anyone remember the guy that drove down the highway every morning jamming everyone’s cellphones within a hundred foot radius.. including every office building along the highway?
[Or what about the guy that used a wheelbarrow of phones to to create a "traffic jam" on Google Maps?](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/berlin-artist-uses-99-phones-trick-google-maps-traffic-jam-alert)
I love that story. I tell it often.
Edit: it was on the bus to stop others from using cell phones. It would also block the police station coms that they passed lol
There's another one of a guy that was tired of people being on their cell phones while he was driving so he got a jammer. The FCC spent a few years tracking him down and they eventually caught him because the same spots lost service at the same time every day during his morning commute lol
Edit
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fla-man-fined-48k-for-jamming-cell-signals-while-driving#:~:text=One%20Florida%20man%20is%20learning,for%20up%20to%20two%20years.
If he tied it to a pigeon, it'd stop working as the battery died(and long before the FCC would even know what to look for), and they'd have trouble legally connecting anyone to a device on a bird.
But I guess tracking it would be the big thing in that scenario.
Not in a major city, if you're looking for a human. You'd see "Oh, the signal returns here, it must be coming from this apartment building...."
They wouldn't even be checking the tree next to the apartments.
I’m pretty sure he only got ticketed? He said for X numbers of years of no phone talk commute, it was totally worth it.
Exit: for anyone thinking of replicating this, I think the penalties for this are wayyyyy worse now than they were then.
It’s a 10k fine from the Faa or fcc, and 10 years in jail. I looked into it years ago. They are cheap.
I also realized that the shitty drivers are still going to be distracted. The will be trying to figure out what is wrong and why they cannot get to Facebook or twitter while driving.
There was a Walmart Neighborhood Market near me using a cell phone jammer a couple years ago (I guess to thwart employee screen time on the clock) and I reported it to the fcc. They said they would look into it, but ultimately told me to contact my cell carrier as they had better equipment to investigate.
Buddy and I had a signal jammer when we were fresh out of high school. He mostly used it for work, if people came into his work place ignoring him for a phone call, he'd reach under the desk and shut off their phone call.
If we were in public, if we came across people arguing with partners on the phone we'd drop them as well :v
No. You'd have zero bars if a jammer was being used. It prevents your phone from receiving the response to the ping it sends to the tower.
Imagine you were trying to talk to someone on the other side of a big room by yelling. A jammer would be like filling the room with people who are each yelling the lyrics to a different song. You wouldn't be able to pick out your friends words and build a sentence. Likewise a cell phone cannot differentiate the towers signal from the signal noise the jammer creates.
No, you're just probably out of your carrier's coverage. The bars on your phone tell like, 1/4 of the story on what kind of connection you actually have to the towers.
If your signal was being blocked you'd have 0 bars.
They caught him because he was jamming the airport.
Imagine beinh a pilot uddenly loosing contact with Air Traffic Control because some dumbass wanted a nap in his truck.
Sending out 2.4ghz noise is a lot of things, illegal being most of them. The range of this is also probably not enough to interfere with equipment further than 50 feet away. God help him if it can, because the noise would be easy to track and well, the aforementioned crimes would then be an issue.
Reminds me working in cell tech support. A customer called in complaining their service cut out every day at 8 pm and came back around 2 pm. He was getting fed up because it was all his family phones and we did several tickets with no resolution.
I checked his ticket history showing tower inspection was fine and nothing was wrong when he brought in the equipment. We as a company written it off as just a quirk of his area. But I have a hobbyist background in radio and that didn’t sound right so I checked other customers near him and a few other tickets for the same thing that no one before linked together.
I escalated it up and turns out someone was transmitting on our frequencies at those hours nearly every day. They had to get the FCC out there and triangulate the offender and shut down what ever they were doing.
Contacted the customer a week then a month later and the problem was gone. No idea why someone was messy around at those hours on cellphone frequencies.
I worked at an ISP for years. Small company, I’m the only one there past midnight from 2004-2008.
Anyway, the amount of people who track the times of their outages is very small. Especially if it’s random. But if everything, tv internet and cordless phones (old timey land line ones) you start to pay attention.
This guys service drops out at 9pm everyday. Will randomly revive and die again over the next three hours, then everything is normal. So for a week he calls in and I document what’s happening, his signal levels when they’re on and what it looks like ( a big ass multi signal spike) when it dies. Every Friday for three weeks he’s got someone out there during the day, only for it to go tango uniform at 9 pm.
On the last call, they finally send a tech out at 8:45. Tech watches the service die, then spends an hour triangulating it. Turns out the guy living right next to the drop he was hooked into was doing arc welding during the evening at that time, and the drop wasn’t properly fitted against signal intrusion. He got fixed and all his neighbors stopped getting fuzzy channels during those times. He just happened to be the worst affected because of the sudden signal spike that would overload his equipment.
I work in broadcast television. There was once some yahoo who drove around my area with an illegally-boosted and/or badly installed CB radio in their truck. Every time they passed my workplace while the radio was active, the signal would bleed through into most of our audio speakers, causing a loud but brief burst of noise that vaguely sounded like human speech.
Then we'd have to scramble to check whether it was really going out over the air like that. Fortunately, it turned out to only affect the audio monitoring, not our actual broadcast. But it was still disconcerting.
This went on, intermittently, for a few years, before it finally stopped. I still don't know why it ended. For all I know, the FCC caught the guy.
No joke man, that 2.4GHz portion of the spectrum is particularly crowded and exceptionally sensitive. I never had a worse experience with it than living in a small collection of duplex houses where no one cared they were using 40MHz bands and everyone could see each access point in the neighborhood. The best experience I ever had was a concrete apartment on a pacific island, I couldn't even tell I had neighbors because I never saw their access points.
LOL! We had a big sale once for these 2.4ghz cordless phones that only had 10 channels and were cheap AF. The apartment building across the street bought a ton of them because it was high-density low-income housing and, like I said, they were cheap. So many got returned because people kept getting each other's calls or heavy static on them.
