Originally published at: A father wiped out a town's internet when he used a jammer to limit his kids' screen time | Boing Boing
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10 Likes
Imagine not being able to get late night work done because one guy didn’t like his kid playing Fortnite at 1 am
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Those kids shouldn’t have been emailing their employees on the weekends. /s
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He nuked the site from orbit but to be fair it was the only way to be sure.
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My hero. 
1 Like
Ripley: “They can bill me!”
Agence Nationale des Fréquences: “Challenge accepted.”
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I just checked; and I don’t think that either our DR or our Business Continuity documents and procedures have anything addressing the helicopter parent exigency. Project for today!
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From the ZDNet article:
…It turned out that all of the broadband and BT service issues endured by hundreds of residents were caused by one individual who was turning on an old, secondhand television set at that time every day. The TV was sending out electrical bursts capable of disrupting signals.
WANTED: Old second-hand television… No questions asked… or answered…
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Communications failures that can tell the time are always interesting.
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As a fellow Dad, I forgive him, and you should too.
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When my daughter was a teen, her mother put parental lock software on all their PCs (we think mainly to stop her partner watching porn all the time). I gave my daughter a Linux bootstick.
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As my Dear Wife often says"There are worse things than watching internet porn, you could be making it". She’s a wise old soul with a heart as big as the whole outdoors…
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Why didn’t they just switch over to Minitel when the internet went out?
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Why didn’t he simply take their devices?
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Wait until the inevitable viable litigation starts…
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I’m surprised that little jammer (pictured in the article) can take out a whole town.
Or shut down the router?
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You’d have to do some combo of both to cover all the use cases. A smartphone without wi-fi can still use its data connection to do internet related stuff. I can even imagine this having happened to this dad and him being hit with the resulting massive bill.
Except for 30,000 reasons…
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3G. 4G and some other logo
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Not if the mobile plan has no data. I assume the parents are paying for the cell phone, so have control over that.
Hopefully there were familial communications breakdowns that led to this, and it isn’t a father who is just being a dick. (I mean, he’s still being a dick because he’s taking out the entire neighborhood, but I hope he tried the more normal asking-and-if-that-doesn’t-work-demanding approach first, before firing up the jammer. And, to be honest, there are next steps many parents take that are far worse than what this parent tried.)
