Abusing technology to gather and monetize data that reveals users' "pattern of life" used to be limited to tech companies. Now that the tech industry rot has spread into other traditionally unrelated industries the abuse becomes systemic. We are now seeing the results of the spreading rot as a fundamental shift in our economic system from capitalism based on mass-production and financialization into surveillance capitalism[1].
We are already seeing entire industries shift from their traditional business models into surveillance oriented data. After a critical mass of businesses pivot to surveillance capitalism, the rest of the market becomes strongly incentivized to also become a surveillance capitalism style business or risk being left behind unable to participate in the new market.
Thanks for reminding me, that book has been on my list of "I should get around to reading..." for a while. It's a long slog, but seems more and more relevant.
I really like Snowden's recommended Faraday cage for phones or other devices of similar size: two drink-shaker cups[1].
Drink shakers are cheap and widely available. The average hotel room in any medium/large hotel chain probably includes a shaker as a standard item as part of the minibar. The simple two-cup style (as seen in [1]) is preferred over the fancier "strainer top" style because you can press the two cups together; this should cause the inner cup to slightly cut into and/or deform the outer cup along the circle where they join together. The seal between the cups should work sort of like the knife-edge seals used in vacuum chambers.
A metal box or conductive bag is only a Faraday cage if it is fully closed/sealed. Any imperfection in the seal or hole[2] might allow the radio signal to leak out. Most improvised items (freezer, random metal box, etc) have poor seals. Making a high quality cage that actually block a modern phone can be done without much trouble, but the drink shaker method is the only method I know of that will do the job using widely available (free) or very cheap ($10-ish?) parts.
I admit the vast majority of my experience with hotels consists of a single repeated data point: the staff[1] suite(s) we shared in the Hilton attached to the SJ convention center. They always had glasses/shaker/etc. You could probably ask for a shaker from roomservice or the hotel bar, if necessary.
[1] If you registered for FanimeCon 2000-2011, the weird software you had to use was my fault...
I've stayed in over a hundred, frequently in suites (upgrades), often at 4* hotels, in 22 countries (Full set of brands - Marriot, Hyatt, JW, etc...) Ice Buckets are pretty common - but I have never once seen a drink shaker in a room mini-bar.
Depends what the tin and shaker are made of. The tin is probably made of aluminum which has a higher skin depth than stainless steel, which I assume the shaker cups are made of. A Faraday cage of continuous surface needs walls that are thicker than the skin depth of the material the cage is made of. Since the skin depth of stainless steel is lower, the cage wall thickness can be lower while still creating an effective Faraday cage compared to an aluminum cage.
If you're interested in simple cages similar in effectiveness to the EDEC Window Pouch (they drop off above 3GHz)... try a Microwave Oven. They are highly available, reasonably convenient and well designed, with pretty good quality control. You can even still see your phone inside has zero bars. I do, however, recommend unplugging the microwave (or even cutting the power cord) as a fire would likely result from cooking your hardware.
To answer [2] How big are the waves you're trying to block? - it's actually crack length not width that usually determines the effective re-radiating antenna length. They can be very narrow, but a long (a few cm) crack will allow one polarization through almost completely.
I've run this test with a GSM base station and confirmed the effectiveness. If you want to test communication with a device to a base station, but have many other local antennas interfering and want to fit many devices inside... it's a decent choice. The alternatives are less convenient and usually thousands of dollars to construct.
The door seals in most microwave ovens consist of tuned slots (eg half-wave stubs) to prevent the RF escaping. These are ineffective at frequencies other than 2.4Ghz.
The reason for the tuned slots is that it's basically impossible to make a conventional metal joint which will seal sufficiently well.
I encourage you to test a few. I found that the cheap ones blocked 2.45GHz ~60dB, but that they were still down 40dB at 600MHz... the real problems were at higher frequencies and 5GHz was only down ~20-30dB at the worst case polarization. I tried using RF absorbing tape, but while it's possible to improve another 10-20dB it's painful and not repeatable without testing, if you need to remove it.
I've also worked in RF Antenna test rooms with seals that are expensive, finicky, and easy to damage... they're also at least $10k and usually much much more. In a corporate environment that's not a problem, but for a home lab it's unrealistic.
If these bags were big enough to put a few phones and a small base antenna in they'd have other uses.
There are two important differences between light and radio waves:
Difference 1 is the wavelength. Light has a wavelengths of 400-700nm, whereas radio waves used by phones have wavelengths in the mm and cm range.
If structures are of similar size to the wavelength, then waves can "bend around" obstacles. This effect is called diffraction and can be observed with sound waves, electromagnetic waves, water waves, etc.
Difference 2 is the photon energy / frequency. How well radiation is absorbed depends on the photon energy. There are lots of molecules that absorb visible light very well, so it's easy to make surfaces that absorb light. But there are few things that absorb radio waves as well, so it's hard to make things that neither reflect nor transmit radio waves.