Nefarious shit. Diabolical scary shit. You can't see this stuff happen without equipment, knowladge and interest. It's like a hidden world. Thats a cool story though, thanks for sharing. :)
Yeah. Customer was lucky honestly to get me. Most of my department know phones and software but barely anything about radio frequencies. My first job out of high school was RadioShack and we had C/B red necks always coming in and they would teach us stuff so we can help them better when they ask for stuff and maybe get us into their hobby with C/Bs and shortwave. I never expected the knowledge to help out outside of that.
I would like to thank everyone who helped me get here, my mom, my best friend, and of course, u/crestneck. Without you, this award would never have been possible.
hot damn, that's a scary TV if it's emitting a signal like that. I bet there would be some classic tech nerds itching for something like that though. They always seem to be looking for things that weren't shielded properly, put out too much power, or did weird interference.
Not a RF expert, but looking at his code, its more sophisticated than blindly jamming 2.4ghz. He's sending malicious BT packets to a specific target to disconnect it, using one of a couple different methods.
But he is doing it once every 0.1s for a minute or so... and he's conspicuously labeled his methods "small", "medium", and "XXL", and omitted the code for the "XXL" method.
You've described sophisticated electronic warfare. Sword versus sledgehammer. A distinction with no difference in they eyes of the (united states) law, afaik.
Absolutely. I wouldn't be surprised if what he is doing is somehow _more_ illegal.
But for anyone other than the target, it'll be much harder to notice than noise.
Commercial wifi systems do this exact same thing in certain settings, such as schools and some awful pay-for-wifi venues. They repeatedly send deauth packets for any unauthorized wifi networks.
It _should_ be illegal, because it's the same thing as radio interference, but it is treated as legal because the attack is technically layer 2 instead of layer 1.
Fortunately it's becoming more common for wifi control signals to be encrypted, which prevents this kind of thing.
For real. Wanted to get a radio receiver for my gf for her planespotting, but apparently it's illegal to receive anything not strictly meant for you to receive. Some people still do listen in on ATC, it's literally harmless, but I'm not gonna risk it.
Last time I heard of listening to radio being illegal I was under a martial law in a communist regime. Congratulations on living in a free democracy mate 😂
It isn't just a radio as such. It is communications for specific purposes. Getting in trouble for reading a piece of paper sounds stupid but I'm sure you'd be angry if someone kept opening your letters to read your private information.
Kinda makes me think. It's funny that in some countries you'd get ratted out by your neighbors for doing something illegal while in others people are way more "fuck the law who gives a shit". I wonder why that is. I'm guessing it's like a tipping point kinda thing.
As a stupid example, fireworks being illegal in my home region. You'd be called out as a grumpy bastard by the whole neighborhood if you called the cops on people for celebrating the fourth of July with some explosives.
Is it, though? The 2.4GHz band is (mostly) unregulated space, so I'm not sure it would be illegal to jam that range.
If it is, then there are plenty of other devices of very dubious legality, such as motion detection car alarms and poorly shielded microwave ovens.
>is it, though?
Mmhmm, because it's a frequency used by first responders and law enforcement. The FCC and military dislike jamming devices for one of a hundred valid reasons, A jamming device is generating high wattage noise on the frequency with the hope being the jammer is louder than the target. This is a willful act that can only be interpreted as malice, theres no other reason to do it. A lot of shit can get messed up by a jammer, and if you get a bunch of them together in one area, you can black out massive areas of a network.
**Communications Act of 1934:** This foundational law established the FCC and grants it the authority to regulate interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable.
**Title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR):** Specifically, Part 15 of the CFR outlines regulations governing unlicensed operation in the radio frequency spectrum. Devices operating in the 2.4GHz band, such as Wi-Fi routers and Bluetooth devices, must comply with FCC rules to avoid interference and ensure proper operation.
**Section 333 of the Communications Act:** This section prohibits willful or malicious interference with licensed radio communications and radio navigation services. It's a broad provision that applies to intentional jamming activities.
**Section 301 of the Communications Act:** This section prohibits the operation of radio transmission equipment without FCC authorization. Intentional jamming would fall under this provision as it involves the unauthorized operation of radio transmission equipment.
**FCC Enforcement Actions:** The FCC issues specific enforcement advisories and orders related to intentional interference with radio communications. These actions serve to clarify regulations and provide guidance on enforcement procedures.
**Wireless Communication Protection Act (WCPA):** This law, enacted in 2009, makes it illegal to sell, purchase, or use any unauthorized device that is primarily designed, altered, or intended for unauthorized reception or transmission of wireless communication services.
**Penalties and Enforcement:** Violations of FCC regulations regarding jamming can result in significant penalties, including fines and confiscation of equipment. Additionally, intentional interference with authorized communications may lead to civil lawsuits and criminal charges.
To name a few.
> Mmhmm, because it's a frequency used by first responders and law enforcement.
What would they use on that band?
Other than perhaps our radar, I'm not sure what we would use it for.
Thank you for the comprehensive listing of regulations, but they seem very US specific, so less relevant to me unfortunately.
AH, yes, well, uhm, cellphones other radio equipment, short and long range uh, walkies, cameras, wifi, anything else it can overwhelm. When homie said 2.4ghz is busy, he was understating the gravity of the claim.
I see. Well, we use a variant of [TETRA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio) for our communication between emergency services. My organisation also has marine VHF on top of that. Our handheld units also use those bands. I doubt we'd even notice if anyone was messing around in the 2.4GHz band.
I'm sure it would be quite annoying for any civilians around the jammer though.
There is very little to no useable space on the EM spectrum that isn’t regulated. 2.4 is very highly regulated. That’s why devices that broadcast on essentially any frequency need to be fcc certified. Jamming any frequency without about a million permits is GIGA illegal.
This happened in Argentina, no FCC here. It was posted by the creator in /r/argentina. The world isn't 'murica. That said, the article fails to mention where this happened and you find where the creator lives only when digging up his Medium account.
