothered to flesh out your profile or to state where you are from. Anonymity is part of the problem here. It is good because it allows for people to come forward with important information, but it is also bad because it allows operators to mask their location and identity which would be a strong indicator into whether or not they have some kind of agenda.

For instance, the site you linked to focuses exclusively on Russian disinformation but might be fine with Chinese or American disinformation, its ownership is not declared and is hidden behind all kinds of layers of obfuscation. For all you know it is the exact thing it pretends to fight against, just another arm of the disinformation machine.

>its ownership is not declared and is hidden behind all kinds of layers of obfuscation

This is another form of unnecessary doubt that comes out from laziness from your part and jumping into conclusions.

The ownership of the site is clearly declared in the About section and I mentioned it. EU East Stratcom Task Force part of The European External Action Service (EEAS). EEAS is the diplomatic service and combined foreign and defence ministry of the European Union (EU). https://eeas.europa.eu/

So it says. But: no address, no official contact, no link to any official EU offices and so on. If this is an EU official effort they are doing a piss-poor job of making their credentials public. Note the "official website of the EU" at the top of every official EU website notice and that that one does not have that banner.

"All official European Union website addresses are in the europa.eu domain."

I could set up a website within the .eu domain easily enough and link it to all kinds of EU official sites to give it a semblance of officialdom. Add a couple of flag banners and before you know it you're in business.

Interesting reading on that site here: https://euobserver.com/opinion/141458

The lack of transparency is rather interesting.

I also note you side stepped the other part of my comment.

> no address, no official contact, no link to any official EU offices and so on

Maybe you should read more carefully and not just skim in hurry. All the above is false.

>I also note you side stepped the other part of my comment.

Because I largely agree with it. No need to comment.

I read very carefully. I'm sure that the site is legit, I am just pointing out that they do a piss poor job of documenting that, are not transparent about their methods, criteria, associates and so on and do not have an official location or any oversight body or review process associated with them (as they ought to have). This makes them part of the problem, not part of the solution, it is essentially a blacklist without a transparent process for adding or removing entries which makes it very useful to achieve the opposite of what it purports to stand for.

If the EU is going to do something like this it should be done properly, not in a half-assed and shady way like this because they are lowering the bar for what an official approach to a problem like this should be.

You made also incorrect factual claims. Not just claims about them doing qualitatively poor job.

Did I now? Such as?

"no address, no official contact, no link to any official EU offices and so on"

Is absolutely 100% supported by the evidence: the website you linked to.

Their official contact is not any address that follows the EU address format, there is no street address, the official EU domain is not used, there is no link to any entity that could be contacted regarding the functioning of that website as is normal for anything EU related.

They are as close to a rogue entity as I've seen that is sponsored by the EU to date, and this is exactly how it should not be done, especially for an entity that is effectively able to censor news agencies, a very dangerous and responsible job.

I'm not going to debate with you anymore. I just copy paste this address I copy pasted from the 'Contact us' page:

    EEAS
    Rond-point Robert Schuman 9, 1046 Bruxelles, Belgia

> I'm not going to debate with you anymore.

That's fine.

> I just copy paste this address I copy pasted from the 'Contact us' page:

> EEAS > Rond-point Robert Schuman 9, 1046 Bruxelles, Belgia

Which does not show for me on that contact page, neither does it on the 'about' page. A 'view source' does not contain that information either. So I'm not sure where you got it off that page but I can't find it.

I'd expect a regular format EU contact page, with the address in normal text, which this website does not follow.

Conditioning people to accept EU official information from websites that do not follow the EU house-style, live on different domains and in general disavows being "an official EU position" is simply wrong.

Open the https://euvsdisinfo.eu/contact-us/ page without noscript/adblock, there's a google map embedded. Couldn't see it at first as well.

Thank you, for figuring that one out. An official EU website that requires you to disable your adblocker in order to figure out their address, that's a first. One more bit of proof to me that this website is administered outside of the normal EU website property regime (as if the domain name wasn't proof enough).

Maybe clicky the search box on the official EU website?

https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/se...

