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Comment by elric | Hacker News Reader

I strongly suspect those would be very illegal and could result in serious side effects, such as for people who use continuous glucose monitors.

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I am a volunteer coach in a rec soccer league for 6th graders. Bluetooth jamming could literally kill one of my diabetic (type 1) players during a game because of this scenario.

That sounds like a serious flaw in his hardware.

Even this highly theoretical harm can be avoided if you jam bluetooth with 50% duty cycle. Like, 2s on then 2s off.

Clearly you don’t have a family member who uses CGM’s. They are extremely sensitive to RF disruptions, and often fail for mind bogglingly dumb reasons.

2s on / 2s off would completely disable all of their functionality until the interference was gone. And possibly much longer - they are finicky.

So they are sensitive to RF but for some reason all the RF around you, from the power lines in the walls, the WIFI, the towers, they are immune to those?

This is such a first world problem. The speakers the post refers to are probably in a third world country where no medical equipment uses Bluetooth so jamming it poses no danger.

The reason why they don't use Bluetooth is because, they don't exist at all. People either die first before receiving the device, or the condition that requires it is rare in that part of the world

surely there's a failsafe if they're that sensitive and finicky.

Counting my lucky stars I don't need one, but if I did, I don't think I'd rely on it if it's that incapable of staying up.

Bluetooth operates in an unlicensed band. If any medical device relies on any unlicensed band for any life-critical thing that is horrible design.

I would absolutely support consequences to any device manufacturer if a death is caused by a jamming of unlicensed frequencies. (In my opinion, medical devices should be able to keep you alive in any jamming scenario if feasible. But using licensed bands is just bare minimum.)

How is additional paperwork supposed to help? Jamming is already illegal and usage of ISM bands is quite strictly regulated.

> How is additional paperwork supposed to help?

Additional paperwork reduces the likelihood (in actual, observable practice) that unintentional interferers exist to impact your critical-to-life application.

Furthermore, by moving your critical-to-life application away from common frequencies of interest, you avoid being collateral damage to jammers targeting unrelated applications.

Oh wow but a GPS jammer is okay so someone could get lost and possibly killed, or even crash a plane?

i’m delighted to report that it’s actually possible for people to talk about a second, related topic in a comment section without invalidating the problems of the main post being commented on

Many people do not understand this concept!

Who said a GPS jammer is okay? They are highly illegal in the US and the FCC will hand out large fines when they find one. GPS jammers are cheap though and so it is unlikely the FCC will catch the majority of users.

Though most GPS jamming is by countries at war. Russia has a large GPS jamming operation around Ukraine, and this often affects GPS in other parts of Europe as well. I have no information, but I would be surprised if Iran wasn't also jamming GPS (off and on depending on the current state of their war). You can safely assume every military in the world has some GPS jammers that they have plans to use if it makes sense to them.

> Who said a GPS jammer is okay? They are highly illegal in the US and the FCC will hand out large fines when they find one. GPS jammers are cheap though and so it is unlikely the FCC will catch the majority of users.

FCC will hand out fines if they can find the owners. Reading through the comments here about the hardware size and capabilities nowadays for pretty much off-the-shelf solutions, it is not a far fetched thought that an adversary can plant thousands of jammers in dense urban environments and then turn them on whenever they want to. Imagine what a blanket jamming can do in NYC airspace.

I think that quite often it has more to do with making sure the missiles and drones can't easily hit their targets. Not that this is an excuse for jackasses doing it just for shits and giggles. Fuck those people.

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