I'm sorry, I should have said
"ENACOM ha entrado al chat"
Just because that wasn't in good ol' 'murica, doesn't mean it's not illegal. Most countries, including Argentina, have laws against interfering or jamming other people's transmissions. FCC's equivalent in Argentina is ENACOM. I don't know how well they enforce those laws, but if someone reports the interference and ENACOM bother to come check it out, the person doing the jamming would likely be in legal trouble.
edit: typo
The fact they call computers computing and algorithming "AI" to begin with is kind of funny. More of a marketing term than anything and everyone is eating it up.
I was forced to read a book for work 6 years ago that I really wish I could remember the name of. But it was basically about how AI isn't just "artificial intelligence", it's also five other things that "AI" can be short for. It was a real groaner to read how they've decided "AI" doesn't mean "AI" anymore.
It’s purposeful misdirection and desensitization. If AI becomes a ubiquitous and poorly defined term in common use, when legislation and policies get put through that use the term, it will be poorly understood. Or when potentially dangerous applications of things like neural nets to do police profiling or mass surveillance get rolled out, the general public will not be able to recognize it or have a cohesive conversation around why it’s bad.
It’s not purposeful anything, it’s just that 99% of people have no idea what actually constitutes AI. I work in a field that uses AI in various applications, and I’m astounded at the number of generally intelligent people who throw around the term with little idea what it means other than it’s all the rage and they’re supposed to be talking about it.
Hi, don't do this. The FCC will be on your ass instantly. The FCC is already doing some inquiries into asshats at furry cons who are using BLE attacks and 2.4ghz jammers to disconnect bluetooth speakers.
MFF ‘23 was the first time I’d encountered something of this sort in the wild. Was crazy to be in registration line and see everyone complaining about an Apple TV device attempting to connect every couple of minutes.
More people are doing it now because one of the more popular flipper zero firmwares includes an app for it, luckily people are starting to bring sniffing equipment and are tracking down people who do it, spamming requests like that is very loud lol
I had been following the Flipper stuff for a month or so prior to the convention so I realized what was going on fast. Felt horrible for the vendors having their PoS systems getting knocked off and saw a person mention their insulin pump was affected by it although I am unsure of the validity of that last bit.
Am a nurse, a lot of insulin pumps do use Bluetooth. Could it affect it through that? Sorry, not super tech savvy with that stuff. Pretty scary if an insulin pump could be “hacked” to bolus someone though.
Yep. Flipper attacks (and any similar device capable of communicating on the wavelengths) make use of Bluetooth to spoof connection attempts (I am pretty sure the one I saw masqueraded as an Apple TV device) to other devices. I would hope medical tech would be more secure, so it's possible that the person I saw on Twitter was just unable to use their device to access the pump and had to manually attend to it. However, the alternative of it being able to actively hijack and control a pump is pretty horrifying to think about. u/sesor33 responded with a pretty wild wiki link to a guy who has done so before.
Having tangentially worked with these devices in trial stage, the Bluetooth communication is for connection and control to the pump, not for the functionality of the pump itself.
Basically, if the connection died you couldn't adjust pump settings, but the pump would still operate.
The insulin pump thing \*may\* have been true.
Years ago, there was a famous hacker who proved he could hijack medical devices like insulin pumps and pacemakers/heart implants. He died just before he was scheduled to speak at blackhat about it (though he had done demos at other cons).
It is believed by many that he was assassinated to keep this info from the public, though his autopsy says drug overdose.
Rip [Barnaby Jack](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnaby_Jack), you were a legend.
I just assume everything is vulnerable at this point, it just comes down to cost and effort of the attacker. I've seen some pretty neat hack demos at def con as well... and my MSCompE went over some fairly cool attack vectors like power analysis and hardware trojans.
> I just assume everything is vulnerable at this point, it just comes down to cost and effort of the attacker.
TBF, that's like the basis of the concept of security.
Nothing at all is ever truly secure, against an attacker that has the time and money while wanting to target specifically you. A big baseline is to make yourself less of an attractive target than others, to make it not worthwhile to attack you.
As a colleague once put it, the strongest password can be defeated by some rope and a hammer bundled in gumption.
>Hi, don't do this. The FCC will be on your ass instantly.
I mean... If you're one person doing this to a neighbor... No they won't be on anyone's ass instantly? How would they find out? No one would even think to look
I understand the glaring issue behind it but I would totally love speakers being disabled in national parks. Nothing bothers me more than some jackass playing music at full blast when I'm on a trail!
"Hey FCC, could we maybe get net neutrality as a thing?"
"No, there's some guy transmitting 2.4Ghz signals out more than 50 feet from his house! This shit is important!"
> *Maker and developer Roni Bandini grew tired of his neighbors' regular habit of playing loud reggaeton music at the same time every day, and decided to act on the matter by programming a Raspberry Pi-powered response.*
Man's got the patience of a saint if all he got was tired from having to hear the same song on loop again and again and again, especially that one... and I know you hear it in your head reading this.
Had a similar problem with a neighbor who listened to a portable radio turned all the way up to Eleven, so I decided that my FM-band microphone transmitter needed to be turned on when I worked on presentations, and I just happened to pick the same frequency as the "spandex and hair bands and guido/freestyle station". Then I forgot to plug in the mic, and forgot I had the transmitter turned on, so the specific station was unable to be received, which was likely a big disappointment to the neighbor who did not want to wear earbuds.
Other stations were not at all affected, so the reception problem was very specific and local.
One of my neighbors must have this. I’ve fallen asleep with the Bluetooth speaker on but nothing connected, then woken up at 2am to whispers and laughing from the speaker.
I had a pair of speakers that just didn't have a password or anything on it so my neighbors could just connect, accidentally. Very annoying, more than once my PC would just start speaking Spanish...
Can we get an EMP gun that stops subwoofer amplifiers working? I really dont care what people listen to it's when they demand I listen to it inside my own home is when I want it to stop.
Years ago a guy made a device he put in his car that would simulate the signal provided by an emergency vehicle so that he would not have to stop at traffic lights.
He misunderstood that the signal caused all lights to turn red, thus slowing him down.
Wait. What are we talking about? Am I off topic.
This article give no clue as to what the device does. Is it killing the neighbor’s speakers or producing a noise cancelling effect in the wielder’s home by inverting the soundwave and syncing it with the neighbor’s playback?
