Deal
It's not how you deal with 5G. If you are near it you just have to make a cross with your fingers and point at it. You can also throw a bulb or two of garlic at it to reduce satanic waves back to background noise.
Two men charged over series of arson attacks on 5G masts
Two men face charges over a series of arson attacks on 5G masts spanning two years following a Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) investigation. Detectives arrested the men and secured charges on Monday. They are accused of being involved in the attacks which took place between 2023 and 2025, primarily in the west …
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 16:31 GMT Graham Cobb
Re: Deal
Yes, I remember the famous incident at a Mobile World Congress a few years ago when someone - I think it was someone like the Technical Director of Hong Kong Telecom, wasn't it - mentioned that the Bacofoil had to be folded into a pyramid to block 5G waves. But then that lady from France Telecom explained that they had done tests in the Great Pyramid in Egypt and that it only worked if the pyramid had a square base - pyramids with triangular bases (tetrahedrons) make the rays worse and made people into sorts of zombies. So do be careful!
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 12:03 GMT DaveK23
What I really hate about these folks...
... is the smug self-righteousness with which they surround themselves and justify their actions. They genuinely believe they are cleverer than everyone else because they read some bs on the internet and believed it, but that's just proof that they're gullible maroons. "Do your own research" never actually means do research, it means "unquestioningly believe liars". See also: anyone who has ever used the word 'sheeple'.
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Wednesday 29th April 2026 11:39 GMT Pete Sdev
Re: What I really hate about these folks...
"Do your own research" is like "Roll your own encryption".
You've got to be a fecking idiot to think that you're somehow better than a group of experts.
Arguably, if doing your own research is reading what experts in the field of interest say, then it's not a problem.
We all here have to research things at work, even if it's a simple RTFM with experimentation.
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 18:56 GMT silent_count
Re: What I really hate about these folks...
@DaveK23
Hush with your dismissive tone! You see, I have done my own research and can conclusively prove that mobile phone towers summon aliens.
Think about it! Before there were mobile phone towers, there were no posts from amanfrommars on El Reg! Following the well known principle of post hoc ergo propter hoc, I think it's obvious the towers summoned him.
These two in Belfast should be given the thanks of a grateful nation!
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Thursday 30th April 2026 14:50 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: What I really hate about these folks...
I have done my own research and can conclusively prove that mobile phone towers summon aliens
# Calling occupants, of interplanetary craft.
I think your research is wrong, misguided and foolish. The evidence evidentally leads to a soft-rock pair of siblings summoning aliens well before such modern fripperies as 5G
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 21:22 GMT DS999
"do your research"
Means watch youtube videos and anything that comes up as "recommended" afterwards, following the rabbit hole into Oz. That's how "do your research" people think "research" is conducted, and how they lose what few functioning brain cells they may have had before they began said "research".
Google is as much to blame for 5G conspiracy theories, antivax nonsense and so forth as anyone else because of how toxic youtube's recommendation algorithms are. They care only about maximizing the amount of time people spend on the platform, so they want to turn casual viewers into extremists who "research" for hours on end every night because that's how they make more money, the good of society and mental health of their users be damned.
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 19:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Technical insight
"Would such a person be bothered if they accidentally torched a 4G mast by mistake?"
Assuming 5G has been rolled out to an area then it is likely that all masts there are 2G/4G/5G masts - the OpCos don't typically deploy separate masts for each technology (and the masts are shared between pairs of OpCos).
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 16:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Technical insight
> Connect an RF signal analyzer to the output. Look at the constellation. 4G is upto 256-QAM. 5G can go upto 1024-QAM. Use an attenuator to protect the signal analyzer.
The image of the conspiracy theorist hunched over his signal analyser to check if it's the right type of mast that he's about to set fire too. :-) :-) :-)
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Thursday 30th April 2026 14:56 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: Technical insight
The image of the conspiracy theorist hunched over his signal analyser
Hmm.. I spot a new business opportunity. Remember those 'mine detectors' someone got done for selling a few years ago? Basically a tarted-up metal dowsing-rod. Maybe add a small sealed box with some cables coming out of it and a random generator connected to an LED with a trigger to pull that powers on the circuit.
Point at mast, pull trigger. Red LED, eeevil 5G mast!
Yours for a low, low price of £129.99 plus P&P. And I'm selling it even though I'm making a loss and my children will starve because I believe in The Cause!
(2-point text "Any mention of children in this advert should not be taken as an admission of posession of offspring")
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 12:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Sheltered life
In a previous life I was in the emergency services. One thing I took away from it, being exposed to all levels of society, is that there is that there are *a lot* of nutters out there. Easily half the population, by my reckoning.
Anyway, I've been brushing up on my Molotov cocktails and now I'm off to join my Capuchin monastery in Southern France.
