Ubiquitous Bluetooth and PAN - Personal Area Network

[Ninurta]

About 2 or 3 years ago, I had a cell phone that kept turning on it's own bluetooth, wifi, and microphone. After the second time it surreptitiousdly turned on it's own mic, I "degoogled" it and cured that problem. I don't know that it was nefarious, as it kept on turning on it's own airplane mode as well, and I don't see a good surveillance reason for that. Might have just been a glitch in the software.

Turning on all that stuff by itself did seem to be burning through a lot of battery, though, and that was annoying.

This paranoid friend of mine had a phone that did that, turn itself on and drain the battery doing something. So he removes the battery every night and puts the phone in a tin box to shield it. If the SHTF, he intends to destroy his phone.

It'll make you paranoid when you realize your phone has just been sitting there listening to you for the past couple hours! It's kinda creepy!

I have a new phone now, and I've not caught it doing that. If it does, all I have to do here is unplug my repeater station, and it's lost, can't communicate. I'm in a "dead zone", with no stray radio waves to bounce around, of any kind, so in order for it to work at the house I've set up a "network extender", a repeater station for cell signal, like a mini cell phone tower. All I have to do is unplug it, and any cell connections magically disappear.

I used to joke about having to pipe in sunshine into these hills, but as it turns out in the realm of communication that's damn near true. No TV signals, no radio signals, no cell signals here, other than what I provide myself by "piping it in". The only other way anyone could get a signal in here would be to station a satellite directly overhead, or put a drone on station directly over head and orbit it around my little hole in the hills - and I'm not important enough for them to go to all THAT trouble!

Before I put that network extender in, I had to climb about 700 feet to the top of the ridge behind me before I could get into a cell signal stream. The higher you climb, the steeper it gets, and before you get to the top you're crawling on your belly, but vertically, to claw your way up 3 feet forward, then slide two feet back, repeat...

I have satellite radio in my car, and even that goes dead at places as the satellite gets masked by ridges or, in the summer, leafed-out treetops. This tin roof blocks all signals from directly overhead, and the mountains themselves block them from coming in through the sides of the house and the windows.

.