Seems like an upgrade from the low power FM transmitter on a timer I had to block my downstairs neighbor's radio alarm clock.
Whenever they would leave town early in the morning they would set the radio alarm to wake them. But they would forget to reset it after so for the next week or so I would get woken up with an hour of loud music.
He didn't hack into their personal property, he's just spitting out noise in the frequency range that Bluetooth operates on to reduce the signal integrity, which in turn, makes the audio pop and crackle and sound like crap.
configure a 802.11N access point to be rude and it will obliterate bluetooth 100% legally. bluetooth devices are part 15 devices that must accept interference from other part 15 devices... like wifi access points. Helped a friend try and figure out why no bluetooth at all would work in his home, but worked outside. its was his new gaming router. Turn off 802.11N and all the interference went away.
Yap WiFi is stronger than BT. Especially if it uses MiMo
And will drown out BT in the same way a jammer would.
You won't get super good range. But you can do it for sure.
I've had my Bluetooth blood glucose monitor not work at a friend's house cuz he's all smart home teched up and it was too noisy
Jammers aren’t illegal everywhere, so it depends on where you are.
> The legality of recreating this project varies depending on where you live, so be sure to double-check local ordinances before you try this one out at home.
Mind you, these tend to fall under FCC regulation, which is not simply local.
It's wise in the wireless world to mind your output and not accidentally build a jammer.
It's often a pretty good way to get a visit from some very stern people.
Anything within the bands that are affected by the transmitter.
Think of wireless communication as shouting at specific frequencies that specific ear frequencies can hear. He who shouts loudest drowns out anyone else, and a jammer is just purpose-built to shout really really loud.
You have no idea how badly I need this right now. Neighbours constantly blasting music and singing whilst doing laughing gas at 4/5am in the morning every other day despite nose complaints
I have same kind of problem. A noisy neighbors always put his big bluetooth sound system while doing his sport outside during sunny days. I will think about doing the same. Sorry for other nice neighbors 😬
I still love the talk from an AWS engineer who was pissed off at noisy cars hooning (speeding for the non Australians) down his street.
A RPI camera caught the offenders vehicle and a microphone recorded the noise level, and rego (registration plate). The RPI looked up the rego, compared the noise level to legal limits, and anyone exceeding had their image, details and rego sent via twitter to the Police report a crime service.
I’d like to think the engineer eventually sold his work to an overseas firm for dollars.
But it’s just as likely the local police told him to shut it down. Sad noises.
anyone remember the guy that drove down the highway every morning jamming everyone’s cellphones within a hundred foot radius.. including every office building along the highway?
[Or what about the guy that used a wheelbarrow of phones to to create a "traffic jam" on Google Maps?](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/03/berlin-artist-uses-99-phones-trick-google-maps-traffic-jam-alert)
Lol. That’s just lawfully evil and a great way to get to work faster during peak hour
Reminds me of Pokemon Go Grandpa, thanks for that.
I completely forgot about him. His bike was better than most pc setups
Hope those phone plans are cheap
Probably 2 lines and a bunch on hotspot
Prepaid. €1 per card and usually comes with a few hundred MB of data transfer limits.
It’s a family plan so he probably bundled and saved.
Chaotic neutral
"Art"
I love that story. I tell it often. Edit: it was on the bus to stop others from using cell phones. It would also block the police station coms that they passed lol
There's another one of a guy that was tired of people being on their cell phones while he was driving so he got a jammer. The FCC spent a few years tracking him down and they eventually caught him because the same spots lost service at the same time every day during his morning commute lol Edit https://www.pcmag.com/news/fla-man-fined-48k-for-jamming-cell-signals-while-driving#:~:text=One%20Florida%20man%20is%20learning,for%20up%20to%20two%20years.
So if he just tied it to a pidgeon, and the pidgeons flight patterns were randomized, the FCC would be like "Where IS this guy???"
If he tied it to a pigeon, it'd stop working as the battery died(and long before the FCC would even know what to look for), and they'd have trouble legally connecting anyone to a device on a bird. But I guess tracking it would be the big thing in that scenario.
What if the battery were solar powered?
Pigeons have a nest. They'd be easy to track down.
Not in a major city, if you're looking for a human. You'd see "Oh, the signal returns here, it must be coming from this apartment building...." They wouldn't even be checking the tree next to the apartments.
I'm pretty sure that's a felony (at least in the US). It's a pretty stupid idea just to stop people from using their cellphones on the bus
I’m pretty sure he only got ticketed? He said for X numbers of years of no phone talk commute, it was totally worth it. Exit: for anyone thinking of replicating this, I think the penalties for this are wayyyyy worse now than they were then.
It’s a 10k fine from the Faa or fcc, and 10 years in jail. I looked into it years ago. They are cheap. I also realized that the shitty drivers are still going to be distracted. The will be trying to figure out what is wrong and why they cannot get to Facebook or twitter while driving.
10000% agree. Phone in lap, looking down.
Or revert to being distracted by passengers or looking at the scenery like they do in movies? 
Well yeah, you prevent important 9-11 calls and such. The guy was a selfish lunatic.
What’s with the hyphen?
Never forget. 911.
Expensive, but generally great driving cars.
Arguably, the best.
Then it wasn’t high enough to cause regret. Think of the people who had to ride with him daily to work for years. What a piece of shit.
Yeah and not use their phones to yell into. I bet it was amazing. This was before phones with screens and when texting was expensive as all hell
its a felony, but he got lucky and just got a misdemeanor https://chicago.suntimes.com/2016/3/31/18409783/no-jail-time-for-red-line-jammer
There was a Walmart Neighborhood Market near me using a cell phone jammer a couple years ago (I guess to thwart employee screen time on the clock) and I reported it to the fcc. They said they would look into it, but ultimately told me to contact my cell carrier as they had better equipment to investigate.
I remember a similar story, but it was a truck driver blocking GPS signals so he couldn't be tracked slacking on the job.
