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Comment by post_break | Hacker News Reader

The cost on this is incredible. The amount of destruction you could do with a handful of those. Rig them up on timers in various parts of a city. Crazy.

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The military have ones which can be dropped from air and are much more powerful.

How long do their batteries hold out? (I'm assuming batteries because "dropped from the air".) If they're "much" more powerful (than the quoted 3-4W) then I'd have some serious doubts that they're useful for much more than a short period of time. That said, I can think of operational scenarios where denying your enemy/target radio/GSM access for even an hour might be useful. Still interested to know the operating time, though...

I don't know the details and they are probably classified anyway. I know about the jammers from a person I worked with as a CS student. This was a project on improving frequency assignment algorithms in battlefield radio networks. We (the university) did the algorithms and they (military) did the reality checks on why a theoretically good assignment doesn't work in reality.

The military has phased array radar on airplanes that can wipe out communications over a gigantic swath of spectrum.

For sure. Although i think most people with enough radio knowledge to even go down this path also know how trivial it is to track down the source of interference, even for an amateur with cost-next-to-nothing gear.

In this case the device was operating for months (blocking emergency frequencies?!?!) before they bothered to look for the source. Something on a timer would be much harder to discover due to the intermittent nature.

> In the last week, it had gotten worse with residents reporting disruptions to Wi-Fi, satellite and cell phone service.

I read that to be “They only started looking for it once it started pissing people off”.

Trip a bunch of these in a city during Superbowl. Whoo boy.

There was a story a couple of days/weeks ago on here (sorry I can't find the link) where someone had been phishing their way into iCloud accounts and downloading all the photos from them. Despite making absolutely 0 effort to cover their tracks (not even a VPN),this went on for a very long time before they were caught.

Just because the knowledge is there and there's a paper trail doesn't mean anyone will _actually_ put the pieces together

Keeping them moving would be cheap and trivial - mount them on a bus or truck or something.

This made me think of the movie, “Pump up the Volume,” where Christian Slater has a pirate radio station and at one point he moves all his gear into a moving van to avoid detection.

The Netherlands had pirate radio stations located at sea : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Veronica

The UK had loads of these at one point, but the really enduring one is Radio Caroline. They were broadcasting from international waters right up until the early '90s when the British government gave itself extraterritorial powers over foreign-flagged ships in international waters (!) in order to forcibly close down offshore broadcasters.

Radio Caroline are still around though, they've actually done pretty well recently with fundraisers. Their old pirate ship is still used for broadcasting but these days instead of using the old valve transmitters aboard they use 4G to relay their signal to (ironically enough) an old BBC World Service site which is then broadcast on 648 kHz with a much more modern unit. They've just been licensed to turn up the power considerably too so they'll be receivable in much more of the UK and northern Europe than they are currently soon.

It's kind of interesting to see new AM stations popping up in what's otherwise a dying band. I've always thought it's a bit short-sighted to get rid of AM because in a real national "shit hits the fan" scenario where power and networking are heavily affected it's an efficient way to reach lots of people. You can even build an AM demodulator out of a razor blade and a pencil if you're in proper trouble! I expect by the end of the decade the only things left on AM will be enthusiasts like Radio Caroline and hobbyist pirates (there's quite a few of these in the Netherlands and Greece).

New Zealand had a Radio Hauraki, also pirates at sea.

https://nzhistory.govt.nz/page/radio-hauraki-rules-waves%3A-...

I enjoyed this one on the same subject:

https://www.metacritic.com/movie/pirate-radio

Great soundtrack BTW.

there was a story a while back about someone being caught with a signal jammer in his van, because he was sick of people being on the phone while driving

Surely this would cause things to be worse as everyone in proximity to this van would start looking down at their phones to figure out why they stopped working

yeah this was pointed out when this was first posted as well. I thought it was on here, but maybe it was reddit.

I think this is the story: https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/man-put-cell-phone-jamme...

And when that van is in an accident, people can't call 911 or other emergency numbers anymore.

I hope the van driver received a prize. He certainly has my admiration.

I mean, I remember even years ago you could buy a GSM/3G jammer from dealexpress and the like for about $50. I assumed it's the staple of any car thief to kill the tracking signals(although "proper" trackers use rather difficult to jam VHF not GSM)

I can’t imagine you wouldn’t instantly appear in some list just by ordering these.

Why would a random Chinese retailer keep such a list or even coordinate with western authorities?

What makes you think it's Chinese to begin with?

Or wouldn't they take extra 10% cut from CIA for sharing the data?

Why wouldn't they? They have no stake in this. They'll do whatever let's them keep operating. "Sure I sold 40 units to <name> at <address> last week. Would you like his credit card number too?"

>>They'll do whatever let's them keep operating.

But that's the point - western authorities can't do anything to shut them down and Chinese ones don't care either. Sending a list of buyers is effort and takes time....so why bother?

I mean obviously we're just speculating, I just mean that a random Chinese website would have no reason to respond to such a request from say an American authority(and it's probably unlikely that anyone would ask, seeing as in a lot of places just owning such a device is not illegal, using it is)

You'd be delusional to think that largest Chinese retailer has no foreign agent employees working there. Just like at any point time there's probably an Russian, Chinese and some other agent working at Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, MS, etc...

>>largest Chinese retailer

I specifically said dealextreme which isn't anywhere near being a "largest retailer". Also with Alibaba you can just message the seller directly. So I don't see how having foreign agents working at a place like Alibaba would help in the slightest.

Either way, like I said, I would be surprised if any agency was spending any effort tracking this, the devices themselves are often legal to own and the cases of abuses seem rare.

They may not respond to polite requests or threats but I expect they respond to US dollars.

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