My guess would be driving around with a relatively short-range jammer actually increases the odds of being hit by a distracted driver. Rather than people driving near you being distracted by conversations on their phones, they're going to be even more distracted because their call just got dropped, prompting them to look at the display waiting for the bars to come back so they can re-dial.
I agree. Most people aren't smart enough to put down their phone even to save their own life. The guy has good intentions but some people just can't be saved.
One of the last things I'd want is lots of drivers near me to be even more distracted saying "Hello? Hello?" into their phone and repeatedly looking at it to see if they're still connected or still have a signal.
Also, good luck if you're in an accident as no-one nearby can call the emergency services.
By default I assume law enforcement is exaggerating for effect, but lot of emergency radios are on 800Mhz, AT&T (as one example) uses 850Mhz, so it wouldn't be hard to imagine a radio transmitter that cuts a wide swath (e. g., jammer) and interferes with other radios.
This depends on the jammer. They range from jam-almost-everything, to jamming only specific wavelengths (configurable or not), to jamming only specific protocols (which is more technically a DOS attack, but still functions like jamming).
Assuming the driver was using a wavebubble, it's likely that it would jam police radios as well (depending on configuration).
I understand how they work just fine. Which part of my statement implies a narrow-band device? Perhaps I was unclear, but I think that I worded it such that a wide-band device was implied ("wide swath").
Regardless, jammers can be narrow-band or wide-band depending on the goal. The device in the article sounds to be wide-band, but that doesn't define the entire category.
Certainly a terrible idea on every level, but I can't help but sympathize with the intent.
Too much of the public simply aren't responsible about driving and there doesn't seem to be any good way to identify and prevent or penalize them for it.
There are accidents where even seconds matter and the effects of the jamming can mean the difference between life and death or even simply a shift in the a victim's odds. Or consider emergency services whose radios were affected: maybe paramedics were radioing in status updates to a hospital, or perhaps police officers were in the middle of receiving an Amber alert. Or, imagine that he's injured in an accident himself. He, and anyone else potentially injured in such an accident, are potentially at risk because people can't notify 911. If he's lucky, he's able to turn it off. If he's unlucky, and is incapacitated or otherwise unable to turn it off, well, that's quite the problem now, isn't it?
I hate dreaming up hypotheticals, but this story practically demands it. His actions were no less selfish than someone else's texting while driving.
I could be wrong, but I think you're misunderstanding incision's comment. The way I'm reading it, he's not arguing with the fact that having a jammer operating in the guy's is pretty idiotic.
What I think he's saying is that he's got sympathy for what drove the guy to go to these idiotic lengths - the fact that a large number of drivers give pretty much no thought to safety by using their phones when they drive.
On my daily 5 minute walk from the bus to work, I will typically see upwards of a dozen drivers staring at their phones, presumably either reading or writing a message, whilst they are moving - ranging from people inching along in slow moving traffic in places that pedestrians could easily (and legally) be crossing, to ones doing 30mph+ in free flowing traffic or even pulling away from the lights based presumably on nothing more than seeing out of the corner of their eye that the car in front has started moving. I've fairly regularly seen cars meandering quite a long way through red lights simply because the driver was clearly paying no attention to what was happening on the road in front of them.
More than a few years ago, I was a manager at a hotel. As such there were several days each month when I had the emergency pager (yep, pager). The only time I ever got a 911 on the darn thing was while I was in the middle of a movie. I've never booked out of a movie theater so fast! I called back to the hotel to find out a fire alarm in a crawl space had triggered.
In the end it was just a loose wire in the actual alarm system, but obviously we didn't know it at the time. And thankfully, the movie staff had seen me in my haste, so when I returned several hours later, they were kind enough to let me watch the next showing of the movie for free.
A friend of mine used to rant about cellphones in theaters, and thought theaters should install jammers (as in, he was actually surprised that none had done this yet). The fact is, they're a primary communication device for many people. Who knows when you might receive a call that you have to take (for certain jobs or with situations concerning family or friends), or when you need to make a phone call (see the Aurora shooting or the recent one in FL for violent examples, but even a heart attack or some other medical emergency). Jammers just aren't a good idea for 99.999% of the situations people suggest using them.
Somehow, back before cell phones were invented, we all miraculously managed to live our lives without having constant access to a telephone. If you needed to call someone, you stepped away from whatever you were doing and called them. If Aunt Mabel had a heart attack, you'd find out about it, just not 500ms after it happened. If someone wasn't happy with how you filled out your TPS report at work, you'd go into the office in the morning and fix it.
> Somehow, back before cell phones were invented, we all miraculously managed to live our lives without having constant access to a telephone.
We also miraculously managed to live without plumbing and electricity. That doesn't mean that life isn't a lot better with it.
I have family who work in health care. They spend a lot of their time at home, on call. Back in the landline days, they were tied to their phone. They literally couldn't take the dog for a walk around the block, lest they'd miss a call. Today, thanks to mobile phones, they can run errands and even go to the movies.
The problem isn't cellphones, the problem is that some people are assholes and movie theaters are too meek to enforce a no-asshole policy. If people were routinely ejected from theatres for being disruptive people would behave better.
> we all miraculously managed to live our lives without having constant access to a telephone.
Well, except for the people who actually, literally died because the doctor who could have saved them couldn't be reached in time.
Doctors on call had pagers before anyone else had even heard of them, much less cellphones. Are you actually taking the position that barring surgeons and other emergency personnel from, not just entering, but coming anywhere near a movie theater is a reasonable solution to the problem of the occasional jerk disrupting your entertainment?
