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IP: More on Cell Phone Jamming Goes Legit In Japan
From: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1998 03:21:33 -0500
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 1998 23:31:10 -0500 To: farber () cis upenn edu From: "David P. Reed" <dpreed () reed com> Subject: Re: IP: Cell Phone Jamming Goes Legit In Japan Dave - re the eagerness of people to jam phones: am I the only person who used to carry a pager for the sole reason of being reached in emergencies by my family; I now carries a cell phone for that purpose? Not all wireless devices are "chains to one's employer" or "toys for phone addicts" (do I seem defensive?) Can I sue a theater for jamming reception on my cell phone if my babysitter cannot reach me in an emergency, thus causing serious risk if I cannot (for example) authorize proper emergency procedures? This situation has come up twice for me personally in the years I have carried a pager. I am extremely careful to use the silent, vibrating ringer on my phone at all times, and I don't answer my phone if the caller id indicates an unimportant call, so why are we seeing the need for busybodies to interfere with my ability to be notified, thus causing serious risk of harm? I'd be happy to have a compromise solution that, for example, announces to callers that the phone user is in a quiet zone, and not ring through unless the caller indicates urgency, but these non-discretionary jammers in a kludge class about as bad as Internet firewalls. Like firewalls, which were invented mainly because many Unix systems features were designed badly and thus impossible to secure (see Cheswick and Bellovin's comments on this point), the cell jammer is a solution to a problem caused by an old bad design that didn't scale (no one assumed that cell phones would be common enough to worry about annoyance, so the systems infrastructure has no way to resolve annoyance issues), implemented by patches at a level that does not have the ability to discriminate at the right semantic level (who knows what a value a call might have? Certainly not the owner of a concert hall.) I'd like to have the cell phone mfrs. produce a feature in cell phones that put out a loud periodic tone when they detect jamming or other systematic interference with service. The user can thus be made aware of jamming that might be a problem, and the manager of the establishment would then turn on the jammer at their own risk. Thus countermeasures lead to counter-countermeasures. I'd pay $50 at least for such a device, unless it came from the jammer manufacturers, who should pay me for my cost of carrying it. - David
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- IP: More on Cell Phone Jamming Goes Legit In Japan Dave Farber (Dec 11)