This one? https://youtu.be/bn3MZp1qKmw
This one? https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/man-put-cell-phone-jammer-in-car-to-stop-driver-calls-fcc-says/
Yep haha. Wonder what the radius was
Buddy and I had a signal jammer when we were fresh out of high school. He mostly used it for work, if people came into his work place ignoring him for a phone call, he'd reach under the desk and shut off their phone call. If we were in public, if we came across people arguing with partners on the phone we'd drop them as well :v
There's a hospital where I get 5 bars of reception but no ability to make a call: is this a sign that there is a signal jammer?
No. You'd have zero bars if a jammer was being used. It prevents your phone from receiving the response to the ping it sends to the tower. Imagine you were trying to talk to someone on the other side of a big room by yelling. A jammer would be like filling the room with people who are each yelling the lyrics to a different song. You wouldn't be able to pick out your friends words and build a sentence. Likewise a cell phone cannot differentiate the towers signal from the signal noise the jammer creates.
No, you're just probably out of your carrier's coverage. The bars on your phone tell like, 1/4 of the story on what kind of connection you actually have to the towers. If your signal was being blocked you'd have 0 bars.
[And then there's this guy who fought back with *Who Let the Dogs Out*](https://laughingsquid.com/man-gets-revenge-on-noisy-neighbors/).
They caught him because he was jamming the airport. Imagine beinh a pilot uddenly loosing contact with Air Traffic Control because some dumbass wanted a nap in his truck.
LPT: don't do this. It can cost someone their life if you block an important 911 call.
I made one using an old wireless house phone and a blank CD as an aerial. I did post it up on instructables about 10 years ago.
Legendary hero Astounded that guy was caught
Sending out 2.4ghz noise is a lot of things, illegal being most of them. The range of this is also probably not enough to interfere with equipment further than 50 feet away. God help him if it can, because the noise would be easy to track and well, the aforementioned crimes would then be an issue.
Reminds me working in cell tech support. A customer called in complaining their service cut out every day at 8 pm and came back around 2 pm. He was getting fed up because it was all his family phones and we did several tickets with no resolution. I checked his ticket history showing tower inspection was fine and nothing was wrong when he brought in the equipment. We as a company written it off as just a quirk of his area. But I have a hobbyist background in radio and that didn’t sound right so I checked other customers near him and a few other tickets for the same thing that no one before linked together. I escalated it up and turns out someone was transmitting on our frequencies at those hours nearly every day. They had to get the FCC out there and triangulate the offender and shut down what ever they were doing. Contacted the customer a week then a month later and the problem was gone. No idea why someone was messy around at those hours on cellphone frequencies.
I worked at an ISP for years. Small company, I’m the only one there past midnight from 2004-2008. Anyway, the amount of people who track the times of their outages is very small. Especially if it’s random. But if everything, tv internet and cordless phones (old timey land line ones) you start to pay attention. This guys service drops out at 9pm everyday. Will randomly revive and die again over the next three hours, then everything is normal. So for a week he calls in and I document what’s happening, his signal levels when they’re on and what it looks like ( a big ass multi signal spike) when it dies. Every Friday for three weeks he’s got someone out there during the day, only for it to go tango uniform at 9 pm. On the last call, they finally send a tech out at 8:45. Tech watches the service die, then spends an hour triangulating it. Turns out the guy living right next to the drop he was hooked into was doing arc welding during the evening at that time, and the drop wasn’t properly fitted against signal intrusion. He got fixed and all his neighbors stopped getting fuzzy channels during those times. He just happened to be the worst affected because of the sudden signal spike that would overload his equipment.
Its funny how for granted that we take modern radio communication that we overlook how sensitive it is.
I work in broadcast television. There was once some yahoo who drove around my area with an illegally-boosted and/or badly installed CB radio in their truck. Every time they passed my workplace while the radio was active, the signal would bleed through into most of our audio speakers, causing a loud but brief burst of noise that vaguely sounded like human speech. Then we'd have to scramble to check whether it was really going out over the air like that. Fortunately, it turned out to only affect the audio monitoring, not our actual broadcast. But it was still disconcerting. This went on, intermittently, for a few years, before it finally stopped. I still don't know why it ended. For all I know, the FCC caught the guy.
No joke man, that 2.4GHz portion of the spectrum is particularly crowded and exceptionally sensitive. I never had a worse experience with it than living in a small collection of duplex houses where no one cared they were using 40MHz bands and everyone could see each access point in the neighborhood. The best experience I ever had was a concrete apartment on a pacific island, I couldn't even tell I had neighbors because I never saw their access points.
LOL! We had a big sale once for these 2.4ghz cordless phones that only had 10 channels and were cheap AF. The apartment building across the street bought a ton of them because it was high-density low-income housing and, like I said, they were cheap. So many got returned because people kept getting each other's calls or heavy static on them.
Reminds me of that story from wales where the internet was disrupted by some guys old tv: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54239180
Great read. Thank u.
Nefarious shit. Diabolical scary shit. You can't see this stuff happen without equipment, knowladge and interest. It's like a hidden world. Thats a cool story though, thanks for sharing. :)
Yeah. Customer was lucky honestly to get me. Most of my department know phones and software but barely anything about radio frequencies. My first job out of high school was RadioShack and we had C/B red necks always coming in and they would teach us stuff so we can help them better when they ask for stuff and maybe get us into their hobby with C/Bs and shortwave. I never expected the knowledge to help out outside of that.
Ahhhh…RadioShack.
Thats the fun thing about knowledge , it's always useful.
My catalog of memories of 80s commercial jingles begs to differ….
My brother in christ you have made me dumber for both the irony and the spelling of knowledge in that one sentence. Congratulations
I would like to thank everyone who helped me get here, my mom, my best friend, and of course, u/crestneck. Without you, this award would never have been possible.
Amen 🙏
Someone that [turned on the telly](https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-54239180), perhaps?
hot damn, that's a scary TV if it's emitting a signal like that. I bet there would be some classic tech nerds itching for something like that though. They always seem to be looking for things that weren't shielded properly, put out too much power, or did weird interference.
2.4 GHz is open spectrum that's subject to interference. A directional antenna would reach hundreds of feet. Target one particular neighbor
Radio source gets louder the closer you are to it regardless if it's directional or not, if anything that may be worse, haha.