"We all" who? Not everyone. Doctors have carried pagers since pagers were invented. Some people do actually have a legitimate reason to be on call 24/7. Not everyone, sure, and most people are too connected to their work these days. But don't pretend as though being disconnected is a virtue for everyone. For some people in some professions being disconnected can cost lives or can cost thousands or millions of dollars per minute in losses.
The problem is we are dismantling our land line network. So if you don't have cell phone there might not by any phone in the building that works. Next what about emergency workers? They need to be able to be contacted. Or what about people on call for their jobs? All of these things could be blocked by jammers and the idea that we survived once without it unconvincing we survived once without vacancies and antibiotics too.
In Sweden we are. After a big storm a few years ago knocked out the phone lines to some remote homes, the telco calculated that it was cheaper to let them use 4G than to repair kilometers of telephone poles.
Payphones are endpoints, the network is much more than that. Except for the few examples listed in another answer, most of the infrastructure is still intact, i.e. you can get a landline in your home if you want one.
I'll make the claim that I've not noticed reception issues in theaters in at least the last 5 years. My use-case is typically texting (usually with the other members of my group, things like "Hey, I'm on the 5th row up") though, but even then I usually see 2+ bars, sufficient for voice calls.
My apartment has worse reception than that (I can make calls from my sunroom, nowhere else).
Yes, it's a true fact that you can pay money for the privilege of extending the cell phone provider's network, while also paying the backhaul the cell phone company's traffic over your internet link, while also paying the cell phone for their "service" that you have to personally install and operate. I have no idea why people think this is an acceptable scenario.
The providers apparently assume that you're already paying for "unlimited" internet.
Also, these access points pair with your device and don't provide bandwidth to other random devices, so at least you're not providing free backhaul for random passersby.
I got one of these for my apartment, worked great for 2 years but I could never add other people's numbers to it like advertised. It just paired with my phone and only used my internet connection for SMS/calls as long as I had wifi on (it would use my internet connection for 3g data but that would kill my battery and be silly to use with a phone that has wifi, it would also count against your quota if you had a limited plan).
There are other ones which are just a simple amplifier, not a whole base station. There's one antennae on the outside, another smaller one on the inside, and whatever signal it picks up one one antennae, it retransmits on the other with more power. Obviously the antennaes are directional so you don't get feedback, and there might be some more complicated filtering too.
It's a solution to a problem, that he faces. I understand that it makes no sense, but sometimes you have to do things that make no sense or switch carriers.
Back in the day (I haven't been in a while, unfortunately, so I don't know the current status), at nicer theatres and at the opera, they had a service available for emergency personnel (doctors, et cetera) where they'd take your pager, put a tag with your seat number on it (and also typically you'd be seated on an aisle), and they come fetch you if your pager went off. Worked great with minimal disruption to patrons... though the definition of "emergency" was fairly narrow, and this likely wouldn't work if patrons were insisting on it for family phone calls and so on.
It would work fine if this was a paid service. People could decide what "emergency" was worth being notified about. That would also give the theater some incentive to enforce a no-device policy.
If it's known that the theatre is a phone dead zone, you can step outside the theatre and make the call. If someone's having a heart attack, you have a whole theatre full of people that you can pull resources from.
A car driving around is a secret dead zone that punishes you for being nearby, even if you're not transgressing any social norms or traffic laws. Sitting on a park bench nearby? Hell, even being a passenger in a vehicle? That's the problem - he's being an indiscriminate vigilante.
I think the point was that if a theatre installed jammers, then patrons could not receive calls. Yea, I get that no one wants to overhear someone having a long chat with their significant other right as the plot line thickens, but a doctor on call or a parent who's kid is just got hurt at the baby sitter might appreciate being able to receive a call or text while their phone is on silent. They can then step out of the theatre in order to take the call or call back.
That said, I totally agree with you on your main point. This is often a counter argument when people suggest that mobile devices should be disabled when the car is in motion (which isn't necessarily the same thing as jamming). Often, when I'm driving, my wife is looking up directions or letting a family member know that we're near.
A doctor on-call can go without going to the movies. I say this having been on-call (not as a doctor) myself. When you're on-call, your life is seriously curtailed. You can't drink, you have to be within range of tools to do your work, you have to be immediately accessible. Being on-call sucks, but it's no reason to argue against passive signal blocking in theatres.
As for the babysitter, deal with it. If you're not contactable for 90 minutes, you're not contactable for 90 minutes. This perma-connectivity is an entirely new phenomenon, and there's no absolute need for it. Essentially this argument is saying that the parent's inability to deal with lack of connectivity is a convenience which trumps the general theatre-going public's convenience of not having people talking on the phone, or who light up the people behind them because they're bored with the movie and are playing online.
Being uncontactable for a short period is not the horror that it's made out to be in these arguments. The good old argument that someone can't sit through a lecture without connectivity "in case Auntie Mabel dies", but of course it's just a cover for having phone access for other things. If one were to believe the excuses that get trotted out, you'd be forgiven for thinking that human mortality had skyrocketed since the public acceptance of mobile phones :)
It's true that the world doesn't end if Dr. Jones isn't allowed to go the movies, or if Mr. and Mrs. Smith get to watch the end credits before finding out that their baby's in an ambulance. But the world also doesn't end if you have to suffer through a rude teenager on the phone for a minute and a half. You talk like your leisure experience is an absolute moral imperative, but everyone else's is just frivolous goofing off and easily sacrificed. Why is that?
The goal of a movie theatre is leisure experience. If you know a movie is 90+ minutes, and there's a significant likelihood of you or your devices causing a disruption to the other 100 people in the audience in 90+ minutes...
On a different note, me and my friend and his wife went to see Roger Waters perform The Wall a couple years back. The tickets said "No photography", but the band was very careful to say "When you take photos, please make sure the flash on your cameras is off. There are effects during our production that camera flashes will disrupt." I'm paraphrasing, but they were projecting video on the bricks that were assembled onstage as part of the performance. Sure enough, not minutes into the first set, flash flash flash flash flash.
