We're Jammin', Hope You Like Jammin' Too

theodp writes "Slate ponders whether a climate where anything can be photographed or surreptitiously recorded means the once-esoteric world of cell-phone jamming will become mainstream. Sites now offer portable cell-phone jammers that can provide you with the same kind of security bubbles used to thwart industrial spies, hostage-takers and bomb detonators. While actively jamming a cell-phone signal is illegal in the US, a distributor reports most of his sales go to US customers, including universities which use the technology to stop students from diddling away on phones during lectures."

Jammer locator...

[ericspinder]

so you can leave it out on a restaurant table and no one will know you're the source of the blissful silence in the room

Great so now not only will I need to be sure that I only go to (or even pass through) places which don't jam, but I have to worry about random people as well. I suspect next they'll sell, jammer tracking locators, so that I can find out which jerk thought blocking me from my responsabilities was within their rights. I can only imagine what that type of fight will be called... maybe Jamming Rage?

I think

[RedHatLinux]

any technology that allows for people to protect their privacy within reason should be allowed and accepted.

Yes!

[Feztaa]

Cell phone jamming should be legalized, and it should become more widespread.

I'd specifically like to see cell-phones jammed in movie theaters, and schools. I'm pretty good about shutting my phone off when I go to these places, but sometimes I forget, and sometimes when I forget, I get calls... it'd be a whole lot easier if the building disabled the phone for me, so I don't have to.

Stupid.

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Try jamming local storage.

CF and Memory Stick expansion is beginning to be commonplace in these camera phones. Jamming delays transmission from "100% Live", but does little else.

You want to shoot X-Rays strong enough to wipe Flash Mem? Be my guest!

Legal Jamming

[pvt_medic]

While it is clearly illegal to jam the signal their is nothing against constructing buildings that jams the signal by just the nature of how the radio signal travels through the building.

HEre an article [wirelessnewsfactor.com]on home to legal jam cell phones.

Re:Yes!

[agentZ]

But what if somebody is expecting a call about a life-threatening situation? I don't begrudge any emergency room doctor from seeing a movie, but I want their phone to ring if they're needed back at the hospital to put me back together.

Re:Tempting.

[Kierthos]

Fine then... let's insure that all cell phones, from now on, will automatically go into "vibrate" mode instead of ring tone when in certain areas, like movie theaters, classrooms, etc.

Call it "courtesy technology" instead of a jamming field.

Kierthos

Re:Signal Jamming?

[mellonhead]

One company, Iceberg Systems, is beta-testing a new technology that will remotely turn off the cameras in cell phones.

Re:Yes!

[Brandon30X]

The solution for this is something I remeber reading about some time ago. The solution was to have bluetooth transmitters near the entrance that would command your phone to go into a silent mode, and then return to normal when leaving. Personally I would love to see this develope, but I am sure people will resist. Nobody wants their phone to be controlled by someone else.

Cellphones are the Anti-Christ, Cameras in Class

[BigBlockMopar]

What? Wouldn't blocking the cell phone signal only prevent the person from sending the picture off? The photograph could still be taken and simply sent later, once the cell phone is away from the jamming signal, right?

This is true. But I don't think that's the primary application of cellphone jammers.

Yeah, well, Beethoven's Fifth, being played through a crappy 2" piezoelectric disk speaker as the ringtone on some Nokia in a movie theater. That's the best reason for jamming that I can come up with. (Why custom ring tones? Don't people know those things sound as stupid as coffee can mufflers on Honda Civics?)

I have had cellphones with work, and was glad to get rid of them when I did. I have no interest in being on an electronic leash, forced to be accountable to someone - somewhere. Or standing in the line-up at Wal*Mart, the ring and promptly following, "Hey, it's me. Whatcha doing? Wanna come over?" (Who is "me"? If I slept with this person, it must not have been very memorable.)

In short, I *hate* cellphones.

Quoting from article: including universities which use the technology to stop students from diddling away on phones during lectures.

Hey, if the student diddles quietly, it's his funeral when his GPA drops and he gets kicked out of school.

Cellphones with integrated digital cameras might have their place, though. I know a university student whose math professor puts excellent and comprehensive notes on the blackboard. So he started to bring a digital camera and a small tripod to class, and takes pictures of each blackboard full of material. He sent me a sample a while ago. [glowingplate.com] An integrated camera/phone would never run out of available internal memory. Personally, copying the notes down would help me remember the material, but whatever works for him... there's a certain style of practical problem solving skill at work there: he's a second-year engineering student; I think I'll have to hire him when he's done. :)

Re:good

[JoeBaldwin]

cheating during exams I think are perfectly fine uses of cell-phone jammers and should be illegal

In the UK, all the major exam boards will drop you from every subject you do with that board if you so much as walk into an exam room with a mobile phone. THis is one of the few decent things AQA and Edexcel have ever done, ever (Jesus christ, they make Standard Oil look like Greenpeace).

mixed bag to be sure

[The Tyro]

My first thought when reading this was one of glee... I'd LOVE to jam those dolts that insist on yakking on their cell phones during the movie.

Also, where I work (critical care area of the hospital), cell phones are explicitly forbidden, so this might be useful to keep in my lab coat pocket ("What? your cell phone just cut out? Hmmm... must be interference from our cardiac monitors") Yes, I'm sure their conversation is critically important, but accurate telemetry from my unstable cardiac patients interests me far more than somebody telling their friends which bar they'll be patronizing when they get discharged from my ER. You wouldn't even believe how torqued (even violent) some people can get if you ask them to turn off their phone... it's not like you're telling them to STFU; you're just asking them to take their conversation outside. I have no problem with someone communicating with their family to apprise them of a patient's condition... but we have land-lines for that, folks; you just have to walk ten feet...