See this news article: https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/32...

Yes, I know. The point is - in case it isn't abundantly clear yet - that that website does not itself follow the EU official format: an europa.eu web address, no address for the office it is run out of, the normal banner at the top, transparency in who runs the office, what its mandate is, what process is being used to place entities on the list, what appeals process there is and so on. It is as shady as it gets within the EU.

Note that they totally undermine everything they do by stating "Not official EU position".

If this is the best we can do against disinformation we're fucked, besides the fact that it only focuses on Russia whereas China and the United States are also quite active in this respect.

I wonder what the Russians are hoping to achieve apart from annoying everyone?

It does not matter. Propaganda is a nice way to get money from the state. It is easy to show immediate results and blaming external factors is always possible when asked about long-term effects.

To make it harder to get people to vote on real information, in turn making it easier for candidates they support to get moved into positions of power. See for instance Thierry Baudet in NL, who is clearly favoring Russia in the same way that Donald Trump does in the United States.

Introducing chaos and disrupting the internal cohesion of their adversaries:

> Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".[9]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Ah that explains quite a lot thanks.

It's a counter propaganda effort against pro-Kremlin propaganda, which is still propaganda in itself, no matter how factual and analytical. An honest anti propaganda effort at minimum would not label undesired propaganda as "disinformation" and would focus on all propaganda in the media to provide a baseline for comparison. I don't see this ever happening though, political systems on the West rely on propaganda just as much as Russia, and something like that could only weaken the power they have, while pushing counter propaganda couldn't, so they just do that.

> Russian disinformation is not trying to create consistent counter-narrative to the West. They just throw out stuff wildly to sow confusion, doubt and distrust.

Adam Curtis covers this in his 2016 HyperNormalisation in "A World Without Power":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HyperNormalisation

It's about 2h22m into the doc. Do a search for "political technologists" for more articles.

I used to be somehow in the middle regarding "is X dangerous" discussions because while probably generally not an issue for large majority people, there is probably a small .% of people who are legitimately oversensitive to various stuff (like, say, some people are allergic to certain foods). And it sucks to be the ignored "edge case" person and not be able to do anything about it (think any time your bug report was rejected).

However I came across this thread that made me realize, many people come up with claims out of thin air (perhaps not even being malicious, just doing fake correlations etc.):

https://twitter.com/sTeamTraen/status/1245814828079427585

> an anecode that was told to me when I visited the operations centre of a large French mobile phone operator a few years ago.

(after installation of new tower)

> everyone who can see the tower, calls the mayor and says they have headaches

> the mayor demands to know what we're going to do to make the headaches stop.

> And we say, well, we haven't switched the mast on yet.

I had a house up for sale for a long time. One day a man and his wife from Amsterdam came to view it. They brought with them a little box. The lady was allergic to 'radiation', and the box would tell her if this house was the one or not. She walked to-and-fro with the box pointing it all all kinds of bits mumbling to herself, and then walked out into the garden. After two hours of this she came back to us and said that it was all very nice but it wouldn't do, just too much radiation.

I asked her if I could look at the box. It was a field-strength meter with a built in amplifier hooked up to a variety of possible antennae, an open dipole and a small loop. She didn't understand the first thing about electromagnetic waves (polarization, for instance). The thing was set to its most sensitive setting amplifying the crap out of any background noise and picked up all kinds of interesting sources, one of which was the sun, essentially turning it into a complex detector for something you didn't need a field-strength meter for in the first place: to tell you where our life giving star is in the sky.

I pointed this out to her and she went to sit in the car in a huff while her husband hung around for a bit. Apparently they'd been seeing 100's of houses and none of them ever were good enough.

Meanwhile, they lived in Amsterdam, right opposite of the microwave support tower next to RAI, a spot so bad that whenever I would pass it my cellphone would spontaneously reboot because of the strength of the electrical field.

I never knew if she was serious or whether she imagined the whole thing or was just looking for a way to get some quality time with her husband. But I highly doubt she ever found a house that was good enough short of a mountain cave.

