[silent_speech]

If your device is hacked at the firmware level, it can be turned into a microwave weapon and used against you. (My hypothesis of the cause of Havana Syndrome: hacked cell transmitters beaming microwave at targets.)

Tech Ingredients (YouTube creator) made an instructional video about how microwaves work and how to defend against them: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg_aUOSLuRo".

[wolrah]

> If your device is hacked at the firmware level, it can be turned into a microwave weapon and used against you. (My hypothesis of the cause of Havana Syndrome: hacked cell transmitters beaming microwave at targets.)

No, no it can't. It is physically impossible for any part of cellular infrastructure, be it the phones or the base stations, to direct enough power at an arbitrary person to cause any effect. Phones simply don't have the power to harm a human and the inverse square law means that even high power base stations are safe from more than a few feet.

[Gnarl]

You may want to consider this: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279863242_Oxidative...

TLDR; 93/100 available studies (2015) confirm that low-intensity RF causes oxidative-stress mediated tissue damage (incl. DNA damage) and is implicated in a wide range of cancer and non-cancer pathologies.

TLDR2; its not just about power levels.

[wolrah]

There is a massive gap between "Long term RF exposure can cause cell behaviors that may have subtle effects" from the paper you linked and "Hacked cell infrastructure can be weaponized" as the parent poster was claiming.

I'm an IT nerd, not a molecular biologist, so I can't really comment on the paper in detail but a quick skim gives me the impression that whatever effect they're measuring is both subtle and generally not directly linkable to the kind of effects a person would actually notice.

Something that could be used to cause targeted injury would have to be multiple orders of magnitude more powerful. The most effective way to weaponize hacked cellular infrastructure would be accessing the data traveling over it, not a fantastical idea of turning it in to a RF blaster.

[numlock86]

> If your device is hacked at the firmware level, it can be turned into a microwave weapon and used against you.

If anything your RF components go up in smoke. Modern chips are designed to only work at the desired maximum transmission power, sometimes even less to depend on idle times and such to save costs. But yeah, it's a nice entertaining conspiracy that keeps floating around nevertheless.

[ericbarrett]

That was an interesting video, thank you. Neat to see centimeter wave RF demonstrated so practically.

[imchillyb]

Uh... Millimeter wave communication is radio communication. Radio antenna.

Microwaves are not similar nor are cellular radios able to utilize microwave communications.

Microwave towers are specifically built at great height and are utilized for long distance communications.

One cannot turn a cellular device into a microwave, nor can one utilize microwaves to achieve cellular communications.

[stephen_g]

Microwave is a ridiculously broad term. By some definitions it is any signal from about 300MHz to 300GHz, but in the industry we don't really consider it microwave until you get to L-band (1-2GHz), and even then, compared to a lot of stuff we do that's extremely low frequency (I've worked mostly in X, Ka and E-bands - ~7-9, 18-19, 28-31 GHz up to 80-90GHz). But WiFi and cellular are definitely microwave, as are the big point-to-point links you're talking about.

Not that I'm agreeing with the parent comment - having worked in the microwave comms industry (and a little bit of radar) for about 10 years, the best explanation I've heard for 'Havana Syndrome' is closer to food poisioning than anything to do with RF. I think the US Government has basically walked back any claims that they were actual attacks recently too.

[tlb]

Microwave ovens run at 2.4 GHz. 4G cellular includes 2.3 and 2.5 GHz bands (among others). So in terms of absorption by tissue, cell towers absolutely have the right frequencies.

What they don’t have is the power level to have much effect beyond a few feet.

[fulafel]

Besides things in pointed out in the other replies, I think the main error in this mental model is assuming there's a category difference between radio and microwave.

Microwave is just a term for a largish swath of the spectrum that encompasses millimeter wave, and lots of cell phone bands, and frequencies used in point-to-point microwave links, frequencies used by your microwave oven, wifi, etc.

[kuschku]

WiFi is microwave radiation. Just three orders of magnitude less powerful.

[numlock86]

> Just three orders of magnitude less powerful.

For FCC that might be the case. CE/RED in Europe goes even as low (or as high, depending on which way you want to see it) as four orders of magnitude.