SLNT Faraday stuff is supposed to be good. I’ve never used one. Michael Bazzell recommends them.
Does a microwave work?
From my tests, not fully. And neither did just aluminum foil. Wrapping the phone in aluminum foil + putting it into microwave oven (off, of course) did the trick.
I was doing this a lot to force automatic band switching into what I liked, until I got a phone where that can be done manually.
Why the numbers 224
Maybe 223 was taken
Is that true @user224@lemmy.sdf.org ?
No. Originally it was a testing username for UNIX shell. I just hit the keys randomly for numbers. Well, somebody verified my account, giving it higher value and making it not temporary.
Then SDF also made a Lemmy instance, and not understanding that being a separate product, I re-used the same username.
Sorry
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They work good, phone lost all connectivity inside. So does Mission Darkness.
Rather than going down the rabbit hole of faraday bags, why not gain a better understanding of how you are being tracked every day so you can take steps to alleviate your concern?
Elsewhere you said you don’t want to be tracked going to the doctors office, but if you drive there your cars license plate is being read by dozens of traffic cameras. If you walk or take a bus there are most likely cameras which are accessible to law enforcement that can be used for computer vision if they don’t already do so automatically.
In the event that you drove, it’s likely that your cars wheel mounted sensors are emitting unique rf signals even if it’s infotainment system doesn’t have immediate connectivity (it definitely does and is tracking and reporting unique ids of devices near it).
The places you went before the doctors office are selling your purchase history (that’s why they give you a deal when you enter your phone number at checkout!), your voter registration information is freely available to any group that can register a political organization and if you paid property taxes then those records are publicly accessible and searchable.
WiFi can even be used, experimentally at this point, to pinpoint the physical location of people in a room based only on how their bodies interfere with the high frequency signal.
The point of this post is not to send you into a panic but to help broaden the scope of stuff you’re considering and maybe help you come to a more complete solution.
There is no opting out. We are in a nightmare. It has onlt started to bother me now that I have made a serious effort to address it, and I have failed miserably. My car is old so no worries there. But the google services and Gemini/Galaxy AIs on my phone piss me off. I can remove them, but get stuck in a bootloop and my phone will not work.
My honest advice if you are concerned about the phone is to switch to ios, turn on automatic updates, turn on adp, turn on lockdown, do the privacy checkup wizard, install a doh/dot device management profile, setup a vpn you trust, either use a device management profile to implement it or that VPNs app if you trust the app and fastidiously go through the settings to improve your privacy further.
From that baseline you can build behaviors like always deleting web data and rotating device identifiers that can help you.
There are two reasons I make this recommendation: first, my goal is not perfect anonymity and privacy, but instead best effort. Im not choosing best effort, but instead recognizing that it’s all that’s within my ability. The best effort within my resources is using the hardware and software made by the company selling security along with careful configuration of settings to refine that.
The second is that my personal threat model is based on the police and recognizes that I am on tax records, voter rolls and many other public records. I am recognizable in my community and cannot “disappear”.
If you wanna make good choices for yourself, I’d recommend doing a foia request or whatever your governments equivalent is on yourself, purchasing yourself on some data brokers websites and going from there.
Wow. That is a good assessment.Thanks!
From what I heard you won’t find a real Faraday bag that works well and blocks almost all signals, those found on Amazon are really not that effective and only “military grade” bags could be useful in these kind of threats
Okay. That means I need to chexk the surplus stores. Maybe I will get lucky.
I don’t think that if real Faraday bags meant for military work they are avaible in surplus store for civilians
This is not bleeding edge tech.
I know but don’t think you could find them there. The only way of getting good ones is surely to buy some that seems reputable (aka not amazon shit) and test them in labs (maybe someone already done that and that Faraday bags recommandations exist online)
Something meant to maintain a high or low temperature. A Thermos or pizza delivery bag or a bag for bringing frozen groceries home. Some might just be foam, but there are also ones with metalic coating or a steel shell.
I do!
My use of a Faraday bag is more prepper oriented (i.e. solar flares) instead of geared towards privacy, but I keep a Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS, linux laptop, and eReader in a SLNT Faraday bag.
My tests have been far from perfect, but the phone’s Bluetooth and cell reception have all ceased working once put in the bag.
Does a microwave work?
Use an SLNT bag
My first faraday bag was a ‘HODUFY’ pouch. It works fine.
After that, I bought the Nickle/Copper fabric from China and tested making pouches using cyanoacrylate glue and velcro strips. I found a supplier now that sells 10 m x 1.1 m fabric for $65 + shipping.
If you are in a hurry and you only want the cellphone pouch, you can buy a cheaper pouch online and test that you cannot call it nor connect via Bluetooth when it is inside the pouch. Working with the fabric directly lets you make custom pouches by cutting, folding, and gluing.
Here are some photos of a HODUFY and the DIY pouch. In the third photo you can see that the material inside the pouch is a similar type of Nickel/Copper fabric.
To make the pouch, a single piece is cut into a rectangle and folded in half, leaving three open sides. Two of the three open sides are folded over twice and glued shut. The remaining side is the opening, which makes use of velcro strips to close. This opening also needs to be folded when closing, like this:
The key point here is that you do not pierce the fabric, and you make sure that the edges are sealed shut properly by folding.
This is actually badass. I might try that. It the fabric fairly rugged? Why did you stop using the Hodufy?
The hodufy works for a phone. I just wanted to experiment to learn. I don’t use any of them often - I keep my phone in airplane mode and without a sim card and only use it with WiFi.
So you use wifi calling?
I video call my family over WiFi, usually when I am home. For me it is easy to get by without making a phone call. In the past few years I remember making one phone call to cancel an internet subscription and one to make a doctor’s appointment. Calling is not my preferred medium, I strongly prefer e-mail. I do keep a prepaid SIM card inside my phone’s case in case of emergency, but fortunately I have never needed it.