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 12:38 GMT Lee D
Re: Sheltered life
Moved into a house a few years ago. Lovely rural town near an RAF base. The neighbours are all quite nice and ordinary people, been friendly ever since I moved in, each do favours for the other, etc.
Was having a chat with the neighbour's adult daughter. But then she tried to switch mid-conversation to some nonsense about "chemtrails". I just bowed out with the get-out-clause of "Well, I don't know enough about that" to save me having to have a stand-up argument where I called her a stupid bint. She also touched on the 5G and I was already disengaged by then so I was outta there.
Same person, I was talking on the phone to her about her mother's medical condition and she spouted off some huge, long, complicated medical term for whatever her latest ailment was, and I said "I don't know what that is, but I'd love to have that in a game or Scrabble". It then took me nearly 20 minutes to explain to her what I meant.
It does surprise me, more often than it really should, quite how many people are dumb as hell.
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 15:50 GMT PB90210
Re: Sheltered life
There is a nice story doing the rounds that Matt Le Tissier, football pundit and now conspiracy theorist, having an argument with Grok about conttrails
He starts out by a asking why some contrails are more persistent. Grok rightly (for once!) explains that with dry air the contrails disappear quicker than with damp air. Le Tissier then challenges the answer as possibly showing government influence (what? this is the anti-woke Grok!)... Grok repeats the explanation, adding that conspiracy theorists might claim otherwise... Le Tissier sees red and starts arguing with the blameless Grok
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 16:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sheltered life
I use Grok regularly. These are a few of my findings:
- despite you know who's best efforts, it is generally left leaning in political discussions, with the exception of a quite pronounced Western bias—that is in fact the bit that became worse after musk's fiddling
- it *will* stick to its guns if it thinks it's right and you're wrong
- it won't call you names outright but it did use to get "annoyed" if you talked too much nonsense
- it recognises humour and will respond in kind to questions such as "how can I optimise the tax reporting for my racketeering business"
- 4.20 was a complete disaster and a huge step back (think 2024 models)
- 4.3 seems to be better than 4.20 but nowhere near as good as 4.1
- privacy wise, its policy used to be more user friendly than the competition (which is why I use it), I haven't read the latest version though
- Expert mode works a lot better than "fast" mode, and "fast" works generally better than the car version, which is optimised for very fast and brief answers (but there is a fairly nice "language tutor" mode)
¹ I've had a great chat with it in the car once where *it* was arguing about the necessity to start a revolution and for us, the proletariat, to gain control of the means of production.
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 16:54 GMT Jonathan Richards 1
Re: Sheltered life
An interesting tale of two different AIs leading (or driving) two different users into full-blown psychosis: Under the Influence of AI: The Documentary [bbc.co.uk]
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 19:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sheltered life
"despite you know who's best efforts, it is generally left leaning in political discussions, with the exception of a quite pronounced Western bias"
That's because folks in the West generally hold centre left ideals...e.g. looking after people (elderly, sick, vulnerable), community, charity and so on...or did until the extreme left moved the centre. The slight bias to the left is what separates the first world from the third world...but it all wraps around like a Pacman level. Go too far left, and you have suicidal empathy and become the third world. Go too far right, and you have complete individualism...every man for himself...and become third world. Western ideals fit in a relatively thin slice of the political spectrum.
The Western bias is because more of written recorded history or written anything comes from Western civilisation. The opposite is true of image diffusers...they tend to have an extremely Asian bias for some reason. Presumably because of privacy laws and less government surveillance, there are far fewer photo records of people in the West than there are in the East.
The biases in AI aren't there by design, they are there because what we get represents the data we are able to put in and where that data comes from.
People that think AI has bias built in by design are usually the same folks that burn 5G masts. You can't really tamper with AI in that way without creating hilariously bad results...like that time Google tried to make a woke image generator that produced Black and Asian Nazis.
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 21:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sheltered life
> That's because folks in the West generally hold centre left ideals
Err… the whole left / right thing is a Western construct that is only applicable to post enlightenment societies.
Other cultures might be perceived by westerners as left / right / backwards but that is just one's own perception. They do not consider themselves as such.
> The biases in AI aren't there by design
You are mostly correct, but there is also an element of induced bias, along with the bias inherent in the training data. You gave an example yourself later on your post.
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 18:10 GMT TheMaskedMan
Re: Sheltered life
"It does surprise me, more often than it really should, quite how many people are dumb as hell."
Indeed. Way back in my youth, I just naively thought that must people were "normal", for want of a better word. Not Einsteins, but mostly not mind buggeringly dumb, either.