How much EM radiation bounces and how much it gets absorbed is highly variable depending on the material and, most importantly, the frequency of the EM radiation. A great example in this article is the faraday bag that was visibly transparent but blocked the EM radiation in the 1-6gHz range. The metal tin was basically the opposite, it blocked visible radiation very effectively but not radiation in the radio frequency range.
A couple of right angles not really make it light tight either.
I remember going caving and we would have to go 100m or more through many different turns before we all turned our lamps off and truly experienced perfect dark.
The last time I used a daylight tank was in the mid '90s so maybe newer models are different, but I believe they are made out of black/dark plastic? Several right angle turns of black plastic provides multiple opportunities for a visible-light photon to be absorbed into a black body where it should be re-radiated as infrared (heat).
A hole/leak in the metal wall of a Faraday cage is going to be a lot more reflective and can easily act like a crude waveguide[1].
Also, 20-30 Db of attenuation for light is already quite a lot. Whilst for a radio signal it is still very conceivable that 30Db of attenuation still allows for a signal to be received.
Our eyes simply aren't very sensitive instruments. And the visible part of the spectrum is uncharacteristically full of 'noise', so it makes some sense that our eyes don't need to detect any signals that are too far below the noise-floor.
That makes me wonder. How much 'darker' is any given bit of radio spectrum as compared to the visual spectrum earth at night.
I take umbrage with that statement! Our eyes are exquisitely sensitive, and most importantly, have staggering dynamic range.
Our eyes are capable of perceiving a single photon [1], albeit noisily (I've been lucky enough to have performed this experiment myself!).
But the greatest thing about our eyes is the dynamic range: the difference in brightness between a moonless, starry night (which we are perfectly capable of navigating by eyesight) and a bright sunny day is nine orders of magnitude. A bright day is a billion times brighter!
Show me an RF receiver or light camera with that dynamic range!
The one place our eyes are limited is in frequency range.
I knew the dynamic range was large. I did not know about the sensitivity! That is quite impressive.
The magnitude of the dynamic range is even more impressive if converted to 'stops' from photography, yielding about 30 stops (1 stop halves the light). Whereas a really good camera will do about 15 stops.
Though I suppose that the camera gets 15 stops in a single 'scene'. Whilst the 30 stop figure for the human eye does not hold up if half your vision is taken up by daylight and the other half by a night sky. For a single 'scene' I think it becomes hard to define the dynamic range of a human eye though.
What does this mean? A fragment of a radio wave is still a radio wave and can carry information irrespective of whether reed solomon or other encoding is used, no?
If the signal gets choppy and you miss some of it, how do you know what you missed?
`..--- -.... ----- -----` (2600) could come through as `..- -. —` (Uno). Uno is a valid word, so passes validation, but it’s the wrong message.
What Reed-Solomon allows us to do is pad the message with n% of error correcting ‘bits’. That way, if >100-n% of the message gets through, the whole message can be reconstructed from whatever bits that made it. And if not enough of the message made it, it immediately fails the validation check and so you know you must resend the message.
It’s so handy and so solid that it’s used almost everywhere. From optical discs to ECC ram to radio communications and a bunch more.
Microwave wavelength lower than visible light. It interacts with atoms differently by interacting with magnetic fields in atoms more.
There is:
- lines-of-sight propagation in free space,
- reflect from the surfaces like light (spectacular reflection)
- microwaves can be channeled trough tubes (think sound waves). If you fold a conductive material like tin foil multiple times, it can still work as a wave guide and escape.
I think the issue is then you have to wait until you are already inside the hotel to use those shakers, which as others have said don’t actually exist in most hotels, and at that point you have been tracked to your exact location. Then it would be trivial to surveil you with other methods without needing your phone.
Pretty sure Google uses dead reckoning geolocation tracking when no signal is available. So as long as your phone is outside of the bag at some point, you're being tracked even when the phone is in the bag, and Google can correct any errors in their dead reckoning calculations once a signal is found.
It's possible, but I'd be surprised. Dead reckoning is terribly inaccurate. To get briefly acceptable accuracy, you need extremely precise sensors that you are reading very very quickly (which would make battery life plummet).
At one company I worked at we had an 'out of coverage bucket'. It was a zinc plated steel bucket. Worked almost every time. Some dude had found at an arts and craft store a very small version of the same thing. It fit over phones perfectly. Basically put device on ground. Put bucket over it. If you had any gaps or any cables hanging out it was sort of iffy and you would get coverage sometimes.
The "We'll There's Your Problem" podcast had a interesting episode[1] about the Hillsborough disaster.
> a large fluid mass
Apparently mosh pits are an ideal gas. From [2]:
>> ... we examined the 2D speed distribution; previous observations of human pedestrian traffic and escape panic led us to expect a broad distribution not well described by simple analytic expressions. However, the measured speed distribution in mosh pits wads well fit by the equilibrium speed distribution of classical 2D gassed, otherwise known as the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.
> The first way in which science is of value is familiar to everyone. It is that scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things. Of course if we make good things, it is not only to the credit of science; it is also to the credit of the moral choice which led us to good work. Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it. Such power has evident value — even though the power may be negated by what one does.
