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Comment by Forgeties79 | Hacker News Reader

I don’t want someone to walk around, I don’t know, forcing all the phones around them in a 10m radius to blow up their batteries and hurt people.

Handheld radios, like my wireless tx/rx for lavaliers have to have their spectrums cleared by the FCC. As do most transmitting devices. There are baseline requirements before they can be sold/used.

I get often with these things if you give an inch they take a mile, but there have to be some foundational guardrails here IMO. You can’t just have a bunch of laws punishing people for behavior and no attempts at preventing it in the first place.

The ability to just transmit anything indiscriminately is just a dicey proposition to me. Like how we used to just allow a free for all with drones.

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Can you show an example of a phone blowing up its battery with the potential to hurt people because of a harmful radio signal?

This seems like something the phone should be able to handle. People already have root access on devices with radio transmitters, they're called laptops. I don't recall many incidents of a malicious actor with a laptop forcing all the laptops around them to blow up and hurt their owners. If that were a reasonable possibility then they certainly wouldn't be allowed on planes.

Maybe I’m misunderstanding but the prior comment seemed to say “people should be able to transmit whatever they want, however they want, with whatever device they want.”

I imagine it’s not insanely difficult to get a phone to crank up voltage or something until the battery starts melting down. Maybe I’m letting sci-fi/thrillers pollute my sense of reality though

My point is that transmitting whatever you want doesn't mean the devices around you will "blow up", devices also have controls on how they receive radio transmissions.

A malicious transmitter could likely jam signals, but this is already illegal and that comment said "If they break the law, that's another question"

Your hypothetical doesn't make sense. People can already hack around with radios and transmit whatever they want, doing so doesn't result in devices around them blowing up or hurting people.

Malicious transmitters are illegal. There is liability for the person operating the malicious transmitter along with the sale, marketing, and manufacturing of the transmitter.

If the maker of a phone allowed a user to break the law by having the phone become a malicious transmitter and the phone maker didn't try everything in their capacity to prevent it, they'd be in trouble too.

Yes, you can hack your own. You can get a CB radio and boost its power by replacing parts of it. That's on you. If you were able to get a phone from a company that knowingly allowed you to install some software or do this "one silly trick" that allowed the phone to broadcast at 10x the power, you'd be in trouble - but so would the company that made the phone.

Sure, but we already have consumer devices with root access that have radio transmitters. Is this a common problem with laptops? Why would it be a larger problem with smartphones?

The amount of integration between the system and the wifi modem, the frequencies that it can broadcast on, and the regulations for that part of the spectrum.

You'd be quite challenged to make your wifi modem connect to an access point a few miles away. Phones do it all the time. A phone may be broadcasting with as low as a milliwatt when near a transmitter to a few watts when further away ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_device_radiation_and_... ). Wifi has a much smaller range of acceptable broadcast power available (and at the most powerful end of acceptable is less than a phone).

Fair enough. I think I’m not following the thread well here. I’m also probably too tired after a very early start day lol

That's called a weapon (EMP discharge), and there's quite a lot of people in the US that are ready to defend even such devices. There's even a Constitutional article about it IIRC.

If you’re going to respond like that then don’t bother responding.

Why not? As we get pushed more into a corner on this obviously self evident logic chain. Many of us WILL NOT EVER comply with this absurd oppressive tyrannical control of computing and communication and information. We might as well embrace the same non arguments of the over the top second amendment people.

It's literally the silly meme. You will take my gun/GNU from my cold dead hands lol

If you're going to use the "ooh freedom is scary and dangerous" card then I'm allowed to play the "some freedoms are necessary to maintain a free society" card. If that was not your argument, feel free to clarify your position rather than dodge the question.

How would arbitrary radio signals blow up a battery?

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