Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Friday April 24 2020, @02:22PM   Printer-friendly
from the Betteridge-says-nope dept.

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by epitaxial on Friday April 24 2020, @05:32PM (9 children)

    by epitaxial (3165) on Friday April 24 2020, @05:32PM (#986582)

    You're a moron. I can't understand why anyone needs paved roads. Those horses have no problems on cobblestones. Why does anyone need faster than dialup? It's all text based anyhow. I don't understand why we need color film, black and white is fine,

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +2  
       Insightful=2, Disagree=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   4  
  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @05:38PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @05:38PM (#986591)

    >> I don't understand why we need color film, black and white is fine,

    Pornography with Asian chicks.

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @06:41PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @06:41PM (#986633)

    What is "color film" grampa?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @10:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @10:03PM (#986711)

      It's the film on your teeth sonnyboy.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Friday April 24 2020, @10:35PM (5 children)

    by meustrus (4961) on Friday April 24 2020, @10:35PM (#986724)

    Then how about you tell me one thing, just one thing that needs 5G. One thing that wouldn't work or be practical on 4G/LTE or WiFi connected to DSL/cable/fibre, but will finally be practical with 5G.

    It doesn't have to be waiting in the wings for as soon as the network is ready. It can be a glimmer in somebody's eye. It can be as pie in the sky as you like.

    If 5G were just a straight upgrade to 4G/LTE, then I'd say sure, why not widen the pipes? But it's not. 5G has serious flaws compared to 4G/LTE. It's extremely short-range, so it needs a mesh installation like some kind of city-wide WiFi. As a result, it will never reach rural areas. It also has serious power draw and processing requirements for connected devices, and as far as I can tell those requirements are not going away. The only solution seems to be bigger batteries and faster processors. Get used to >$1000 phones, I guess.

    As for your examples...what?

    Cobblestones are a form of paved road, and asphalt is thousands of years old, not some fancy new thing. A quick search for WTF you could be implying turned up a story about Rome replacing its historic cobblestone streets [travelandleisure.com]. But they're doing it because they have a reason to: high traffic is dislodging the stones. They wouldn't go to all that trouble if they didn't need to. There are still plenty of cobblestone streets in the world, and most of them are perfectly adequate for the amount of automobile traffic they receive.

    Dial-up internet always had serious flaws. Everybody knew it. Anybody who was paying attention could predict that soon it would be feasible to store enough megabytes of data that computers would be capable of sharing photos and music, given enough network capacity. Corporations were lining up to be the first ones with viable services as soon as people had broad access to broadband. Customers waited anxiously for broadband to become available in their area. I guarantee you, DSL could have caused AIDS and we wouldn't have people burning down the phone lines.

    If the color film thing is meant to imply we need better than 4K video, you're wrong. At least for mobile devices. While anybody can see the difference between color and grayscale, nobody can see the difference between 4K and 8K on anything smaller than a 40cm display unless they get closer than 75cm. That's because the human eye can only perceive so much detail [transvideointl.com]. Your 1080p 5" smartphone is already pushing the limits of human perception at 440ppi [saji8k.com]. This is the reason, by the way, that Apple didn't keep boosting their pixel density past 326ppi after the iPhone 4, and why the iPad Pro is only 224ppi even though they probably could push the pixel density to equal the iPhone. There's just no point. So if you're powering any kind of mobile device, 4K is literally at the limit of human perception. You would need to be powering a bigger screen for the added fidelity to make any kind of difference.

    --

    5G is a massive infrastructure project with no defined purpose. They try to market it for IoT, but it doesn't seem particularly well suited to that application. They try to market it for video streaming, but 4K streaming is already possible with 4G/LTE, and anything higher definition is more than humans are physically capable of seeing on mobile devices.

    I might salivate at the pure bandwidth, but I can't think of anything besides large-scale data processing or piracy that needs it. Neither of those makes sense within the limitations of 5G (and public policy).

    I ask again: If you're so damned smart, you tell me what is the application of 5G. What could we possibly use all that bandwidth for that isn't already better served by hard-wired connections? And for those applications where WiFi 6 isn't fast enough (and it's not even an order of magnitude slower), why wouldn't you just set up a private 5G network instead of sourcing it from the sleazy cell companies?

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @11:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 24 2020, @11:04PM (#986736)

      Come back in 5 years and I'll bet you're looking like a dumbass. More of a dumbass.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday April 24 2020, @11:30PM (3 children)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 24 2020, @11:30PM (#986750) Journal

      3-d animated movies with octa-sound speakers. Interactive lidar (or sonar) based applications. Fast-acting remote controlled AI devices. (Not sure about that one, as compression might be good enough.)

      You did say it didn't need to be currently feasible.

      --
      Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
      • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Sunday April 26 2020, @02:34AM (2 children)

        by meustrus (4961) on Sunday April 26 2020, @02:34AM (#987174)

        Interactive lidar (or sonar) based applications.

        Oh yeah, self driving cars! I forgot about that proposed application of 5G.

        It's an interesting proposition. But cell networks are not known for constant uptime. Even if they had full coverage, which 5G certainly will not, I really don't want to trust it to inform my car or the cars I'm sharing the road with.

        Maybe if 5G were actually reliable, unlike any prior cell data tech, it could be a profound change to society. I really fear what that could mean for the left-behinds, though.

        --
        If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday April 26 2020, @03:28AM (1 child)

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday April 26 2020, @03:28AM (#987182) Journal

          I wasn't thinking so much of cars, which I would definitely prefer run from local AI, as low end robots of various sorts. (Yeah, it's a lot further away, I think.)

          --
          Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by meustrus on Monday April 27 2020, @02:28PM

            by meustrus (4961) on Monday April 27 2020, @02:28PM (#987533)

            The expensive part of self-driving cars is modeling the space and knowing about everything moving around in it. It's not a processing problem as much as a sensing problem; although one could imagine human-level visual processing algorithms solving this problem without all the fancy sensors that we use now, that's not where we are with AI right now.

            I was under the impression that a reliable high-speed wireless network would enable cars to receive space modeling data from the network, either from other cars or from street-installed sensor arrays. This could dramatically cut the costs for self-driving cars by reducing the amount of exotic sensors that need to be packed into each individual vehicle.

            But it still raises concerns about 1) whether the network is reliable enough, and 2) how this concept starts to distinguish self-driving-enabled streets from everything else.

            --
            If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?