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Comment by aDyslecticCrow | Hacker News Reader

> blocking/jamming the specific wireless traffic would be pretty interesting, if possible.

And probably highly illegal.

At the end of the day, legality is what society settles as an acceptable way of running itself when all the stakeholders reluctantly agree or at least don't protest too much. Right now the 'costs' are sufficiently low that no one cares. As with most things, I suspect that there is a threshold ( though likely much higher than I have previously anticipated ) at which normal person would be unwilling to go as if anything changed.

Nobody cares? Here (sweden) its illegal to possess outside of military use. The US seems to give fines between 20-200 thousand $ for its usage and potential imprisonment for its sale. Even overboosting wifi routers for better range gets people in trouble.

It's among the most illegal things you could easily do with basic electronics equipment.

why? Part of it is historical; it used to be complicated, so being in possession of one got you in trouble with the anti terrorism squad.

These days; it's because it can block emergency services, police and military radio, and burglary alarms.

They may be lenient for a nerd playing with a router but the law its not on your side when push comes to shove.

https://legalclarity.org/are-signal-jammers-illegal-in-the-u...

This is overstating the case. In the US you can buy such devices (usually from Aliexpress but Amazon has devices capable of some jamming/deauth). They are illegal to use for intentional jamming of other people’s equipment. However, unless you go around jamming important safety equipment or making local hams angry then nothing will happen. The FCC has its hands full and can’t even seem to address persistent issues on the ham bands until they get really bad.

Deauth attacks weer common in the Google Glasses days. Nobody got arrested as far as I can remember.

Yeah, true. Implementing this would be tricky.

Implementing it is trivial. you can just overlook the radio from openWRT and drown out every 2.4-2.5 gHz device in a 100M radius.

Doing it targeted is more difficult since it does frequency hopping, but you could probably reverse the frequency hopping algorithm to target specifically Bluetooth and force high packet loss.

This is still illegal for radio jamming reasons, and also patent infringement since a misbehaving Bluetooth device has not gotten permission to use Bluetooth patents held by SIG.

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