I don't think jail is required here, I think a simple "don't do it again would suffice". It is not like he intended to disrupt the entire city.<p>I have the similar issues trying to keep my kids focused during the school day. I finally found a way to block him that didn't block my job access, and turns out all the kids are passing around VPN accounts to get around parental locks. For all my work I only managed to keep him off Minecraft for ~45 minutes.
I've thought about controlling mobile data for specific high-security scenarios.<p>My design, which I never got to try out, was to cover the walls in RF shield paint, there is a corresponding film for windows. Then you can install an indoor LTE antenna/booster on a physical switch and viola, managed access to data.<p>Jammers like this in the US (and apparently from this article, other jurisdictions) are illegal if their effect reaches beyond your property since it can block access to emergency services, etc. I think RF containment is a legally-safer strategy.
An illegal action which causes harm to (many) others should come at a cost. Maybe the cost can just be an inconvenience and a bit of public embarrassment, such as is the case here.<p>I absolutely would apply this to people who disrupt a flight and cost the other passengers time and the airline $$$.<p>I would also apply this to idiots on the road who create enormous accidents. Maybe their actions were a mistake, but when it costs a lot of people time and money, it is a harm.<p>If you're capable of sourcing and setting up such a jammer, you must have enough comprehension to know that it could affect other people. It is doubtful that he expected to take out a large group of peoples' internet, but he could not have been completely ignorant to the risks of collateral harm.
Possible penalties are 34k euros and/or 6 months in jail. He hasn't been convicted of anything yet.<p>That being said, could people with more experience in jamming chime in here? How likely is it that he was actually jamming his teenagers' phones and not something else? The hardware we see in the picture seems extremely overkill for that task, I expected the smaller AliExpress jammers.
The father IS NOT facing jail time for "keeping his kids offline at night." He's facing jail time for preventing others in a nearby town from accessing the internet. It doesn't appear that was the father's intent, but that's what he did.
So for parents of phone-using-age kids, what is your tactic for healthily limiting screen time? Behavioral, technological, etc… As the father of a 2 1/2 year-old, I’d love to hear suggestions, even though this scenario for me is a few years down the road.
Setting aside the obvious solution of using the phone's parental controls or physically confiscating the phones each night…<p>1) Is there a way to arrange omnidirectional transmitters so the signal is much stronger <i>inside</i> a given volume than <i>outside</i> it? Maybe using constructive/destructive interference like a Fourier transform?<p>2) Wouldn't a directional antenna dish on the roof pointed down keep the signal from leaking out so much?<p>3) Do cellular companies provide consumers with an API or webpage to scrape that shows data usage in near-real-time so he could have set up an alert if his kids break the rule?
Discussion from a few days ago: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30386852" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30386852</a>
> <i>it happened every weeknight starting at midnight and ending at 3 AM</i><p>I'm rather surprised that it took them several days to become aware of it/find the jammer. It was my impression they'd catch on to something like that more quickly.
My take-away is that he was looking for a technical and realtively easy solution to the difficult and sometime painful parts of parenting. As an engineer I think there's a valuable lesson here.
Is there a phone case that blocks the phone from receiving any signal. Since my government in Canada has given itself dictatorial powers. Many Canadians might be now traced for peaceful protesting.
Since we already had the discussion about FCC regulations, society's downfall from phones, and advice on traumatizing your kids can I ask for an aside on the theory of justice?<p>What is even the point of jailing him? This dude is an idiot, like beyond ignorance of the law. Society gains nothing buy jailing a man who is clearly not a danger to anyone, didn't even realize his mistake, and has no chance whatsoever of re-offending. And if you're gonna jail someone to make an example / as a deterrent you could at least wait until you find someone who actually did it with the intent to harm.
This story points out few things. First, this is a failure of parenting. He should have demanded his kids surrender their devices every evening. Did he not want the "conflict"? Dads had more backbone, when I was growing up.<p>Second, I think there should be licensed use available for low power jammers -- say, one that ranged only so far as the perimeter of a high school classroom. If that's not possible, then perhaps schools need to be refitted with chickenwire in the walls, like the old plaster walls of years ago.