SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Coronavirus: Scientists brand 5G claims 'complete rubbish':
Conspiracy theories claiming 5G technology helps transmit coronavirus have been condemned by the scientific community.
Videos have been shared on social media showing mobile phone masts on fire in Birmingham and Merseyside - along with the claims.
The UK's mobile networks have reported 20 cases of masts being targeted in suspected arson attacks over the Easter weekend, including damage to a mast providing mobile connectivity to Birmingham's Nightingale Hospital.
The posts have been shared on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram - including by verified accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers.
TV regulator Ofcom is assessing comments made by presenter Eamonn Holmes in which he cast doubts on media outlets for their attempts to debunk the claims.
But scientists say the idea of a connection between Covid-19 and 5G is "complete rubbish" and biologically impossible.
The conspiracy theories have been branded "the worst kind of fake news" by NHS England Medical Director Stephen Powis.
[...] Many of those sharing the post are pushing a conspiracy theory falsely claiming that 5G - which is used in mobile phone networks and relies on signals carried by radio waves - is somehow responsible for coronavirus.
Tough sledding for the engineers, but concerns about 5G have been raised prior to the coronavirus.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Friday April 24 2020, @04:29PM (5 children)
It seems like people get more and more gullible. Willing to believe anything.
Teach the controversy. Create FUD. Be bold in defending attacks upon stupidity.
Let me point out from 1995: SoftRAM - The Story of the Incredible RAM Doubling Scam [youtube.com]
Why did it take so long for such an obvious scam to be brought down? It was obvious to anyone who understood how computers work that this was a pure scam. I still remember it. But the company seemed legit. The claims were boldly asserted. There were people who were sure that SoftRAM had increased their memory. After all, as they asserted, it's just as good as actual memory added to your machine, but cheaper. They couldn't possibly lie in advertisements, right? (by extension . . . a politician could not lie, or god forbid the president of the usa be an ignorant bumbling idiot, and obviously so for the whole world to see.)
How is it that people become Flat Earthers? Believe COVID-19 is no worse than the flu? Believe magnetic bracelets magically confer some kind of healing power? Pay no attention when science has a consensus and the only controversy is entirely manufactured for ideological reasons?
Is this stupidity new, or was it always this way?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday April 24 2020, @05:46PM
No, it's always been that way. Look at all the moon-landing deniers; that was going on all the way back in the late 60s/early 70s.
What's different is that the Internet has made it really easy for all these idiots to find each other and spread their insanity. Back in the "old days", if you had some stupid conspiracy theory, you had to go talk to people in person usually to spread it around. Or you could write something, pay to get it published on flyers, and pass those around, but that wasn't free. Now, any idiot can write stuff on internet message boards for nothing.
Mass communication has enabled a lot of things in modern society that would not have been possible before it existed (imagine trying to run modern society without telephones, and having to send communications by paper everywhere). But the flip side is that it's enabled a lot of craziness too.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday April 24 2020, @09:59PM
It has always been this way. But some of the things in your list of "stupid" things are not like the others. Coronavirus's nature is still not firmly established, because they are not able to test everyone to see if they've already had it and experienced no symptoms; we don't have enough data yet. Consensus in science is temporary and often overturned (see: ether).
You are right that some controversy is manufactured for ideological reasons. So what? Test all ideas and hold to those that are true. If a theory or idea can't stand up to controversy, then it's flimsy. Some ideas will kill those who hold them. Eating Tide pods, subway surfing, and socialism are a handful of examples. They are self-correcting. But if the ideas are harmless, who cares? It does not affect me one bit if the guy next to me thinks the Earth is flat.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Disagree) by corey on Friday April 24 2020, @11:08PM
Well it's why Trump was voted in.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday April 24 2020, @11:42PM
It is technically possible to increase your available memory through software: compressed caching. That is, you compress and decompress memory pages to/from RAM.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 25 2020, @03:02PM
How long should it take? It was first released [ftc.gov] in May 1995. A German magazine [wikipedia.org] finally took a look at it in December and determined that it was worse than doing nothing. The FTC had been investigating it over a similar time frame, and the product was removed from sales by the middle of next year. That's pretty fast even for an overt fraud.
The key thing to remember here is perception. The idiot hears about this memory problem, picks up a box that confidently says it fixes the problem, and thinks the matter is settled - placebo effect in action. But when are knowledgeable people going to get exposed to it? The key to a good fraud is controlling information, particularly, the mark's perception. But it also means excluding knowledgeable people who will see through the con quickly, and people who can bring down serious negative consequences on the fraudster, particularly, law enforcement. My suspicion is that if you look at advertising for the SoftRAM product, it was in venues where idiots tended to congregate and knowledgeable people stayed away. Thus, it can take a surprising amount of time (well in excess of a year) to go from fraudulent product to regulatory crackdown.
It's one of the reasons I like to browse with ads enabled. It gets me an idea of how stupid the reader is expected to be.