Less Radiation

The Sunday Times’s InGear supplement reports today - Microwave beam weapons are coming soon.

Mark Harris reports that the Home Office are investigating the potential of these weapons, and the Scientific Development Branch will publish a report sometime next month.

These weapons come under the broad description of Active Denial Systems or ADS. They can focus a beam of Microwave RF at an individual (or group) 500 yards away that causes the victim to feel an incapacitating burning sensation.

The US based Raytheon comapny are behind a prototype weapon called Silent Guardian. The original version was vehicle mounted and weighed several tons. As with so many things, miniaturisation is the goal. They have already scaled the device down to backpack size, although battery requirements will mean it won’t be incorporated in the next Nokia mobile!

Apparently they have done over 10,000 test firings on willing human volunteers… I wonder how much that job payed? Anyway, they say that 99% of people, who expressed a preference, said ‘it was jolly uncomfortable’. The weapon is designed to be fired in short bursts of between one and six seconds at a range of several hundred yards - during testing one unlucky soul got much too close and the resulting burns required skin grafts. Eek.

One thought does occur to me though. If it fits in a rucksack and you need to be several hundred yards away to avoid getting burnt, then what happens to the poor bastard doing the firing? Even with a silver coated bobbinet all-in-one romper suit and a big old earthing strap, that’s got to be bloody dangerous. Can it be operated by remote control? I’m guessing that this item could also be pretty good at upsetting a room full of computers several hundred yards away too? Now that could be fun!

Apparently the Home Office don’t have plans to give it to the village Bobby just yet, but surely it’s only a matter of time… The US Air Force is claimed to be one of the first paying customers for the system.

Just another tale from a Crazy World.

The Nintendo DS must be one of the most popular handheld games consoles of all time. My six year old son absolutely adores his.

Maybe you’ve got kids and they love their DS’s too?

Okay, I have a question for you. Would you let your six year old child sit 12 inches away from a constantly transmitting wireless access point for 1 hour?

Would you let them sit 1 metre away from three full-on data swapping access points for an hour?

It’s a kind of sick question really. We know there may be a risk and it’s sensible to adopt the ‘precautionary principle’ advocated by the Stewart Report of 2000 (They said kids under 8 shouldn’t have mobiles, full-stop. WiFi & mobiles are exactly the same at this level).

Okay, here’s the thing. When a Nintendo DS is being played by a kid on his own it gives out no WiFi signal at all. But when you have two or more children playing against each other, in multi-player games - they turn into ad-hoc wireless access points. One DS becomes the pseudo access point, and the other clients. Large amounts of data are being transferred - much more than an average little-used regular WiFi point would emit. In multi-player mode the Nintendo DS can be a source of potentially dangerous Electrosmog.

Studies carried out in 2008 have conclusively revealed that mobile phone radiation wrecks the quality of sleep in adults an hour before bedtime. The WiFi in the DS will produce the same effect in your kids.

By all means let your kids use their DS before bedtime, but don’t let them play multi-player games against their siblings!

If you’re really concerned, don’t let them use the wireless features of the DS at all.

If your children are having trouble sleeping, trouble concentrating at school & showing unexplained signs of Autism, then this is one more thing you could try eliminating for a short time, while hunting for the solution.

Of course, if you live in a home jam-packed full of DECT phones, DECT baby alarms, WiFi routers & PCs, Video Senders, you can safely ignore our advice, as it will make very little difference…

No, we’re not suggesting getting your mobile phone wet.

New Scientist magazine reported yesterday - researchers have put up several Bluetooth monitoring points around Bath town centre. As around 50% of people that own mobiles walk around with Bluetooth enabled, the researchers were able to track peoples movements and social interactions around the town centre. (For ‘Social Interaction’ read - blokes beaming porn to each other in the pub.)

Vassilis Kostakos from the University of Bath sited four Bluetooth transmitters in the city centre. If you live in Bath and were wondering why your battery has been going flatter quicker, now you know why.

Vassilis’s tracking stations have been beaming out Bluetooth Inquiry Requests to every phone with Bluetooth enabled, and each time a visible Bluetooth phone receives an Inquiry Request it transmits a packet back to the device querying it. This packet contains the phones unique Bluetooth OUI, which is burned into each cellphones firmware.