Now if they had one that only blocked outgoing calls...

private property

[Doc Ruby]

The space inside a private building is private property, and the owner/controller can put anything in it they want that is lawful to possess, including noisy radio waves in a given band at low power. However, my phone is private property, and no one may interfere with it within the physical boundaries of its case. They can jam the waves from my antenna in their air, but they can't send "off" commands inside the phone. So they might claim some kind of "performance" rights, and perhaps copyrights, on the appearance of objects inside, but they can't materially prevent me from snapping a picture and taking it outside, without violating my property rights. The professional photographer and art communities have been fighting that one out [nearbycafe.com]; perhaps we can take a lesson from them, or perhaps their commercial rights to the appearance of their property conflicts too much with the traditional reality where beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Silent use of a cell phone - Web browers and SMS

[RoundSparrow]

I'm sure I'm not the only IT person who has to turn on a cell phone in movie theater. In my case, I can check and respond to a situation with WAP or more modern browser. Who says you need to make noise?

I own my business... I'm on call 24x7 but work 50 hours a week (sometimes more, sometimes less).

I love the freedom of being able to go into a movie and only having to read a couple text messages. I keep my phone on my lap, try not to create any light pollution.

For all those who think jamming is cool - why not just force people to use silent text messaging or web browsing?

I mean a silent pager with vibrate worked for me in the 1980's? Is it these stupid new kids who don't think that are causing all of us to suffer?

Re:Yes!

[praedor]

Not a backpedal, just an adjustment based on what I decided was a valid concern: a DOCTOR or similar needed to be able to receive messages. This can be done without screwing others around him/her. This can be done by even allowing candyassed rude polesmokers that constantly and pointlessly use their cell phones anywhere and everywhere without regards to how rude and obnoxious it is.

Even such idiots can still receive their precious inane phone calls...they just can't take them in certain areas. They can look at their beeper (there precious cell phone) and decide if it is important enough to warrant leaving the theater or their table and actually return the call. No problem. Doctors and other people with valid reason to NEED to receive calls still do while others who are just fools, idiots, and dorks, get to receive their messages too - they just can't be complete fools, idiots, and dorks by taking the call and blathering on and on right there and then. Better for eveyone.

Signal locator would probably be more effective

[rwa2]

Jamming is a solution, but simply being able to locate and reprimand people with cell phones would probably be better in the long run.

First of all, it's a sociological solution. If people know they can be detected, they would simply concentrate on following the "no cellphone" rule, rather than trying to be discreet or circumventing jamming mechanism (which would lead to a jamming/anti-jamming escalation).

The detector wouldn't have to be so complex (though it would certainly be tres cool to have a tricorder-like 3D spectrum analyzer). It could be as simple as a wand hooked up to an amplified speaker :P . With a little more work, you could probably tune them to the 2Ghz cell phone frequencies to increase their range and do some triangulation to cover a larger room, and put it on a public display so everyone could see who was violating the no cell phone rule, or forgot to turn them off, etc.

Re:Cellphones are the Anti-Christ, Cameras in Clas

[raju1kabir]

I will use my psychic mind reading powers to say that you must be atleast 35.

How come every generation of old people feels the need to criticize every new technology that comes around by mis-characterizing it?

Sorry, I'm not 35 and I'm another cell phone hater.

Are the devices inherently evil? Of course not. However, in the vast majority of people who have them, they encourage behavior that ranges from irritating to extremely annoying to downright dangerous.

I know any number of otherwise nice people who will answer these things (or at least reflexively check the screen) in the middle of face-to-face conversations, which is the height of rudeness. Some of these people do it enough that I really don't enjoy hanging around them anymore. For one of them it's even caused problems with her marriage - her husband can't stand it either and she doesn't seem to be able to kick the habit.

On trains, the racket of cellphones ringing and getting yacked into has destroyed what was once a restful way to travel. Other public spaces have suffered as well. People who are able to maintain normal volume levels when talking with the person next to them are for some reason unable to resist screaming their stupid inane shit into the little plastic box. In fact, I think one of the upsetting things about cell phones is that by raising the volume level of conversations I'm exposed to, it's correspondingly raised my awareness of what morons most people are. I'd like to think it's just that the same people who choose to have cellphones are also subintelligent twits, but depressingly I've seen no particular basis for that.

And, of course, almost every time I look into the window of a car after it's executed some brain-dead maneuver on the city streets (last-minute unsignalled turns, cutting other drivers off, almost mowing down pedestrians in crosswalks, etc.), the driver has a phone stuck to his/her ear.

If the price came down to about $100 I'd happily buy a jammer and carry it always.

Context sensitive cellphones

[Tech]

The problem with jamming cellphones is that a jamming device is non-selective and renders the entire phone useless, even when it is not necessary. For example, in a movie theatre all you want is to disable the voice services and alert tones, but there is no reason to disable text/SMS reception and sending, if individuals want to do that. In fact jamming the cellphone signal can be counterproductive. GSM phones will up their transmit power if they can't get decent reception, in effect reducing battery time and *increasing* the possibility of interference with nearby electronic equipment. In an environment with sensitive electronic equipment, jamming is the last thing you want.

What I would like to see is some way of providing context information to a cellphone, so that the cellphone can decide for itself what would be appropriate behaviour. A movie theatre, for example, might have a small [bluetooth] transmitter that tells all nearby phones that they are in a theatre, and the phones automatically switch off voice services and ring tones. In a hospital context the phone might switch its transmitter off automatically, but still allow the owner to look at the onboard phonebook. A library context might switch off the ring tone and switch on the vibrating alert.

This is obviously something that would have to be supported by the manufacturer. I hope they are reading.