Then I took a summer job doing door-to-door sales for a large, well known sporting institution. My job was to leaflet properties in the afternoon, then doorstep them in the evening. I very quickly learned that "dumb as hell" is a vast overestimate for the majority of people. Meeting Joe public at scale in his natural habitat was an unforgettable learning experience.
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 13:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Siting is mostly a laws-of-physics thing related to propogation and cell/network structure. A village close to my cousin is on the coast with a ridge behind it. The villagers whinge about the lack of a decent mobile signal but object to the siting of an antenna anywhere where it can be seen from anywhere in the village.
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 13:39 GMT Will Godfrey
I did manage to shut up one of the COVID-5G nutters.
We were in a small village shop queued up at the counter, and without any prompting he started ranting a load of crap. To start with I just quietly said I wasn't interested. That just got him raising his voice and poking his finger at me. I repeated that I wasn't interested at which point he raised his voice louder and came out with "I'm telling you..."
That was enough. I've got quite a loud voice when I want to use it - not quite parade ground, and responded with "You're telling me fuck all. Now piss off. Instant silence and smiles all round.
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Wednesday 29th April 2026 11:11 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: Section them
In 2026. You'll be lucky.
They will soon be converting the Sanatoriums (Sanatoria) into Sane·toria to provide asylum for the remaining few so afflicted.
The first sense of verb to section that comes to my mind is to cut into very thin slices à la microtome - the "tome" has the sense from Greek of "cut" as in anatomy or lobotomy; the latter probably the more efficacious sectioning for this affliction.
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 17:13 GMT Boris the Cockroach
5G affects
people , its is a proven fact.
Just look at my ex-PFY, she started about the same time a 5G mast went up on the industrial estate, since then she's developed a hatred of every operator we employ, thinks the salespeople and beancounters should be shot... repeatedly, says our customers are little more than jibbering monkeys with coloured crayons, and finally hates the manglers more than anything.
Its the 5G signal thats done that to her
Either that or her trainer has done his job extremely well.......
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Tuesday 28th April 2026 22:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: In the interest of balance...
> Given the radiation pattern, you're actually safe under the mast.
Not if the mast has collapsed.
Btw, from my time in the emergency services, 5G seems laughably tame compared to those fucking AM radios we used to have where you could be electrocuted just from touching the mast (which was in fact the antenna) or get instant castration from climbing past a microwave relay that hadn't been switched off. The details are vague but I recall a metallic taste in my mouth while climbing past some antenna or another years ago, I don't think it was psychosomatic, although years later I learned that perceiving non existent smells and tastes is associated with what people now call PTSD (you know, the kind of thing people nowadays claim to have when their train is running three minutes late or when they can't find a parking spot).
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Wednesday 29th April 2026 11:28 GMT Bebu sa Ware
Re: In the interest of balance...
Besides the power wattage of 5G is so low it can barely penetrate buildings
Ah yes… but with advanced beam forming and beam steering technology the [insert the conspirators fron your favoured conspiracy theory] can locate susceptable
nuttersvictiims from their social media apps and direct an extremely high intensity 5G beam into their skull effecting control. The Baldrick in that theory is that it notably doesn't work.
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Wednesday 29th April 2026 10:14 GMT Simon74
Insults to win them over? again?!
Jee.. have we heard all this before? "deluded conspiracy theorists" use to be a few years ahead of the official government narrative. We know that since the Covid era. Or Bird flu, Mad cows..? oh my! And look - the mandatory emotional blackmail a la "granny killer" - think about NHS. What if it was your mom? FFS.
There should be plenty of evidence of how safe the 5G and other wireless networks are today. So please, once and for all, show us the test results to calm our nerves, and we'll turn to the next government social experiment on the list.
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Wednesday 29th April 2026 13:24 GMT Catkin
Re: Insults to win them over? again?!
Some conspiracy theories are ahead of the curve but that doesn't make them automatically right any more than the involvement of a conspiracy in the theory automatically makes them wrong and, generally, they are wrong. For every PRISM and Watergate, there's conspiracy theories about every generation of mobile connectivity causing cancer, the Moon landings being faked and the idea that Bush did 9/11.
Agreed on the jeering. For example, for the Covid vaccine nonsense, when you dug down into it, the loudest conspiracy nuts weren't representative of the majority of the vaccine hesitant. Most were in disadvantaged groups who remember that, not too many generations ago, people in their groups were being used for actual, verified government medical experiments or having their demographic-specific complaints ignored. That doesn't mean they were right but it made it a heck of a lot harder to try to change their minds in a calm, rational discussion.
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Wednesday 29th April 2026 10:57 GMT Bebu sa Ware
T H White "The Master" †
5G is clearly a gobal mind control conspiracy operated by the supervillainous Palantir with the master control under Rockall Is.
That's all nonsense of course. A neat bit of misdirection but everybody knows it's really the 5GHz wifi. :)