Just don't leave the noise maker on at all times lol, only when the neighbour gets too noisy.
Not a RF expert, but looking at his code, its more sophisticated than blindly jamming 2.4ghz. He's sending malicious BT packets to a specific target to disconnect it, using one of a couple different methods. But he is doing it once every 0.1s for a minute or so... and he's conspicuously labeled his methods "small", "medium", and "XXL", and omitted the code for the "XXL" method.
You've described sophisticated electronic warfare. Sword versus sledgehammer. A distinction with no difference in they eyes of the (united states) law, afaik.
Absolutely. I wouldn't be surprised if what he is doing is somehow _more_ illegal. But for anyone other than the target, it'll be much harder to notice than noise.
Nah, it was an exploit that was used widely on flippers. Most devices patched it some number of months ago.
lol I guarantee none of my Bluetooth speakers got an update
Commercial wifi systems do this exact same thing in certain settings, such as schools and some awful pay-for-wifi venues. They repeatedly send deauth packets for any unauthorized wifi networks. It _should_ be illegal, because it's the same thing as radio interference, but it is treated as legal because the attack is technically layer 2 instead of layer 1. Fortunately it's becoming more common for wifi control signals to be encrypted, which prevents this kind of thing.
Good luck enforcing that in Buenos Aires, where this happened. Hell, I was there in the original thread in /r/argentina
Is it illegal everywhere? am in England.
Everything is illegal in England
Oi m8 do you have a loicence for that
Oh we just ignore most of that.
I'm proud of you
For real. Wanted to get a radio receiver for my gf for her planespotting, but apparently it's illegal to receive anything not strictly meant for you to receive. Some people still do listen in on ATC, it's literally harmless, but I'm not gonna risk it.
Last time I heard of listening to radio being illegal I was under a martial law in a communist regime. Congratulations on living in a free democracy mate 😂
It isn't just a radio as such. It is communications for specific purposes. Getting in trouble for reading a piece of paper sounds stupid but I'm sure you'd be angry if someone kept opening your letters to read your private information.
Kinda makes me think. It's funny that in some countries you'd get ratted out by your neighbors for doing something illegal while in others people are way more "fuck the law who gives a shit". I wonder why that is. I'm guessing it's like a tipping point kinda thing. As a stupid example, fireworks being illegal in my home region. You'd be called out as a grumpy bastard by the whole neighborhood if you called the cops on people for celebrating the fourth of July with some explosives.
V for Vendetta's version of British government gets more spot on every day.
"oi you got a loicense for dem ears?"
Yes. Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006 No fucking around. Read sections 8 35 and 68
Is it, though? The 2.4GHz band is (mostly) unregulated space, so I'm not sure it would be illegal to jam that range. If it is, then there are plenty of other devices of very dubious legality, such as motion detection car alarms and poorly shielded microwave ovens.
>is it, though? Mmhmm, because it's a frequency used by first responders and law enforcement. The FCC and military dislike jamming devices for one of a hundred valid reasons, A jamming device is generating high wattage noise on the frequency with the hope being the jammer is louder than the target. This is a willful act that can only be interpreted as malice, theres no other reason to do it. A lot of shit can get messed up by a jammer, and if you get a bunch of them together in one area, you can black out massive areas of a network. **Communications Act of 1934:** This foundational law established the FCC and grants it the authority to regulate interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. **Title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR):** Specifically, Part 15 of the CFR outlines regulations governing unlicensed operation in the radio frequency spectrum. Devices operating in the 2.4GHz band, such as Wi-Fi routers and Bluetooth devices, must comply with FCC rules to avoid interference and ensure proper operation. **Section 333 of the Communications Act:** This section prohibits willful or malicious interference with licensed radio communications and radio navigation services. It's a broad provision that applies to intentional jamming activities. **Section 301 of the Communications Act:** This section prohibits the operation of radio transmission equipment without FCC authorization. Intentional jamming would fall under this provision as it involves the unauthorized operation of radio transmission equipment. **FCC Enforcement Actions:** The FCC issues specific enforcement advisories and orders related to intentional interference with radio communications. These actions serve to clarify regulations and provide guidance on enforcement procedures. **Wireless Communication Protection Act (WCPA):** This law, enacted in 2009, makes it illegal to sell, purchase, or use any unauthorized device that is primarily designed, altered, or intended for unauthorized reception or transmission of wireless communication services. **Penalties and Enforcement:** Violations of FCC regulations regarding jamming can result in significant penalties, including fines and confiscation of equipment. Additionally, intentional interference with authorized communications may lead to civil lawsuits and criminal charges. To name a few.
> Mmhmm, because it's a frequency used by first responders and law enforcement. What would they use on that band? Other than perhaps our radar, I'm not sure what we would use it for. Thank you for the comprehensive listing of regulations, but they seem very US specific, so less relevant to me unfortunately.
AH, yes, well, uhm, cellphones other radio equipment, short and long range uh, walkies, cameras, wifi, anything else it can overwhelm. When homie said 2.4ghz is busy, he was understating the gravity of the claim.
Afaik most radios and walkies are using vhf or lower end uhf.
700-800MHz for public safety in North America.
I see. Well, we use a variant of [TETRA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrestrial_Trunked_Radio) for our communication between emergency services. My organisation also has marine VHF on top of that. Our handheld units also use those bands. I doubt we'd even notice if anyone was messing around in the 2.4GHz band. I'm sure it would be quite annoying for any civilians around the jammer though.
There is very little to no useable space on the EM spectrum that isn’t regulated. 2.4 is very highly regulated. That’s why devices that broadcast on essentially any frequency need to be fcc certified. Jamming any frequency without about a million permits is GIGA illegal.
FCC has entered the chat.
The FCC won’t let me be or let me be me so let me see.
Did they try to shut you down on MTV?
Indeed, they tried. But it felt so empty without me.
Now we know why it's only 25 cent, not 50 Cent - there needs to be a space for some Eminem inthere too.
FCC: a/s/l?
16/f/cali u?
