[hyperhopper]

Are you anti handheld radio?

Yes, that's the point of freedom. People can carry devices that do things. If they break the law, that's another question, but everyone should be allowed to have computers that communicate that they can control

[Forgeties79]

I don’t want someone to walk around, I don’t know, forcing all the phones around them in a 10m radius to blow up their batteries and hurt people.

Handheld radios, like my wireless tx/rx for lavaliers have to have their spectrums cleared by the FCC. As do most transmitting devices. There are baseline requirements before they can be sold/used.

I get often with these things if you give an inch they take a mile, but there have to be some foundational guardrails here IMO. You can’t just have a bunch of laws punishing people for behavior and no attempts at preventing it in the first place.

The ability to just transmit anything indiscriminately is just a dicey proposition to me. Like how we used to just allow a free for all with drones.

[stetrain]

Can you show an example of a phone blowing up its battery with the potential to hurt people because of a harmful radio signal?

This seems like something the phone should be able to handle. People already have root access on devices with radio transmitters, they're called laptops. I don't recall many incidents of a malicious actor with a laptop forcing all the laptops around them to blow up and hurt their owners. If that were a reasonable possibility then they certainly wouldn't be allowed on planes.

[tremon]

That's called a weapon (EMP discharge), and there's quite a lot of people in the US that are ready to defend even such devices. There's even a Constitutional article about it IIRC.

[63stack]

How would arbitrary radio signals blow up a battery?

[tantalor]

The risk is if you have unfettered control then it's easy to get tricked into installing malicious apps, and now my device is getting zero-day attacks over bluetooth or wifi from state actors using your phone.