But that house, about 300 meters away from the German border was about as isolated from anything radiation related you're going to find in Western Europe and if she wasn't making it up then for the life of me I do not understand what mechanism would underpin that sort of sensitivity.

I had an “electrosensitive” housemate at university - no phones allowed, and she’d go around unplugging everything, even taking the batteries out of wall clocks - and would microwave herself a meal twice daily, nose pressed to the glass of the door. She wouldn’t be told that the microwave was a much greater emitter of EM radiation than anything else around her - said the frequency was in tune with the human body, which was why it made such nutritious food, and was why she liked to be close to it while it ran for its “positive energy”.

We don’t keep in touch.

Missed opportunity, I never thought of asking her if she had a microwave oven. Apparently their whole apartment had been covered in copper mesh, but they still had a regular electrical system and were looking at the kitchen appliances as well so I assumed they wanted to keep those.

Every time this whole conspiracy theory comes up in my circles, I ponder on the means by which it might be true, even though it (probably) isn't.

<tinfoil> Perhaps there are microwave frequencies which are conducive to agitating bacterial/microbial/viral activity - I could imagine a scenario, though I have no idea of the science/math involved, where the structures of the targeted vector are 'assisted' by remote stimulation.

Like, you can give flagellum a little 'kick' in the thrashing-around frequencies, which make it more violent against cell-wall structures, and so on.

Think, magnetohydrodynamics at pico scale.

Were such a thing feasible, I'm quite sure DARPA discovered it decades ago. That's what its for, right?

Either way, there is a way to approach this subject which doesn't encourage hand-waving and woohoo thinking, but I'm not capable of it. I'm sure there are ways that microwaves can be applied against biological targets that we, the non-scanning-electron-microscope-using general public, probably don't quite get, just yet, has been weaponised ..

</tinfoil>

It's just energy, which can - like any other electromagnetic energy source - be harvested by the right resonant mechanism. The chances of a particular frequency band at such low field-strengths having an impact on a structure not expressly designed for it is super small. It would be like the evolutionary equivalent of finding a 'u-beam[1]' ready receiver in something made in the 1920's.

[1] The fraudulent wireless ultrasound charging company.

> every time (conspiracy) comes up I ponder on the means by which it might be true

Wrong. [1]

Try to falsify.

"Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, whereby the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than something that can be proved or disproved." [0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability

That is exactly the key. They are plugged into the belief systems of the gullible. Religions also do this, and to some extent our past history of belief has set us up to avoid skeptical thinking at all costs.

Also wrong.

Religious belief is disjoint from scientific discovery. [2]

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faith_and_rationality

Wikipedia pages make for poor arguments. Also [2]?

What website hosts the best arguments?

And since an argument is always hosted on some kind of computer (be it a webpage in a server or your brain), can you answer if a computer can explain itself? [42]

> What website hosts the best arguments?

It is not an argument at all. It can be evidence to support an argument but it is not an argument by itself.

> And since an argument is always hosted on some kind of computer (be it a webpage in a server or your brain), can you answer if a computer can explain itself? [42]

I don't think that has any bearing on the subject at hand, nor does it make any sense when taken seriously.

You claimed that

> religions plug into the belief systems of the gullible

And

> our history set us up to avoid skeptical thinking at all costs

If I understand correctly

The second claim is paradoxical.

For the first, I argue that religions are not an entity outside us (preying on "the gullible") but inside our minds as a running process to make sense of our experience (as active skepticism). Just a well as the scientific method. However metaphysics answers different questions than science. I'm no authority on if either can be definitive.

... with thought as computational process, my question can perhaps make a little more sense. And only meant for pondering on the topic.

Sure there are scientific ways to go about things. But the idea that there is 'safe thought' and 'dangerous thought' is just plain batshit lunacy. A lot of amazing stuff we take for granted today started off with "hmm.. I wonder if <x> is possible somehow" ..

Nobody is being paid to conjecture "what if there were a way to do it.." unless, they actually are.

> But the idea that there is 'safe thought' and 'dangerous thought' is just plain batshit lunacy.

No one said that...

