Less Radiation

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.