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Comment by istingray | Hacker News Reader

"I can’t imagine a Joe Blow citizen having that equipment to be used for anything other than malicious intent"

Can tech savvy folks here talk about legitimate uses for having such a device?

The key issue is that any use case that sounds legitimate is still not really legitimate because, as a rule, it's illegal to operate a transmitter without a specific license and in almost every case the condition of that license is that you won't interfere with others.

The difference asserted in that quotes is essentially between "willful malicious illegal activity" and "negligent illegal activity", there's no reasonable possibility that it would have been a legitimate use - as far as I understand, simply importing that particular device would already be illegal - there is an exemption in the rules (https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=a230935ff03941152f...) for "Three or fewer radio frequency devices are being imported for the individual's personal use" but that only applies to specific categories of devices and would not apply to that jammer.

If I were trying to develop a jamming detector or jam-resistant device perhaps I’d order that device. But I wouldn’t turn it on in the middle of a suburb.

"What does a cosmetology school just outside Dallas need with a 5W adjustable cell phone jammer? Blissful quiet in the classrooms, apparently."

https://news.hitb.org/content/texas-beauty-schools-cell-phon...

Something for a future YC startup to pursue?

Blocking exam cheaters

It's illegal to jam signals but it's not illegal to make your classrooms Faraday cages. Some relatively cheap metal mesh put up behind the drywall would be somewhat more expensive but would solve the problem.

That's... actually a fairly decent use case for a signal jammer.

It really isn't. Cheating with cell phones is the same as cheating with a note card except the quality of information.

They aren't less or more detectable than other forms of cheating so there's no need to specifically target phones. Teachers just need to continue doing what they've been doing for decades, looking for cheaters.

Signal jammers are meant to stop the kind of blatant cheating where you take a picture of the problems, send it to a hired test taker on the outside, and receive the answers. (A Google glass like device would be especially powerful at this.)

Not surprisingly if you only use your phone as a digital cheat sheet then an online one isn’t that much better than an offline one.

When they busted a large cheating ring here in Sweden for the national aptitude test the setup involved miniature receivers and transmitters, a central location giving information to all the test sites, and countermeasures to anti-cheat. The cheating was a multi-million operation and the several people involved got multiple years in prison.

One could say that the quality of information is one qualifying difference, also the scale and effectiveness. They were less detectable, and also designed and tested to avoid detection in ways that note cards are not.

> It really isn't. Cheating with cell phones is the same as cheating with a note card except the quality of information.

It really is. Most cheaters aren't going to assume that their phone is going to be blocked and store things locally.

Please do realize that most cheaters are pretty stupid.

However, that still doesn't make a jammer a good idea.

You're missing the point.

People still have to covertly read a small rectangle for the answers to the questions. That's what teachers were looking for before and that's what they're looking for now.

I may be a bit out of touch with all these new fangled things like people working on neural implants, but back in my day dealing with cell phones during exams (and other school activity) involved either a permanent removal of the offending device and/or an instant fail of the test.

You can cheat on an exam without a signal. But people in the area of exam rooms still should be able to call emergency services if they need to.

But if you still really want to block cell signals in your exam room, just hold exams in the basement of a well built building with a lot of metal in it.

As one of the comments above supposes, this may have been a misguided person thinking they'd be shielding themselves from 5g -- protecting themselves from cancer that might be caused by 5g. Obviously the jammer would hurt them more, if energy at those frequencies does hurt humans (60W is a lot to put into a 5g jamming!).

Such an intent would not be malicious.

Another possible use might be to try to dissuade neighbors and phone companies from using 5g in the area. This would mean taking one for the team for a while until they give up. Except they wouldn't give up -- they would go find the jammer and get them arrested.

I can't think of a legitimate use for a 5g jammer.

yes but it could just be mounted somewhere too then it would be about good detective work and people skills but wven then. it can be triangulated to a degree by its radius.

If someone's quadcopter keeps hanging around your windows at night, this would be a good way to knock it out of the sky.

I wonder how effective simply piping the output of one of these cheapo jammers to a Yagi would be at disabling or simply "return to home" area denial-ing drones.

I will admit that I fantasize about having a signal jammer every time someone on a phone nearly crushes me on my bike.

Burglary ?

1a rights

Please say more!

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