My friends were taking photos. I made sure not to look over at them.
I've been to the cinema several hundred times over the last decade. There was a period we used to go 1-2 every week. In that time, I've never once been distracted by anyones phone going off. Maybe half a dozen times I've been momentarily annoyed by someone checking their phone with an overly bright screen. That's it.
It would seem letting people have a signal doesn't have to be a problem.
> The goal of a movie theatre is leisure experience. If you know a movie is 90+ minutes, and there's a significant likelihood of you or your devices causing a disruption to the other 100 people in the audience in 90+ minutes...
I think your definition of "disruption" may not be entirely reasonable. It's one thing if someone is sitting there having a chat during the movie, but if a person quietly getting up and excusing themselves (in response to an unheard vibration in their pocket) is unacceptable, then we're going have to ban anyone who sits down to a three-and-a-half-hour film with a Jumbo Big Gulp from the concession counter.
If that was the reaction to an incoming cellphone call, every time by every person, I don't think anybody would have a problem with cellphones in public spaces.
Yea, I could probably list a few hundred examples and you could probably shoot each and every one of them down on an individual level. Great. The larger point is that in the aggregate, there are enough individual situations that would be disrupted by jammers in the theatre that it would outweigh the nexus between the number of times someone is going to be inconvenienced by a conversation during a movie and the number of times someone is actually rude enough to pick up the phone during a movie. At the end of the day, it's a cost-benefit analysis.
If a movie theatre did in fact install jammers each parent concerned about their kid (yea, it's probably not a true emergency, but subjective perception matters) or each doctor (I'm thinking more about delivering babies, which can mean being on call for weeks at a time, than an ER doctor) might choose to skip the movie. The end result is that that the theatre will likely take a hit on their profits. That's not a compelling reason to invest in installing a jammer.
The whole "we survived just fine without constant connectivity" argument is flawed. Yea, we did a lot of things without modern technology. We got along fine without movies, driving to the movies, mobile phones, the Internet, or arguing on the Internet about the need for mobile phone access during a movie.
The 'we got along fine without instant connectivity' argument is a counter to the overwrought life-and-death-situation arguments in general. It's not about being a luddite, it's about keeping perspective.
Have another read of my comment, and you'll see in the middle of it that I'm saying that it's an argument of conveniences. It's convenient for a parent to have instant connectivity in case the babysitter calls, just as it's convenient for the audience to enjoy the movie they paid for without distractions. You say the theatre would take a financial hit for installing blocking devices, yet the more common trope is that the major annoyance in a theatre is people on phones - you could just as easily argue that they'd get a financial benefit from it. Doctors specifically on-call to deliver babies aren't much of a market segment to a movie theatre.
> It's not about being a luddite, it's about keeping perspective.
You clearly have no perspective.
I'd prefer my next trauma surgeon can relax and take in half a movie before he is called in on his pager to try and save my life, of which I have one that will be entirely in his hands. I don't give a fuck if you miss a couple of minutes of a movie that cost you $15 or even if it meant myself never being able to go into a movie theater again.
Maybe you care a lot about your life, and thereby about the quality-of-life of trauma surgeons. Do you think the movie theatre does?
What's so wrong with having places that can only be attended by people who are fine with nobody will be able to reach them? Businesses don't have to serve everybody; in fact, selling exactly that escapism--that only people in certain classes and professions can afford the time to experience--is exactly the business model theatres. It is also the business model of cruise-lines and travel agencies.
If a trauma surgeon wants to see a movie, they can wait for it to come out on Netflix. Just so: if a trauma surgeon wants to go to the beach and sip mai-tais, they can find a public one within an hour's drive of the hospital.
(Note that this is all assuming that being on-call is a sensible thing to have in society. We really need to get ourselves enough employed doctors that we can guarantee we'll only need some of them at any given time, so the rest can actually stay home and sleep.)
There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I can't wait until movie theaters pop up that advertise walls covered with metallic paint to block cellular RF. As someone who dislikes push notifications and refuses to work in any profession with the concept of being "on call," I will go to those almost all the time. And when my surgeon isn't on call, he'll be even more relaxed!
Thing is, I just can't think of a single scenario where the rights of the many to enjoy uninterrupted entertainment in every theater outweigh the rights of everyone else to be in constant communication with whomever they chose to, for whatever reason they chose to. Regardless if they are a surgeon, parent, or just a loud douchebag in a movie theater.
So until these faraday cage theaters start popping up, if you want the movie theater without the rest of civilization, you'll just have to take a generator and projector to a National Park or start it yourself.
Rights? What rights? You're talking about conveniences here, supplied by a private entity, not rights. You don't have a right to watch a movie with guaranteed phone access any more than you have a right to watch a movie not being illuminated by the bright screen of the phone from some idiot in front of you. You don't even have a right to watch a movie in the first place.
Since we're doing ridiculous hypotheticals here, I'd rather the entire movie theatre having a relaxing, fun time with no interruptions or rude phone users, meaning that they leave the movie happy rather than irritated, less likely to have an accident on the way home and hence need a trauma surgeon in the first place. Ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure and all that.
As for perspective, you are right that life-and-death on-call people should be using pagers rather than phones, but you completely miss the point that you can get pagers that work on a higher frequency than the phone system. Your precious trauma surgeon can still have a pager that works in a theatre while disallowing phone use, since Faraday cages can be tuned to work on different frequencies. Pagers should be used because a pager service comes with a guaranteed SLA, and SMS services do not.
