Comment by SilasX

7 years ago

Sorry -- do you have a citation on that? If popping party balloons could disable iphones, I think we'd hear about it more often. (I can't find anything about it on a quick search, and I hope I can be excused for missing an analogy that depended on an invalid premise!)

What made it unnoticed for so long was that it required the much larger MRI He release to trigger. What (I claim) makes it disturbing is that an expensive incident can happen (bricking a hospital's iphones for weeks) at levels that no one currently calibrates sensors to check for, because no one expects that level to have a negative effect of such magnitude.

Regardless of your preferred terminology, it seems odd to take an attitude of "oh, it only deleted everyone's second-brain for week, in a way that was hard to root-cause, no one died, no big deal" and therefore balk at the use of "disturbing".

I mean, do you consider undetectable, inexpensive phone-bricking techniques to be generally "non-disturbing", or just this one?

> Sorry -- do you have a citation on that? If popping party balloons could disable iphones, I think we'd hear about it more often. (I can't find anything about it on a quick search, and I hope I can be excused for missing an analogy that depended on an invalid premise!)

Some of the tests were just plastic bags with tiny amounts of helium in them. Unless you're asserting some exceptionally strange gas physics here, you can break an iphone with some balloons.

> Regardless of your preferred terminology, it seems odd to take an attitude of "oh, it only deleted everyone's second-brain for week, in a way that was hard to root-cause, no one died, no big deal" and therefore balk at the use of "disturbing".

> I mean, do you consider undetectable, inexpensive phone-bricking techniques to be generally "non-disturbing", or just this one?

Hang on. You were calling the calibration of the air quality sensors disturbing. That's what I objected to. I wasn't making any claims about the iphone bug itself.