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Comment by MR4D | Hacker News Reader

If you read the article (you should - it's a good one and well written), then you should also read the comments.

My favorite nugget from the comments:

  "I hope you’re keeping that mug in an opaque Faraday cage, well grounded."

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I know it's a joke but: Mugs have a tendency to be put in microwaves, making them a dangerous place for electronics.

If you find yourself receiving a questionable mug, time for a glass of warm milk.

Microwave ovens are not that horrible against bipolar transistors. They are completely lethal for MOS-FETs, but one can make electronics that survive it.

Do you have more information on how to do that?

Making things resilient against a kilowatt of non-ionizing microwave radiation seems challenging, in my experience it will burn the traces right off the PCB. A different game from the more common radiation-hardening where the concern is low power ionizing radiation.

Embedding your conductive trails into a large non-conductive material helps, as does putting unrelated trails apart, and making them at the right size. Completely surrounding them with a ground plane helps too, but I have no idea how to include an antenna.

Make your faraday enclosure the antenna (better have some heavy duty protection on the tx/rx circuitry though).

That tx/rx interface is the real problem. But if you enclose things with the right material, you can turn everything into a large varistor and even MOS-FETs will survive.

Surely the listening device was just installed in the house by the delivery person.

Or while he was on vacation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

Not realistic here but it has been done

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