And frankly, I don't give a fuck about your ignorance, just don't use it to angrily insult me when I've done nothing to you.
Thanks, receiving calls is really the big one for me. I know a lot of people working in fields requiring them to be on call 24x7 unless they're on leave. A 2 hour delay in calling back is just barely tolerable for most of them, and unacceptable for some. It'd suck to have to stop enjoying something outside a couple vacations a year because some people are inconsiderate and other people can't tune them out.
That said, making calls to emergency services, if you have to run outside to make that call, you've lost 30 seconds or a couple minutes. And you can't follow their directions in aiding the person because you're outside, and the victim(s) are inside. That's assuming it's not an attacker who would prevent you from leaving in the first place.
Theater shootings and mass shootings, not really. But shootings do happen, sometimes over the dumbest crap, and by people you wouldn't expect ([EDIT: retired] police officer in FL in a theater, a veteran shot a woman at a gas station here in GA [1]). Shootings aren't nearly common enough, though, to justify a ban on jammers. But emergency situations do come up, especially in a country of 300 million people and some 40k theaters [2], each with several screens. It just strikes me as irresponsible and unnecessary to insist on such a hardline ban for the sake of shutting out a few rude jerks.
Since hands-free phone usage is just as distracting[1], it would be very challenging for a police offer know if someone is using a cell phone while driving. Probably we just need a cultural shift to make people reluctant to use a phone (or even talk to their passenger) while driving. My guess is that we'll get self-driving cars first.
I need to read those studies closely; but, I imagine there's a difference between gabbing about nothing and doing serious mental work when it comes to the amount of focus taken away by talking. Singing with the radio probably has similar focus requirements to gabbing. I have not done any tests on this; and we're not going to stop singing on the radio.
Fiddling with a phone is probably the most dangerous of phone related activities while driving, though. Looking and reading off the screen (texts), pushing capacitive spots on the screen to interact with it (changing songs), and so on.
Police most likely want eyes on the road, as even passive attention to the road is better than eyes completely off it.
[edit: replaced "be singing" with "stop singing" since that's what I meant to say]
I know there was a study and analysis a few years back that found the reason people are more distracted having a hands-free conversation in the car vs a conversation with someone next to them is that the person on the other end of a phone call doesn't have awareness to your situation. So, while someone talking with you while sitting next to you in the car will naturally quite down while a change in driving conditions happens (or even alert you), the person on the phone is unaware of it and demands more of your attention. I can't recall when or where I saw the study, unfortunately.
Maybe from the same study... IN addition to citing the advantages of conversing with a situation-aware passenger vs an unaware phone-caller, the study summary also made much of their finding that there is a significant cognitive load devoted to visualizing the person at the other end of a phone call. This visualization is not needed when the person is in the car.
It also mentioned that young children can cause dangerous distractions because they lack the knowledge to know when the driving has gotten tough.
That would make sense, too. In my own driving experience, most of the people that ride with me in the car in the front seat are of the mind "We're looking at the road", not "the driver is looking at the road, so I don't have to" as their general attitude; and when I've been under the weather, driving poorly, they've been the first to comment and require a fix to it.
As for the phone, they're also the hands that will affect my phone if we need to change settings on GPS or music or whatever, because they understand the safety precautions.
So, what you say makes sense at least anecdotally and mentally.
On a tangent, there seems to be an interesting difference in front-seat passengers who drive and those who don't. Often you'll see the drivers do a head-check with you as you approach an intersection. I have a few friends that don't drive, and I've never noticed any of them doing that subconscious check.
Until self-driving cars or a viable nationwide public transportation system comes along, a well-funded and sustained marketing campaign along the lines of "don't drink and drive" could help reduce fatalities (see [1] for the historical trend). Many people think they are the exception to the rule and can safely drive while texting or whatever. If, during the process of getting a license, drivers were forced to operate a driving simulator while texting it may cause them to realize how bad everyone is at this.
It's actually a trivial matter of image processing to detect, by classification, photos depicting a driver looking down at their hands or holding their hand to their face. It is also completely trivial to OCR license plates. It would be a quite simple system to classify such pictures, send them to human review for verification, and then mail out tickets.
About 20 years ago, an electrical engineer friend of mine had built himself a small (~10 GHz, IIRC?) transmitter about the size of a garage door opener. It had a single red button on it that, when pressed, emitted a signal in one of the frequency bands that radar detectors picked up.
As a teenager, it was amusing to watch another car go zipping past us on the highway and then see their brake lights come on right after Nathan would hit the button.
My mom's SUV was totaled by a woman who was on her iPad while driving. I really don't think we'll be fixing the idiots-on-the-road epidemic anytime soon.
The solution is not only logical, but also an answer to lots of other problems: ditch the car-centric culture and move these people out from their cars to buses, trains, trams, bicycles and other forms of sustainable transport. It's not that hard, takes some time getting used to, but will do good to all of us.
Here's another non-obvious solution to the problem:
Start making sure that insurance companies have no payouts if the driver's phone was on X amount of time before the accident. That way they pay for their own damage, and the damage done to everyone around them. Regardless if they were "at fault" using conventional reasoning.
How about another one:
Require all vehicles to install cell phone tethers that have the driver's registered sim card in it. Disable it during the drive. Mandate it's installation, and penalize people that break it, even more so if they were in an accident.
Almost ALL problems have a technical/legislative solution for them. The only real problem is that no one has either the resolve, balls, lawyers, political backing, or money to implement/require those technical/legislative solutions. So all we get are half-asses solutions with selective (and sometimes biased) enforcement by the police/courts.
"Almost ALL problems have a technical/legislative solution for them"
Still waiting to hear practical solutions, because the ones you gave thus far don't cut it in the real world, IMO.