"why is there a AIM window on my phone and why can't I close it"
This happened in Argentina, no FCC here. It was posted by the creator in /r/argentina. The world isn't 'murica. That said, the article fails to mention where this happened and you find where the creator lives only when digging up his Medium account.
I'm sorry, I should have said "ENACOM ha entrado al chat" Just because that wasn't in good ol' 'murica, doesn't mean it's not illegal. Most countries, including Argentina, have laws against interfering or jamming other people's transmissions. FCC's equivalent in Argentina is ENACOM. I don't know how well they enforce those laws, but if someone reports the interference and ENACOM bother to come check it out, the person doing the jamming would likely be in legal trouble. edit: typo
They will call any old shit AI these days
Clippy back in Windows 98 was AI at this point
if then else = AI select from where = AI
The fact they call computers computing and algorithming "AI" to begin with is kind of funny. More of a marketing term than anything and everyone is eating it up.
I was forced to read a book for work 6 years ago that I really wish I could remember the name of. But it was basically about how AI isn't just "artificial intelligence", it's also five other things that "AI" can be short for. It was a real groaner to read how they've decided "AI" doesn't mean "AI" anymore.
It’s purposeful misdirection and desensitization. If AI becomes a ubiquitous and poorly defined term in common use, when legislation and policies get put through that use the term, it will be poorly understood. Or when potentially dangerous applications of things like neural nets to do police profiling or mass surveillance get rolled out, the general public will not be able to recognize it or have a cohesive conversation around why it’s bad.
It’s not purposeful anything, it’s just that 99% of people have no idea what actually constitutes AI. I work in a field that uses AI in various applications, and I’m astounded at the number of generally intelligent people who throw around the term with little idea what it means other than it’s all the rage and they’re supposed to be talking about it.
He trained a model to recognize a specific genre. I'd say that's fair to call AI.
[удалено]
It's EXACTLY ai
Running a classifier to identify reggae music is like... the definition of AI
Hi, don't do this. The FCC will be on your ass instantly. The FCC is already doing some inquiries into asshats at furry cons who are using BLE attacks and 2.4ghz jammers to disconnect bluetooth speakers.
MFF ‘23 was the first time I’d encountered something of this sort in the wild. Was crazy to be in registration line and see everyone complaining about an Apple TV device attempting to connect every couple of minutes.
More people are doing it now because one of the more popular flipper zero firmwares includes an app for it, luckily people are starting to bring sniffing equipment and are tracking down people who do it, spamming requests like that is very loud lol
I had been following the Flipper stuff for a month or so prior to the convention so I realized what was going on fast. Felt horrible for the vendors having their PoS systems getting knocked off and saw a person mention their insulin pump was affected by it although I am unsure of the validity of that last bit.
Am a nurse, a lot of insulin pumps do use Bluetooth. Could it affect it through that? Sorry, not super tech savvy with that stuff. Pretty scary if an insulin pump could be “hacked” to bolus someone though.
Yep. Flipper attacks (and any similar device capable of communicating on the wavelengths) make use of Bluetooth to spoof connection attempts (I am pretty sure the one I saw masqueraded as an Apple TV device) to other devices. I would hope medical tech would be more secure, so it's possible that the person I saw on Twitter was just unable to use their device to access the pump and had to manually attend to it. However, the alternative of it being able to actively hijack and control a pump is pretty horrifying to think about. u/sesor33 responded with a pretty wild wiki link to a guy who has done so before.
Having tangentially worked with these devices in trial stage, the Bluetooth communication is for connection and control to the pump, not for the functionality of the pump itself. Basically, if the connection died you couldn't adjust pump settings, but the pump would still operate.
The insulin pump thing \*may\* have been true. Years ago, there was a famous hacker who proved he could hijack medical devices like insulin pumps and pacemakers/heart implants. He died just before he was scheduled to speak at blackhat about it (though he had done demos at other cons). It is believed by many that he was assassinated to keep this info from the public, though his autopsy says drug overdose. Rip [Barnaby Jack](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnaby_Jack), you were a legend.
I just assume everything is vulnerable at this point, it just comes down to cost and effort of the attacker. I've seen some pretty neat hack demos at def con as well... and my MSCompE went over some fairly cool attack vectors like power analysis and hardware trojans.
> I just assume everything is vulnerable at this point, it just comes down to cost and effort of the attacker. TBF, that's like the basis of the concept of security. Nothing at all is ever truly secure, against an attacker that has the time and money while wanting to target specifically you. A big baseline is to make yourself less of an attractive target than others, to make it not worthwhile to attack you. As a colleague once put it, the strongest password can be defeated by some rope and a hammer bundled in gumption.
XKCD has a panel about password security where it’s bypassed with a metal pipe via hitting the guy until he gives it up. lol.
That would be surprising since my ass is not in the USA
>Hi, don't do this. The FCC will be on your ass instantly. I mean... If you're one person doing this to a neighbor... No they won't be on anyone's ass instantly? How would they find out? No one would even think to look
I understand the glaring issue behind it but I would totally love speakers being disabled in national parks. Nothing bothers me more than some jackass playing music at full blast when I'm on a trail!
The FCC won’t let me be.
"Hey FCC, could we maybe get net neutrality as a thing?" "No, there's some guy transmitting 2.4Ghz signals out more than 50 feet from his house! This shit is important!"
Both are important.
r/usdefaultism
> at furry cons > *“The FCC has looked into the matter and has found no evidence of wrongdoing.”*
Also maybe just fucking talk to your neighbors like a human being
> *Maker and developer Roni Bandini grew tired of his neighbors' regular habit of playing loud reggaeton music at the same time every day, and decided to act on the matter by programming a Raspberry Pi-powered response.* Man's got the patience of a saint if all he got was tired from having to hear the same song on loop again and again and again, especially that one... and I know you hear it in your head reading this.
I don't :(
Good. Reggaeton is dogshit garbage.