The OUI is in the form 00:11:22:33:55:FF and the first 3 pairs identify the manufacturer of the device. Also, they would be able to collect your phone name, which is the identifier you can edit yourself - a lot of people change this to their real name, or nickname.

Of course it’s also possible to track someone using the regular GSM phone signal, by using several masts to triangulate the signal - but this is only good to a few hundred metres in the most ideal conditions - and unlike Bluetooth tracking, it’s not easy for an amateur to setup.

Vassilis’s experiment proves that using a combination of GSM & Bluetooth, you could track an individual at close range. If you were privy to the phone companies inside information you could look up the IMEI number in their database to find the home address of any individual… hypothetically of course!

Bluetooth is normally a short range technology, 10 metres for most phones and 100m for Bluetooth on a PC. However, our own experiments with modified USB Bluetooth dongles & external antennas show that you can pickup the signals from Bluetooth devices comfortably at 700 metres with a directional dish antenna.

On their website they say that this research will help monitor the interactions of prisoners within the jail environment. We don’t really buy that justification. Expect to see it coming to a town near you soon! ( In case you didn’t know. Our country is full of dangerous terrorists, and they all need tracking. Now.)

Today’s Mail on Sunday magazine ‘You’ poses the question: ‘Are you sleeping with the enemy?’

Yes, another mainstream magazine dares to link Mobiles, Wifi routers and other electronic devices with poor sleep. In the article Dr Chris Idzikowski, director of the Edinburgh Sleep Centre, says that, ‘ There’s more than sufficient evidence that mobile phone exposure an hour before bedtime adversely affects deep sleep ‘.

Others in the article report the classic fuzzy-mindedness that over-use of RF emitting gadgets can bring on. The article suggests that you turn off your mobile at bedtime.

While this is good advice, not a single mention is made of the danger from DECT cordless phones. The article states that a Mobile left on the bedside table will talk to the cell tower every ten minutes or so - well in our experience it’s more like every half an hour, for a five second burst. That isn’t going to disrupt your sleep. However, having a DECT cordless phone near your bed almost certainly will.

If you didn’t already know: the DECT cordless phone’s base station - the main docking point, if you have several handsets - gives out a constant pulse of RF, all the time. Even when you’re not talking on the handset. Keeping it a few feet from your head, while trying to sleep, is not such a good idea. Nor should you have a DECT base unit next to the home PC you use for hours at a time. All those hours you spend feet from a DECT cordless docking station really could leave you feeling completely ‘Spaced Out’.

So, while the article in the Sunday Mail is undoubtedly well intentioned, it could have payed more attention to DECT.

Originally published in The Independent newspaper back in January 2008.

Using up all those free minutes before bedtime can seriously disrupt your sleep pattern. This is the conclusion of researchers in Sweden & the USA, in a properly controlled trial.

Critics from the mobile industry were quick to dismiss the effect as ‘no worse than having a coffee at bedtime’. But, up until very recently they insisted that no non-thermal effects existed with mobiles - now it seems that they’ve changed their tune…

Full original article from The Independent.

Micro Mart magazine reports this week that OFCOM have given British airlines the go-ahead to install phone masts (picocells) on planes. The picocells will be switched off for take-off & landing, and will only be activated above 10,000 feet. The report states that BMI & Ryanair plan to install the technology soon. Great. Recycled air & electrosmog.

Dubai based airline Emirates has become the first airline to allow in-flight mobile calls. The specially converted A340 has shielding to prevent interference to the sensitive in-flight systems. This could be a really good money earner for Emirates. Good luck guys…

A New Scientist article this week reports.

Researchers in Helsinki have shown that 10 female volunteers exposed to 900MHz signals for 1 hour all showed altered protein expression in their skin cells. Interestingly, 580 different proteins were tested, and all ten women showed raised levels of one protein and suppressed levels of a second.

While similar results have been previously observed in cultured cells, this is the first study to show this effect on humans. While this doesn’t show any harm being caused it does rather overturn ICNIRP’s constantly repeated assertion that no non-heating effects exist with mobiles.

The author of the report now plans a larger study to identify the actual proteins involved and any ramifications for human health.