I like using my phone (responsibly, in a dashboard mount) as a network-connected mapping/GPS device. If I'm heading to an event with a guest and running late, I like being able to ask a passenger to quickly use my phone to call ahead and let them know, etc, etc.
I'm all for attempts to keep people off their phones while they are driving (even when using a hands-free system, because there is quite a bit of evidence that just removing the button-pushing part doesn't help), but there are a lot of perfectly valid use cases that would be destroyed by either of your solutions.
> Still waiting to hear practical solutions, because the ones you gave thus far don't cut it in the real world, IMO.
That's because the real world is developing self driving cars, and they are relatively boring: there is no revenge in that, and they won't save the world.
I will frequently have my wife look up something on my phone or handle the GPS on it while I'm driving or take a call. These are perfectly reasonable and go against your two suggestions.
Further investment in public transport is one part of a solution (and has other benefits) but another part should be reducing the "always available" expectation.
Phone calls are almost always a huge intrusion. I'd rather they act, rather than a ringing phone, as more of an "x needs to speak with you, initiate call when convenient" alert. Then if they become unavailable, they can set a time or wait until your "ready" signal is active and contact you.
If parent commenter already wants to require tethering your phone and your car in order to disable the phone, I have little doubt they're okay with what they would likely describe as a small inconvenience to save lives.
Let's just ban cars altogether and everyone can walk everywhere they need to go. Not only would it be much safer for everyone in the short-term but the exercise would improve long term health as well.
No, let's just ban human-driven cars altogether. This is actually a good solution. Can't wait until the day it becomes reality.
In the meantime, maybe the society should start approaching driving cars the way they approach flying airplanes? That is, actually train the people operating the vehicle. Current driving license exams are a joke, and people still complain they're too difficult.
Every day large chunks of the world's population are able to drive safely to their destinations. We have illustrated an ability to do this year after year and yet there's this idea that the best solution to stopping accidents is to ban humans from the equation.
I agree with your thoughts on properly training people on how to drive a car - Western countries that have better driving training and safer cars score far better in deaths per 100k motor vehicles than poorer countries and this is something that can still be improved on. That I was able to get a manual license (in Australia) without needing to demonstrate a hill start to my tester is a complete joke.
I'm not saying that self-driving cars are a bad thing - I would happily set my car to autopilot while I cruise down the highway and eat lunch or take a phone call. I'd love the additional safety of having a system that can brake perfectly for me if I'm about to crash. Being able to take a tight park because I can just get out and then watch my car go into the space? Awesome.
However, to completely ban humans is going too far. Sure, be much harsher on those at fault in accidents where they've disabled a safety feature that could have provably stopped the accident. But don't take the "a few people are bad so let's stop everyone" approach to something that we've already demonstrated a high level of competency at.
> Every day large chunks of the world's population are able to drive safely to their destinations. We have illustrated an ability to do this year after year
Yes and no. The accident rate would I think be viewed as completely unacceptable in almost any other activity.
That I was able to get a manual license (in Australia) without needing to demonstrate a hill start to my tester is a complete joke.
Perhaps it would make you feel better to know that here in America, there is no distinction of licenses for a manual transmission. You can pass in an automatic and then drive whatever you want. So not only do you not have to demonstrate a hill start, you don't even have to know how to know how to use the clutch at all!
This is true in Australia too though you can take the test(s) with either transmission. e.g., you can pass your test in an automatic and then drive a manual.
Depends on your state. This isn't the case in Victoria. I think they split the licenses into auto and manual about 15 years ago.
This being said, I trained and passed in a manual car, and have driven an auto since. I at least know what the clutch is supposed to do, but I'm not exactly practised :)
I imagine that many accidents aren't due to poor training but poor discipline and lack of appreciation for the seriousness of the task at hand.
The fines for using your phone while driving are high and there are frequently advertising campaigns about it, but I still routinely see people (especially 16-45yo women) texting or calling in traffic.
> In the meantime, maybe the society should start approaching driving cars the way they approach flying airplanes?
And the training (and reassessment) in flying aeroplanes is ongoing, unlike most countries approach to driver education.
I passed my driving test(s) 20 years ago and since then there's been a huge number of changes in technology, laws, road layout, etc and yet my license is valid for another 30+ years.
I've heard that driver's ed in Germany is quite comprehensive and rigorous. Heck, even the yearly car checks are thorough (hey, you don't have a standard German first-aide kit in your car? Fail!).
Having insurance companies deny payouts when their insurant's distraction is the cause of an accident is a horrible idea that, in nearly all instances, will shift the cost onto their victims.
Few people can pay for repairs out of their own pockets. Are we going to garnish their wages or place a lien on their assets? Great, the repair will be paid for after the next car gets traded-in. The end result will be victims paying for it themselves, whether directly or through their insurance carriers.
Uninsured and even underinsured drivers create significant externalities that are shifted onto their victims. The last thing in the world we need to do is effectively create more of the little bastards.
There are many situations that it is necessary that I can know when someone has called or messaged me while I am driving, under which circumstances I need to pull over to the side of the road to respond/acknowledge the call/message. Cell phones these days are sometimes necessary, and there are situations where it is absolutely necessary that people respond to them, as long as it is done in a safe way, ie. pulling off the road somewhere that it is safe to do so.
You can restrict people from answering or responding to phones in certain situations (ie. driving), but there is absolutely no situation where you can restrict people from having them on or being alerted to them. In the case of movie theaters or even driving, a vibrate in my pocket is enough to satisfy this requirement, but by no means do I respond to it without putting myself into a safe situation, or a situation where I won't disrupt people, before doing so.
The problem with coming up with solutions to problems is that you need to also think about all the possible repercussions of said solution.