> I learned a way of expressing this common human problem on a trip to Honolulu. In a Buddhist temple there, the man in charge explained a little bit about the Buddhist religion for tourists, and then ended his talk by telling them he had something to say to them that they would never forget — and I have never forgotten it. It was a proverb of the Buddhist religion: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.”
> What, then, is the value of the key to heaven? It is true that if we lack clear instructions that determine which is the gate to heaven and which the gate to hell, the key may be a dangerous object to use, but it obviously has value. How can we enter heaven without it? The instructions, also, would be of no value without the key. So it is evident that, in spite of the fact that science could produce enormous horror in the world, it is of value because it can produce something.
> Well, because it simply doesn't work for them: returning from a function does not trigger the EXIT signal.
It doesn't trigger EXIT, but it does trigger RETURN. Just trap both:
#!/bin/bash
foo() {
trap "echo 'Cleanup!'" RETURN EXIT
#return
#exit
echo "Kill me with ^C or \"kill $$\""
while true ; do : ; done
}
foo # should print 'Cleanup!' on SIGTERM,
# returning, or calling exit
Depictions of the Tsar Bomba usually focus on the huge mushroom cloud, which is awesome (in the original "causing awe or terror" meaning of the word). However, I think the geometric simplicity of the fireball is even more effective at inspiring awe.
For a brief moment, the sky was filled with the light of a human-made star.
I used to believe that. It seemed obvious to me and a phd chemist friend of mine that - as you say - the different reputations were a cultural/social creation. The drink itself was just different amounts of ethanol.
Then one day that chemist friend of mine decided to get a bottle of Hornitos Reposado. We usually preferred a good bourbon or weird herbal stuff[1]. We drank most of the bottle, but that wasn't unusual for us at the time[2]. We were intending on a normal evening of video games. MTG, and/or VtES. Instead... we ended up spending the evening having the stupidest, most aggressive, pointless, childish, "macho" argument of our lives. It was shockingly out of character for us. The amount of ethanol consumption wasn't large, and we drank it at a normal rate. Both of us had been a LOT drunker in the past. The only significant difference was our unusual choice of tequila.
While I agree that the cultural preconceptions are probably responsible for most of the effect, there is at least some truth behind the reputations of different types of alcoholic beverages, because the actual drink isn't just ethanol. The different brewing/distilling/aging processes produce different amounts congeners[3][4]; their psychological effects might be small, but small effects amplified through social mechanisms are how "culture" is created.
> In many ways that makes these rumor filled, science light, unsubstantiated media stories about “this is the most dangerous drug ever” incredibly irresponsible.
Hear, hear!
> moral panic over Four Loko ... amaro and coffee
Yah, people have probably started putting whisky (Irish or otherwise) in their coffee the morning after they invented the whisky. Also, you probably have to drink the entire giant can of Four Loko to get the same caffeine in a typical cup of coffee.
> Yet it never caused moral panic until the “wrong type of people” started consuming it.
It's disturbing how often this kind of bs ends up just being a fancy form of racism/sexism/${targeted_group}ism
[1] e.g. Pernod, Herbsaint, Chartreuse
[2] Yes, we were regularly drinking WAY too much. 375ml/day/person minimum. WAY WAY WAY too much...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congener_%28beverages%29 "These substances include small amounts of chemicals such as methanol and other alcohols (known as fusel alcohols), acetone, acetaldehyde, esters, tannins, and aldehydes (e.g. furfural)."
[4] Also, the different amounts of sugars means different effects on bloodsugar/insulin/etc. The resulting effects are probably complicated and difficult to explain, but their contribution to the different reputations might be larger than we expect.
I still would urge caution before taking any amount of SSRI[1]. They are very useful tools that work well for many people, but some people do get very serious side effects. They can also be difficult to stop, sometimes requiring very slow dose tapering over many months.
In my personal experience from both a multi-year experience with fluoxetine and (~5 years later) a short (~4-weeks-ish? I think?) experience with tramadol, there were serious side effects that lasted many months after I stopped taking the drug. I think I was still getting regular 'brain zaps' for almost a year.
Every medication requires weighing the expected benefits vs the adverser effects and risks. I'm not saying SSRIs/etc are bad. I just urge caution and respecting them like the powerful tools they are. Powerful tools - like SSRIs, opiates, or a table saw - are great if you need them, but you do need to understand them properly or you might loose a finger.
(that said, any SSRI side effects is almost certainly a better option than dying from covid, but... seriously... get vaccinated and do what you can (masks, limiting crowds, etc) so you - and the people you interact with - hopefully don't get covid at all)
[1] or anything that messes with serotonin like the SNRIs, SNDRIs, MDMA and related phenethylamines, or even stuff like the painkiller tramadol (it's also an SNRI)
I'm sorry to hear of those troubles. Yes, I'd have said some of the same things minus the direct experience if I were to give my opinions -- just wanted to counter where the GP comment seemed unreasonable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
"Welcome to Life"