Using Aluminum Oxide Paint To Secure Wi-Fi 271
eldavojohn writes "The BBC reports on people using aluminum oxide in their paint to block Wi-Fi signals from leaving their home or business. Aluminum oxide resonates at the same frequency as Wi-Fi signals and other radio waves, blocking data from going outside a building. It's not a flawless solution, as it may also block AM/FM signals. You or your neighbors may be unwittingly using this already, as most pre-finished wood flooring uses aluminum oxide as a protective coating."
Does not resonate with me (Score:5, Insightful)
Dunno where they got the crap about "resonates".
The paint might act as an electrostatic shield, or as a lossy dielectric, both effects that will attenuate RF signals.
But resonate, no.
What is so hard about using WPA2? (Score:5, Insightful)
You select WPA2-PSK in your router's config, press "generate key", make a note of the generated key, connect your laptop to the encrypted WLAN, enter the key, done. No beacon disabling, radio frequency shielding, MAC filtering, DHCP disabling or other nonsense necessary. It's like people are trying to test every option but the right one.
Re:Extra protection? (Score:5, Insightful)
If I were a science teacher, I think I would have a weekly contest "What's wrong with this?". I'd give all the kids a website, newspaper article, creationist newsletter (probably lose my job over that one but oh well), etc... and have them come up with a list of all the reasons that it is nonsense. Start with easy stuff (like the difference between EM and Ionizing radiation) and move to more challanging things later (like what a valid sample size is). We need to expose kids to the idea that not everything they read is gospel, to think critically about what they read and see and actually apply their education.
Re:Cellphone reception? (Score:5, Insightful)
Helpful hint for posters: if you don't know a damned thing about physics, don't answer questions as if you do.
Helpful hint for moderators: if you don't know a damned thing about physics, don't mod up posts full of word-salad wharrgarbl like "intra-molecular impedance."
http://www.howeverythingworks.org/prints.php?topic=microwave_ovens&page=4 [howeverythingworks.org]
Re:Extra protection? (Score:2, Insightful)
There's an idea for a startup - a company that creates additional homework for parents to give their children to make up for deficiencies in what their school teaches them.
Re:Cellphone reception? (Score:2, Insightful)
Was this in the USA? The reason is that doing this, while so very nice to prevent the idiots who don't know how to put their phones on vibrate from bothering everyone else, is also highly illegal.
The reason is that it can interfere with emergency calls even outside the building. The FCC can impose fines on the order of thousands of dollars per day that such a system is active.
There are moves afoot to try to get special exemptions to jam cell phone communications (prisons are another example) but so far it is still very illegal to run a jammer in the USA.
Re:Extra protection? (Score:3, Insightful)
No major school system would ever allow this. If you teach them not to believe everything you read, the next step is they don't believe everything they are told. If they don't believe everything they are told, they don't assume their teachers and administrators are correct, and should automatically be listened to and obeyed. As the average modern American school has nothing to do with educating, and everything to do with babysitting, it would be very dangerous to the comfortable low expectations their students and the student's parent's have.
Re:Cellphone reception? (Score:3, Insightful)
You see people on call (like Sysadmins, Doctors etc...) and people who feel a need to be reached on short notice for personal reasons (parents of small children), no longer saw that theater as an option for dates. This might not be a problem in some places but because of the lower pay scales (and hence higher relative cost of movie tickets) here, those affected were a major proportion of the theater's customer base.
Remember before cell phones? You could watch a whole movie in the theater without interruption? Your 3 year old was with the teenage babysitter, and if they both died or your house burned down, you wouldn't know until you got back home. Sysadmins didn't go to the movies because they would have gotten their asses kicked, and doctors were so fucking rich that they just bought the new releases and watched them at home when they were on call.
Yet somehow everything worked out just fine. If there was an emergency, you had to call the theater and have the attendant go and find the person you wanted to talk to. But that was for real life-or-death emergencies... if you were on call, you weren't at the movies, you were sleeping at the hospital or inside the mainframe.
Ah, the good old days... when it wasn't socially acceptable to be a self-important dipshit with a cell phone.