> Almost ALL problems have a technical/legislative solution for them.
Legislative solutions should only be considered as a last resort, not the first option. Pretty much all laws that I can think of come with unintended consequences, and sometimes create larger problems than they solve. Top examples: alcohol prohibition and the war on drugs.
Also, as you yourself pointed out, enforcement is a big issue requiring a lot of resources and placing a lot of responsibility (and also authority, that maybe they shouldn't have) on the police.
"Legislative solutions should only be considered as a last resort, not the first option."
I agree with you. I'm not one to advocate more laws or more state as I'm an anarcho-capitalist. But the point I was trying to make is that if people really wanted the state to fix this problem, it would be. Either through more laws, incentives, education, technology, whatever. (Side note: this assumes the state 100% does what the general public wants.)
> Start making sure that insurance companies have no payouts if the driver's phone was on X amount of time before the accident
Your insurance company will happily sue you for the payout and more if you were acting tortuously at the time of the accident. The purpose of insurance isn't to protect the driver, it's to protect the victim of an accident ("There's money and you'll get it").
> Require all vehicles to install cell phone tethers that have the driver's registered sim card in it
I have 1-3 mobile phones on me most times and share around 7 SIM cards between them. Also, what about cars with more than one driver?
> Almost ALL problems have a technical/legislative solution for them. The only real problem is that no one has either the resolve, balls, lawyers, political backing, or money to implement/require those technical/legislative solutions. So all we get are half-asses solutions with selective (and sometimes biased) enforcement by the police/courts.
Yeah, let's try totalitarianism again. This time we'll have the balls to get it right.
"The purpose of insurance isn't to protect the driver, it's to protect the victim of an accident"
Well, first of all. It depends on what kind of insurance, and who got it. What I'm saying is that all of the insurance that the reckless driver has, whether for himself, or for third-party damage, should be denied. That way it's ALL out-of-pocket for him, assuming the law finds him reckless and owes damages to the victims.
Now, of course. The victim should have their own insurance, if they're smart. So they are covered whether or not the reckless driver was insured, or his insurance pays out third parties for damage.
Of course, as one of the other posters mentioned above. "Poor reckless drivers won't be able to pay the victim, and this will hurt the victim." Well, I'm not an advocate of more-state, but if that's what tickles your fancy, then mandate insurance. Like, I asssume, they already do for third-party damage? I don't live in the US so I don't know about that.
"I have 1-3 mobile phones on me most times and share around 7 SIM cards between them. Also, what about cars with more than one driver?"
Well you're an exception. And if you think that's a reasonable argument against my solution, then you obviously didn't read it in its entirety, or you didn't understand it. If it's the latter, then I'm sorry I failed you. My point is that no one really wants to fix this problem, they just want to appear to fix it. Because if they really wanted to fix it, it would be fixed with whatever draconian/weird/unique/ballsy solution works.
a major problem preventing further adoption of mass-transit usage in my city is that it is so spread out. the Phoenix Metro area is huge and not overly dense. taking a bus or the "light-rail" would take 2 or 3 times longer than driving my truck.. Carpooling is still an option though, and a big help...
I got to play with these in Afghanistan. They were installed in our SUVs but they were so huge and unwieldy. I'd be interested in seeing what setup he had. Unless the traffic was very dense and slow, I'd imagine him just forcing calls to be dropped as he passed by which doesn't really seem helpful. Restaurants/theaters/anywhere-there-be-tweens, yeah bring it on in those locales!
They're (cellular frequency jammers) down to the size of a cigarette pack, and can run off 12V aux power in your car. Range isn't terribly great (~100ft).
Mods: I posted the link (which was the first google result for "cell phone jammer") just to show what the size and cost was. If it needs to be removed, please feel free to remove my comment in its entirety.
A friend has one of these compact models from China, and it works just as you'd expect. It will completely kill any and all cell phone connections (or WiFi, or Bluetooth) within a large room. Apparently it can run for several hours on battery, or the length of a long movie.
Historical aside: during the 'Troubles' in my part of the world, the creators of radio-triggered devices soon became wise to jammers and inverted the logic so that they detonated when a continuous signal was lost due to jamming.
You can do network-specific jamming really easily (P25, the dominant digital trunked police radios, can be locked out by reprogramming a toy pager to tie up the trunks, for about $20 and in the milliwatts...).
JIEDDO was generally trying to jam more than just cellphones, and wanted high assurance, and while they were in motion (so, you needed range).
I imagine you already know, but for everyone else, the full comedy of the P25 system can be found in "Why (Special Agent) Johnny (Still) Can’t Encrypt"[1] by Clark, Goodspeed & others.
Chapter 4 covers the DoS using a kid's wireless IM gadget
Also:
> "All users operated in the clear, but
gave an indication that they believed they were operating in encrypted mode. In some cases, this involved one user explaining to another how to set the radio to encrypted mode, but actually described the procedure for setting it to clear mode."
Any solution that tries to pry people from their amazing magic boxes is going to fail. They're too damn good and only getting better. We just need self-driving cars and VR(/AR).
There's also a lot of room for improvement on the UI-side of things. Ideally, drivers shouldn't need to touch their phones to access the data or service they want; everything I want to do in the car ought to be voice-accessible.
Does anyone here work for a wireless service provider? It would be interesting to hear how major sources of interference are identified and dealt with.
And to follow up on what TallGuyShort says, they most likely triangulate just as for amateur radio when looking for transmissions that violate regulations.
Or, come to think of it, if you know the transmitter goes down I-4 everyday, just sit by the side of the road with a receiver and watch signal strength. I-4 can be pretty crowded, but it shouldn't be hard to narrow it down as the signal gets stronger then starts to tail off.