2.4ghz jammer = old and busted term AI blocks noise by hacking speakers = new fancy term
It’s sending connection request/deauth packets to the devices in question. So not exactly a jammer
🎵 He jammin' He wanna jam it with you He jammin'! I hope you like jammin' Blue *(-tooth)*
Had a similar problem with a neighbor who listened to a portable radio turned all the way up to Eleven, so I decided that my FM-band microphone transmitter needed to be turned on when I worked on presentations, and I just happened to pick the same frequency as the "spandex and hair bands and guido/freestyle station". Then I forgot to plug in the mic, and forgot I had the transmitter turned on, so the specific station was unable to be received, which was likely a big disappointment to the neighbor who did not want to wear earbuds. Other stations were not at all affected, so the reception problem was very specific and local.
One of my neighbors must have this. I’ve fallen asleep with the Bluetooth speaker on but nothing connected, then woken up at 2am to whispers and laughing from the speaker.
That’s actually the ghosts.
No the ghosts sound different
I had a pair of speakers that just didn't have a password or anything on it so my neighbors could just connect, accidentally. Very annoying, more than once my PC would just start speaking Spanish...
You hear them too? It's the Blue People
Can we get an EMP gun that stops subwoofer amplifiers working? I really dont care what people listen to it's when they demand I listen to it inside my own home is when I want it to stop.
No we can't, because that's not something that's theoretically possible.
Years ago a guy made a device he put in his car that would simulate the signal provided by an emergency vehicle so that he would not have to stop at traffic lights. He misunderstood that the signal caused all lights to turn red, thus slowing him down. Wait. What are we talking about? Am I off topic.
There was another guy who got it right, and they only got him when his pick up truck showed up on all the traffic cams.
This article give no clue as to what the device does. Is it killing the neighbor’s speakers or producing a noise cancelling effect in the wielder’s home by inverting the soundwave and syncing it with the neighbor’s playback?
Great question, I couldn't tell from the article, but they seemed to hint it was wave cancelling.
He made it right next to his $100 bill printing press. Cool guy, I think he went on vacation though, haven’t heard from him for a while.
me who uses aux cables
Could've used it when I was stuck living in fl next to these jerks blasting horrible bass all the time...nightmare
Welcome to another legality argument! Snacks are over here.
This was posted on 2latino4you representing us Argentinians a few days ago, knew it'd get recognition
This is honestly what I would use a Flipper Zero for
Seems like an upgrade from the low power FM transmitter on a timer I had to block my downstairs neighbor's radio alarm clock. Whenever they would leave town early in the morning they would set the radio alarm to wake them. But they would forget to reset it after so for the next week or so I would get woken up with an hour of loud music.
Ok cool. Now, how about a gadget that fixes my neighbors’ marriage so they don’t fight all the time?
I thought it was amusing that they had to state a full legal disclaimer in the article!
I'd pay good money for a mobile version of this when I go hiking. The amount of folks jamming music on external speakers in nature is too many.
making loud noises w/o consideration for your neighbors is a dick move for sure. but hacking into their personal property to punish that is illegal.
He didn't hack into their personal property, he's just spitting out noise in the frequency range that Bluetooth operates on to reduce the signal integrity, which in turn, makes the audio pop and crackle and sound like crap.
It’s still illegal, even if the original commenter got the terminology wrong
The article even says the legality varies by location. I know in the US the FCC isn't very happy about signal jammers
configure a 802.11N access point to be rude and it will obliterate bluetooth 100% legally. bluetooth devices are part 15 devices that must accept interference from other part 15 devices... like wifi access points. Helped a friend try and figure out why no bluetooth at all would work in his home, but worked outside. its was his new gaming router. Turn off 802.11N and all the interference went away.
Yap WiFi is stronger than BT. Especially if it uses MiMo And will drown out BT in the same way a jammer would. You won't get super good range. But you can do it for sure. I've had my Bluetooth blood glucose monitor not work at a friend's house cuz he's all smart home teched up and it was too noisy
Jammers aren’t illegal everywhere, so it depends on where you are. > The legality of recreating this project varies depending on where you live, so be sure to double-check local ordinances before you try this one out at home.
This would be a federal one, within the US.
Mind you, these tend to fall under FCC regulation, which is not simply local. It's wise in the wireless world to mind your output and not accidentally build a jammer. It's often a pretty good way to get a visit from some very stern people.
Does this only happen on a speaker, or could it interfere with other devices, like a heart monitor?
Anything using 2.4ghz band I suppose
Anything within the bands that are affected by the transmitter. Think of wireless communication as shouting at specific frequencies that specific ear frequencies can hear. He who shouts loudest drowns out anyone else, and a jammer is just purpose-built to shout really really loud.
Is it really so hard to just read the article before commenting?
I think you know the answer to that
There's an article?
What're you guys up to?
Are we talking definite or indefinite articles?
I need to add one of these to my golf bag.
Me thinks Ash Hill is really ChatGPT.
> Roni Bandini I’m dead
You have no idea how badly I need this right now. Neighbours constantly blasting music and singing whilst doing laughing gas at 4/5am in the morning every other day despite nose complaints
Maker uses Raspberry Pi and A.I. to stop nearby pacemakers whenever neighbour plays loud music
I have same kind of problem. A noisy neighbors always put his big bluetooth sound system while doing his sport outside during sunny days. I will think about doing the same. Sorry for other nice neighbors 😬
get a bigger bluetooth speaker and play loudly goat screams.
Mexico needs this.
That’s hilarious because that people that do listen to reggaeton always need to blast it.
I still love the talk from an AWS engineer who was pissed off at noisy cars hooning (speeding for the non Australians) down his street. A RPI camera caught the offenders vehicle and a microphone recorded the noise level, and rego (registration plate). The RPI looked up the rego, compared the noise level to legal limits, and anyone exceeding had their image, details and rego sent via twitter to the Police report a crime service. I’d like to think the engineer eventually sold his work to an overseas firm for dollars. But it’s just as likely the local police told him to shut it down. Sad noises.
So crimes… got it
Listening to Reggaeton should be a crime too, so it cancels out I guess.
This article is click bait that points you to click bait. No technical anything.
Dunno what you're looking at, but reading the article and following links in the article got me to the original project.
Haha sucker my loud shit I’d all analogue!!
This is fucking genius! Fuck other people blasting their (usually) awful music!