Steve Jobs To Tawkon: “No Interest” In Your Phone Radiation Measurement App | Hacker News Reader

Steve Jobs To Tawkon: “No Interest” In Your Phone Radiation Measurement App

techcrunch.com

25 pointsskbohra12319 comments

To clear up the ambiguity in the title: this is an app that measures that amount of radiation from your phone specifically, not ambient radiation in the environment.

By what mechanism does it measure radiation? Or does it just say, in fine print, "In our lab tests, using the phone in the way you're using it now produced between 10 and 15 microjibbits of RADIATION"?

Yeah that's what it looks like on their website (http://tawkon.com/technology). I also like how in the screenshot on TC, there's a little warning at the bottom telling you hold your phone further away from your body. Give me a break. Of course Apple isn't going to allow this app.

This is really... a publicity stunt. I mean if your teacher tells you not to do something, do you go to the schoolmaster and expect to get approval? Worth a try, but they shouldn't be surprised that Jobs was in "no interest"

And as others have pointed out, "We are hoping the required API's will be added to the iPhone SDK" - was more than just asking approval for an app, it requires changes in the SDK!

Jobs should've replied "give me a break!"

According to the recent xkcd radiation graph there should be no radiation coming from the phone whatsoever, unless you are using a banana phone. What gives?

Maybe the app developer would be better off using the phone's camera to detect nearby bananas.

Phones don't emit ionizing radiation. They do however emit non-ionizing radiation.

Can anybody explain what this means? There was a segment on This American Life a while back about how nobody's looking into the effects of cell phone radiation on the body anymore, and that the reason isn't scientific but political, and maybe we're in lots of danger from long-term use but we don't know, etc. I didn't know what to make of it.

What is non-ionizing radiation, and what grounds are there for thinking it's not dangerous?

Non-ionizing radiation is radiation that isn't energetic enough to separate electrons from atoms (thereby creating ions).

The radiation from a cell phone is microwave radiation, which (as you probably know) is capable of heating matter. As far as I am aware, the conjectured nature of the possible danger from cell phones is that localized heating in the brain could result in increased likelihood of cancer. So the natural questions are (a) are cell phones capable of causing a non-negligible amount of brain heating and (b) is any such heating actually carcinogenic. This is not an issue I follow particularly closely so I don't know what the current state of knowledge is with regard to either of those two questions.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=ionizing+radiation+vs+non-ionizing+radi...

The first link from the EPA has a really great opening that summarizes it nicely:

> Radiation that has enough energy to move atoms in a molecule around or cause them to vibrate, but not enough to remove electrons, is referred to as "non-ionizing radiation." Examples of this kind of radiation are sound waves, visible light, and microwaves.

> Radiation that falls within the ionizing radiation" range has enough energy to remove tightly bound electrons from atoms, thus creating ions. This is the type of radiation that people usually think of as 'radiation.' We take advantage of its properties to generate electric power, to kill cancer cells, and in many manufacturing processes.

This doesn't explain exactly why scientists don't think it's dangerous, but because non-ionizing radiation doesn't cause changes in molecular structure, the effects would be far more subtle.

The tldr of it is, I believe, that non-ionizing radiation can't modify your molecules, e.g. it won't give you cancer.

That doesn't mean it's not potentially dangerous - a bright enough light will blind you, and you can microwave yourself to death if you had an oven big enough to crawl into.

But basically, if you're not afraid of your stove-top (which generates non-ionizing radiation in the near-infrared, and sometimes visible red light) your probably shouldn't worry about your phone.

Ionizing radiation is radiation that has enough energy to knock electrons off atoms to create ions. This can cause all sorts of damage to DNA etc. Radiation with less energy is unable to affect the structure of matter in this way, and is therefore considered not as harmful/carcinogenic. If you look at chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, http://xkcd.com/273/ , everything from Ultraviolet upwards is generally considered 'ionizing'

"We are hoping the required API's will be added to the iPhone SDK"

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but doesn't this line make it sound like they rely on private API's, which Apple hasn't allowed for a while?

That's what it sounds like to me as well. Having spent a bunch of time with the WiFi and related networking APIs (WiFinder, back when private API usage was l33t3!), all of the functions I recall that let you get any information about the overall system functionality were private.

Maybe I should make an app that measures electrosmog. I could just wire some fancy UI to random() and then I don't even need to use private APIs!

Interesting. So personal appeals to Steve Jobs don't result in apps getting approved? That's news.

Flagged.

Ambiguous about the app but I am always surprised that people are not allowed to run the software they want on their own hardware.

Apparently Apple owns your very device and will tell you what's good for you or not for the rest of it's life. And then more surprised so many people willingly accept that and keep giving Apple more money.

You're allowed to jailbreak it and put it on there, no sweat.

You're not allowed to put applications that abuse API's that weren't meant to be used by them, in the app store, which is part of the Apple brand and, righteously so, Apple has some level of quality control for.

One of the rules they make apps abide by is, don't abuse private API's. These are API's that are not (yet) ready for use by outside developers. Abusing them could leak important private data, may crash the application or the iphone when used improperly or aren't meant to be forwards compatible (meaning they'll change in the future and everything built on it is broken).

It's arrogant and foolish of Tawkon to build an application on API's that are known to be private and off-limits, and then expect Apple to change the rules just for them.

You can run anything you want to on your hardware - you just have to jailbreak it first. It's more of a matter of not running the software you want on Apple's software.

I hear I can't run .exe files on OS X, either - the tragedy!

And like you pointed out, it's a choice that people make for a variety of reasons. I made it because at the time, the iPhone was the best mobile platform available, and not being able to measure the radiation that came out of it wasn't a critical need.

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