No it isn't - in this case triangulation is the correct technique. Trilateration is when you measure distances. For instance, locating the epicenter of an earthquake is done by comparing the time at which various waves arrive, and making calculations based on the known speeds of those waves. Doing that with the speed of light at terrestrial distances is very tough and will be prone to inaccuracies and large errors. Instead, you measure the angles at which the signal is strongest, and that is triangulation.
I've dreamed of doing this for a decade, even found some sources in the U.K. to purchase a few and looked up schematics for building wideband jammers.
Ultimately it was the very serious approach the FCC takes that stopped me from really exploring it, even for fun. Everthing I'd read indicated that you'd be caught and fast, so I'm sort of surprised it took two years, even if it was on a highway.
But lord I still might push it whenever I'm at the grocery store and someone's doing a remote, live shopping list with their wife down every aisle.
Why is a husband and wife talking to each other in a grocery store so vexing? Is it only if one is remote, or have you also looked into the ramifications of muzzling fellow shoppers? Is it that you prefer to hear both sides of stranger's conversations?
I ask in a flippant way, just to highlight the incongruence, but I'm sincerely curious.
I think the image here in this person's mind is of someone bumbling around an isle, not looking where they're going (2 people tend to look around more and be more cogniscent of their environment, especially when the sounds they're listening to are coming from the environment (human voice, 3 feet away) and not a small box a few inches away)... and then occasionally yelling, "WHAT?!!?" into the phone when they can't hear.
> Is it that you prefer to hear both sides of stranger's conversations?
Yes. Hearing just one half is irritating, I think because I can't help expending brainpower on filling in the other side. A speakerphone conversation is much less annoying.
Really? Let's just hope nothing happens that requires someone to call 911 around you, finding themselves unable to and having emergency services be delayed.
Indeed. The odds of this happening are exponentially lower than causing a fatal accident by checking your phone in your car, but I appreciate the forced aghast sentiment expressed here.
Actually, it sounds like the FCC moves fast once they know about it.
MetroPCS finally had enough of the interference on April 29, 2013 and informs the FCC. They determined the likely location and started monitoring the route starting May 7. By May 9 they figured out which car it was coming from and coordinated with the local sheriff's office to stop the car, interview the driver, and confiscate the jammer. It was the driver in question that said he'd been using it for two years and dug his own grave so to speak, I don't actually see anything that says they have evidence that he was using it for 24 months beyond what he said (although maybe MetroPCS can back that up).
> But lord I still might push it whenever I'm at the grocery store and someone's doing a remote, live shopping list with their wife down every aisle.
My husband can be hopeless when he's shopping for groceries, go easy on him ;) There's a reason we use Instacart/Google Shopping Express and I'm the one usually shopping otherwise, but I appreciate any of his efforts to help me out.
There are a few more details in the FCC's official “Notice of Apparent Liability for Forfeiture,” which was released yesterday:
On June 14, 2013, agents from the Tampa Office tested the seized cell phone
jammer and confirmed that it was capable of jamming cellular and PCS
communications in at least three frequency bands: 821-968 MHz, 1800-2006 MHz,
and 2091-2180 MHz.
The real surprise here is that MetroPCS noticed the lack of service.
As someone who has used Cricket [they bundle Sprint and MetroPCS together] ... they couldn't care less about spotty reception within their given coverage map.
Note from Europe: fairly soon all cars will be required to include a mobile system with GPS that will automatically call the emergency services if the car is involved in an accident. This system is called "eCall".
"Agents from the FCC used direction finding techniques to find that strong wideband emissions were coming out of a blue Toyota Highlander SUV driven by Humphreys."
This I find interesting and am curious what devices they had to obtain in order to accomplish this.
I used to work for a telco that, to this day, continues to have this very issue with _someone_ in a remote rural location. By the time the NOC can inform local law enforcement the jammer has left the area, seemingly impossible to track.
Tracking radio signals with two spectrum analyzers, two Yagi type directional antennas is pretty trivial. If you know the probable location set up two (or more for a faster fix) people with gps units and their hand held antennas. Tell them the frequency and they can read back their headings (you know their position from GPS). After about 3 minutes of this you have the transmitter location to a precision of less than 12" if it isn't moving.
I think this person gave themselves away by being extremely regular about their behavior. If he was causing disruption on the commute every day for two years then they had plenty of time to work through the bureaucracy of getting the equipment out there and tracking it down.
I could imagine how you could cross-reference data from the towers and start seeing a pattern. You might even be able to track it to a specific location over time. Seems totally doable with access to enough information.
It was a strong radiator (perhaps broadband) and that makes it easy to geo-locate. You can use distributed mobile sensors and TDOA to pinpoint the location.
Does anyone know if it is illegal for the military to operate these within the United States? I'm not sure they're in use, but I did notice that an unreasonably high percentage of my phone calls were (perhaps coincidentally) dropped when I was on I-395 near the Pentagon.
Putting a sign up is not the equivalent to an FCC license. And if you're going to transmit radio waves, you'll need an FCC license (yes, there are exceptions and I'm vastly simplifying for this specific topic). Good luck with getting the FCC to grant you that license.
That's not to say that a movie theater or coffee shop couldn't passively attenuate cell phone signals with metallic paint or other equivalents to a giant Faraday cage. But ensuring that you're not being an ass with your radio transmissions is the FCC's specific task.
If you could ensure that the interference didn't extend pass your own property, I don't think there should be a problem. That's probably not how the FCC works though.
I don't see why it's like that at all. Am I not allowed to create a small faraday cage in my garage, and inside that test out a cell phone jamming device? Why does it matter if there's literally no measurable effect on the surrounding property?
I'm not a lawyer but I do read FCC regs for fun...