And it would be clearly false: It can be dangerous to be wrong, such as thinking that drinking concentrated bleach will somehow cure you from a disease. Or, you know, destroying infrastructure based on unsubstantiated fears.

It is inevitable that in such an atmosphere unlikely targets are picked as scapegoats. If it stops at 5G antennas I guess we can consider ourselves fortunate.

Also a bunch of young people forced sitting at home

In my (unfortunately much greater than I would like) experience of people engaged with 5G conspiracies, they are not generally young.

You’re right, but even these older people are not the ones who would be starting fires. They are usually the ones motivating the younger ones.

There is also a group of politicians who are not too proud to promote these conspiracies as a way to rally their base.

> these older people are not the ones who would be starting fires

Are you basing this off of something other than conjecture?

Yes. Older people who would do that usually are already a part of some sort of organised crime ring.

Younger however have a higher tendency of working for the idea (just the same way as younger people tend to work for startups).

Or are you go tell me that younger people are statistically wiser than older ones?

Another smaller HN discussion on a related article from yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22778815

RT.com has run a story calling these 5G coronavirus links "baseless conspiracy theories" [0]. In another story they say the same thing, and talk about "expert scientific studies repeatedly concluding that the high-speed communications system does not pose a threat to humans" [-1].

This is interesting because RT.com in 2018 and 2019 was one of the major source of baseless anti-5G health stories. Examples:

• 5G Wireless: A Dangerous 'Experiment on Humanity' [1]

• Could 5G put more kids at risk for cancer? [2]

• How To Survive Dangers of 5G [3]

• Cancer risk? 5G wireless speeds could be dangerous [4]

• ‘Totally insane’: Telecomm Industry ignores 5G dangers [5]

RT.com videos on YouTube average over 1 million viewers per day, which is higher than any actual news outlet, and their claims are then repeated by many blogs and social media sites and other websites and then others pick it up from there, often losing the attribution to RT.com along the way so [6].

I wonder what caused RT.com's apparent flip on 5G?

[-1] https://www.rt.com/sport/484967-coronavirus-5g-amir-khan/

[0] https://www.rt.com/uk/484877-5g-coronavirus-conspiracies-moc...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_f9gpg4t6c

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpXEyP0WMrk

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aO1gZhwqCvI

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmLwuM0_MJg

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML7wx_5n2z8

[6] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/science/5g-phone-safety-h...

I'm surprised there's enough flammable material on a mast to set it on fire. Antenna radomes and wire insulation maybe?

Lots of foam inside HF coax, outer mantle will burn, paint will burn, electronics will burn very nicely and the are a lot of plastics that would sustain a fire. Nasty stuff coming off that too when burning (dioxins).

Surprised they don't put all that in some sort of conduit though.

How is anyone supposed to read the text on this page on a mobile device when the ads above the current scroll location keep loading and unloading with random heights that suddenly shift all the text on the page up and down by a large amount every few seconds?

Firefox + uBlock Origin?

https://www.mozilla.org

https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/

This pandemic is certainly providing lots of opportunity for behavioral and social studies.

this is the way I'm looking at it, someone please correct me if I don't grasp the situation.

definitions:

• "ionising radiation" broadly refers to particles (alpha/beta particles; cosmic rays) and EM radiation types that are sufficiently energetic to directly or indirectly (respectively) displace electrons in the atomic structure of matter they pass through. there is no single definition of what counts as ionising radiation when it comes to human cells. it's normally said to be around 10eV – 30eV, but we'll come up with a catch-all definition for argument's sake later. we want to avoid ionisation of DNA, white blood cells, that sort of thing.

