Comment by jolmg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jolmg | Hacker News Reader

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> This an advertisement for their RF phone cases

This is on ieee.org. The article mentioned this[1] other test by the Chicago Tribune. This isn't purely an advertisement though it serves that purpose a bit.

It's disputed because they only tested 2 iPhones.

> There are reasons to take the results with a grain of salt, however. McCaughey clarified that Penumbra supplied RF Exposure Labs with one iPhone 7 and one iPhone 11 Pro for the tests—phones the company had purchased off the shelf. He attributed not testing more phones to the cost of purchasing multiple iPhones

This is also important:

> More notably, when the FCC conducted a follow-up investigation after the Tribune published its story, the agency did not find evidence that any of the phones exceeded SAR limits. That said, while the Tribune and Penumbra both used off-the-shelf phones, the FCC largely tested phones supplied by the manufacturers, including Apple.

It raises the question whether Apple and others supplied the FCC with phones that are different from what they sell.

[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/investigations/ct-cell-phone-...

> the FCC largely tested phones supplied by the manufacturers, including Apple.

That weasel word “largely” isn’t helpful. They either only tested supplied phones, which may raise suspicions; or they also tested phones sourced from other channels, however insignificantly, suggesting problems with the third-party tests, or they would have noticed the anomaly. “Largely” ostensibly points to the latter, but it could also mean “we don’t know”.

A lot of these smartphones go through imperical tests in an anechoic chamber managed by a third party lab to see if they’re bellow the allowed levels in each band. That sounds hackish but (IMO) isn’t the end of the world.

What weirds me out is that they’ll send them to these third party labs and repeatedly test some small number (possibly one) of devices until it’s right up against what’s allowed. That feels less than scientific and probably wrong although I’m not sure what I’d change.

The main problem with all this kind of testing is how little precision there is.

“Double the energy limit” sounds a lot, but for a lot of these labs that’s inside of the error range of their equipment.

I’m sure Apple has their own test chambers.

The "conspiracy" portion of my brain makes me wonder if it's possible that Apple phones have lower power levels if the location services determines that the phone is in a location with a known anechoic chamber. There can't be that many of them.

Such behavior has already been shown by automobile manufacturers during the "diesel-gate" incidents.

You don’t have to do that, usually you’ll run special test firmware on the device and say that this behaves appropriately (I’ve done this for other companies)

Remember that this is fundamentally a legal/social thing that involves engineering/science and not the other way around.

Right, you're supposed to test to the worst case and you get to define "worst case." Cheating would be as simple as defining a favorable "worst case."

Before the tin-foil crowd calls regulators stupid, I'd like to point out that in the absence of cheating this allows hardware engineers to do a better job & design a system that is robust to software shenanigans. That's a nice thing. Maybe we cannot have nice things, but if so, let's prove it rather than presuppose it.

I'd estimate the likelihood of cheating by looking to see if people are choosing phones on the basis of EIRP the way they choose cars based on MPG. I don't see that happening, so I estimate that the likelihood of cheating is low, and would vote to keep the cooperative model around.

This story isn’t strictly a submarine story but pg has stated a PR agency is a great marketing investment . I also saw at least a dozen articles that were similar using DuckDuckGo. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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