A passive faraday cage on your own property that's not open to the public probably isn't an issue. As far as size goes you would be subject to local building codes of course.
Once you get into active jamming however that requires you to transmit and to transmit you need a license from the FCC. The right to transmit anywhere in the US is under the FCC's jurisdiction and doesn't have anything to do with the landowner. It may seem strange to divorce airwave rights from property rights but it's not that different from water rights or mineral rights or airspace rights, which have a long legal history of being divorced from landowner rights.
When you open your faraday cage to the public it gets a little tricky too, because if a "licensee" has the legal right to be somewhere according to you and the legal right to transmit or receive according to the FCC then you can't really legally prevent them from doing both at the same time. This idea, which is called the "OTARD rule" in some situations, is interpreted to force landlords to allow tenants to install WiFi and satellite equipment on rented property for example.
There probably is an FCC rule that would prevent stores or movie theaters or similar public places from jamming via a Faraday cage, but since actively jamming is cheaper I am not aware of any actual instances of this type. So in that sense it's a test case, but I'm reasonably certain which way it would go.
> It may seem strange to divorce airwave rights from property rights but it's not that different from water rights or mineral rights or airspace rights
It seems very much different to me, because all of those things have very obvious externalities for your neighbors. My example, where you build a faraday cage and test a signal jammer inside that cage, has no externalities (assuming a hypothetical perfect faraday cage). There would be no measurable signal an inch outside the faraday cage, and certainly none at your neighbor's property.
I think that falls in a "it's not illegal if you don't get caught" scenario -- that is, unless you make an incomplete Faraday cage, the FCC would have no real means to catch you doing that. Also, since you wouldn't be jamming anyone else's signals, nobody would report you.
You'll find out real quick if you screwed up your Faraday cage design, though.
Yes it would be, however, you don't need clear big signs, you need a small piece of paper authorizing the transmission from the FCC.
If you have the right piece of paper you can push 100,000 watts. (Note, if you're pushing 100,000 watts, then you do need a clear big sign outlining the dangers of standing near a 100,000 watt microwave)
Definitely not. It would be hard to guarantee that jamming stopped at the perimeter of the property. Maybe interference is allowed under exception for industrial cases where there is no real way to prevent it but it is not acceptable for your given use cases.
As other people have said, jamming would certainly be illegal because of the potential for interference. However, they could fairly easily implement some kind of passive signal blocking. I know that a few schools, including the one I went to, install aluminium foil in the ceiling for this exact reason.
It does, yes. Actually schools have several of them. What i said was a knee jerk reaction to "actively attempting to make it impossible to use cell phones in a school", because two obvious good use-cases of them are 'school shooting and reporting it instantly'; and 'my teacher just collapsed, help'. But yes, footwork could help fix a medical emergency (run to the nurse / another teacher); and chances are, someone heard a gunshot somewhere or someone can get to a place where they can report the shooting.
It's almost certainly not legal to transmit in cellular bands without a license (other than for the intended use). FCC licenses I've seen have a 'do not interfere' clause, so even if you rigged your handset as a jammer it would likely be illegal.
The FCC does not even allow cell phone jammers at prisons. The Secret Service protecting the President is probably one of the few authorized users of cell phone jammers anywhere in the country.
No, I'm saying we're not all equal if such "special privileges" are granted to some special few individuals for one reason or another. Overall, it was a reference to the Animal Farm book.
But if you want to know if I think it's wrong for us to have inequality in the form of non-universal applications of morality or "law", then I'll answer with Yes.
As long as people recognize that, it's a good start. But I suspect a lot of people would do mental gymnastics to avoid accepting that governments privilege certain individuals.
If you don't like people driving and talking on their cell phones while driving near you then there is on easy solution. It is hard to find many good tech jobs near the radio observatory though, so this option might not be good for the HN crowd.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Qu...
My opinion is probably in the minority on this issue, but I think cell phones should be disabled by default near vehicles(Except for emergency services). As a stick-driver and motorcyclist, I see way too many distracted drivers. People will miss lights, swerve, and worse because of their cell phones.
The one thing that will help reverse this trend will be self-driving cars.
This completely ignores everyone considerate enough to car pool. One of the major advantages is being able to read emails, check news, etc. If you can't do anything on your phone, it kind of wrecks one of the major perks.
I can understand the desire. But at the same time, I use Spotify while I'm driving and it would be really annoying to me that a crazy spacebat with a jammer blocked my tunes. But as is pointed out already, I feel certain this would actually increase distracted driving.
On a related note, anyone know why cinemas don't have some form of shielding/Faraday caging to prevent people from making calls? You could shield just the movie halls themselves, so people can still make emergency calls from the lobbies.
I appreciate this guy's intent but he doesn't need to do this. Texting while driving is the leading cause of death for teens. The problem is fixing itself.
My impression that the biggest domestic market for these is hotel operators, who secret them around the premises to force their customers to be gouged by the hotel phone.
I can't believe this is true, since such persistent, immobile jammers would be trivial to locate (and presumably would be -- cell providers track down problems as the OP's article attests), and hotels would have so much to lose from being caught, and so little to gain by doing it.
I know of a dentist who has one to stop patients using their phones. As someone who works in a hospital, I can see his point. People answer their phones in the middle of procedures. Some even make calls during them.
I don't know, but we have several signs and yet I have still needed to ask patients to stop. It probably happens once or twice a month. Not quite as frequent is those who try to video their procedure. While I get irritated, I'd get more bothered by not being able to make or receive calls myself if a jammer was installed. A good compromise is to have patients seated near an MRI Faraday cage - it works just as well and doesn't break laws.
I don't know if you noticed this but in my area most of retail stores have terrible cellphone reception. I'm assuming they put cell jammers in their store too
