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Comment by dguido | Hacker News Reader

This kind of stuff has been around since 2005: http://difrwear.com/

If you want to turn off your cellphone... turn off your cellphone. It has an off switch and airplane mode. This kind of protective casing is really only needed for the type of things you can't turn "off" like all the RFID chips embedded in credits card you own (and probably don't even realize you have).

Also, this is pretty lol: "Mr. Harvey said that he could not afford to hire an outside firm to extensively test the effectiveness of his products, but that he tested them himself with most of the popular smartphones and major wireless carriers." If you haven't tested it, I doubt it works at all. http://difrwear.com/pages/certifications

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Unless you take the battery out how do you know your phone is ever off. It doesn't just have hardware toggle button probably. So you'd have to take the battery out. Well then isn't it easier to put it in a Faraday cage than mess with the battery.

And how exactly do you plan to use your phone?

As soon as you take it out it can transmit everything it captured while in there.

This thing is useless for a cell phone.

It isn't going to be able to record without a battery...

If you take out the battery why are you using this pouch?

Again, this pouch is useless.

It prevents a straight forward tracking and forces anyone wishing to track you using a cellphone to throw a lot more resources at you than before. Inside the case it doesn't get any simple tracking info, the only thing it really gets would be physical orientation (gyroscope, accelerometer, and compass) and audio.

In order to turn the first into tracking the phone has to either do the inertial tracking itself (possible but computationally expensive and it diverges pretty quickly unless there have been some major improvements).

The second requires some luck involving an identifiable sound marker some where in the recording then the processing power to cross reference everything.

It's a mistake to confuse imperfect with useless.

It's useless.

Just turn the phone off. Or really just the GPS off since that's the only thing this thing blocks.

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