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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.


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  • (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.

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  • (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.

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    • (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.)

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      • (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.

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