• f = v / λ (Hz)

• c = 3 × 10⁸ (m/s)

• h = 6.62607015 × 10⁻³⁴ (J⋅s)

• E = hf = hc/λ (eV)

___________

premises:

• EM rays of high frequency have proportionately high photon energy

• ionisation by EM radiation requires higher photon energy

• the lowest threshold for ionisation of an atom of any element is caesium, at 3.9eV (low end ultraviolet)

• the lowest energy EM radiation that can affect, damage or ionise bare DNA in a vaccuum will be greater than 3.9eV (or 3900meV) [1][2][3]

• the highest frequency officially proposed for 5G to date is 86 GHz (λ ≈ 3.5 × 10⁻³m) [4]

• an 86GHz microwave would have photon energy of 3.6×10⁻⁴eV (or 0.36meV)

  (8.6 × 10⁻¹⁰) × (6.62607004 × 10⁻³⁴) ≈ 5.7 × 10⁻²³J ≈ 0.00036eV

• 0.36meV is a lot less energy than 3900meV

___________

conclusion:

EM radiation in proposed 5G range is unable to ionise — and very unlikely to cause any damage to — organic molecules like DNA in a vacuum, without even contemplating absorption/attenuation or the fact that the vast majority of 5G is going to be even lower freq than 86 GHz.

this is just ionisation we're talking about here, i.e. the shredding of your cells by penetrative, energetic radiation. 5G will not be used at anywhere near the kind of wattage as your microwave oven puts out. even if you put yourself in a microwave, yes you get cooked but this is because you absorb the EM radiation and it induces kinetic energy in you, as it would a bowl of porridge. similarly, if you sit yourself in front of a radar you'll probably feel pretty damn hot as well.

___________

I've seen some crazy people yelling about how 5G is almost the same frequency as crowd-dispersal microwave weapons use — but again, this weaponised form is a focused BEAM. if you use enough visible light you can cook yourself as well. incidentally, even with 5G masts all over the place (and they will be because it has a shorter effective range than 4G LTE) you won't be subjected to anywhere near the wattage a microwave oven or a military radar put out.

if low energy EM waves damage DNA, your immune system, or cause anything related to cancer, it is not by any known physical mechanism [5]

interestingly enough, I caught this on wikipedia:

  An international appeal to the European Union made on 
  September 13, 2017 garnered over 180 signatures from
  scientists representing 35 countries. They cite unproven 
  concerns over the 10 to 20 billion connections to the 5G
  network and the subsequent increase in RF-EMF exposure 
  affecting the global populace constantly. The appeal 
  also references the International Agency for Research on
  Cancer's (IARC) conclusion in 2011 that frequencies 
  30 kHz – 300 GHz are possibly carcinogenic in humans.

this seems like something that will blow up in paranoid people's minds, and will make purveyors of fake news lick their lips, but consider that the entry on the list cited is

"radiofrequency electromagnetic fields such as, but not limited to, those associated with wireless phones"

so not just 5G at all, but also your granddad's radio, your 3G burner phone, your bluetooth headphones, your kid's remote-controlled car, your drone, etc.

the spectacular list of "possibly carcinogenic things" in question [6] includes aloe vera and the occupation of carpentry/joinery. hey, maybe electromagnetic radiation causes cancer — but then again, so does interacting with pretty much everything else on the planet!

also haven't we been using mm-λ waves in radars for ~50 years now? not seen any super mutants yet.

_______________

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC20415/

[2]: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Folkard,%20M.,%...

[3]: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~atdgroup/publications/Prise,%20K.M.,%...

[4]: https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0021/97023/5...

[5]: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/r...

[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IARC_Group_2B_Agents_-...

> "ionising radiation" broadly refers to particles (alpha/beta particles; cosmic rays) and EM radiation types that are sufficiently energetic to directly or indirectly (respectively) displace electrons in the atomic structure of matter they pass through

"Detach" would be better than "displace" there.

Thanks! You're right, displace was definitely the wrong word. Unfortunately can't edit now.

If that's all I'm wrong about, I'm happy.

What's the story with 5G mast torching? Is it entirely in paranoid territory (eg. 5G causing infections) or is it based on a rational cause (5G causing health issues due to density, or that ubiquitous 5G critically helps mass surveillance due to low-cost, always-on receivers)?

> rational cause

> 5G causing health issues due to density

There's no link between health problems and 5G networks at this time. The UK has actually tested radiation levels in the field https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51613580

Reply on news.ycombinator.com