Bogus Security Technology: An Anti-5G USB Stick

The 5GBioShield sells for £339.60, and the description sounds like snake oil:

…its website, which describes it as a USB key that “provides protection for your home and family, thanks to the wearable holographic nano-layer catalyser, which can be worn or placed near to a smartphone or any other electrical, radiation or EMF [electromagnetic field] emitting device”.

“Through a process of quantum oscillation, the 5GBioShield USB key balances and re-harmonises the disturbing frequencies arising from the electric fog induced by devices, such as laptops, cordless phones, wi-fi, tablets, et cetera,” it adds.

Turns out that it’s just a regular USB stick.

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Posted on May 29, 2020 at 12:02 PM • 33 Comments

Comments

Martin Potter • May 29, 2020 12:45 PM

To be honest, I think the company’s website at https://5gbioshield.com/ is a masterful piece of traditional British satire. I doubt that anyone could have done it better. Monty Python in the 21st century. Just the sort of thing that a geek like me loves to read. And, actually, I still have a Verbatim 256 MB thumb drive — hey, twice the protection of their “128” catalysers!

Norio • May 29, 2020 1:02 PM

Yes, and what could be more Monty Pythonesque:
“[Toby Hall] thought the company might be able to develop a system that could offer protection to the whole town of Glastonbury against the effects of radiation from electromagnetic fields.”

I can just see John Cleese carrying an USB stick 8 feet tall and looking for a place to plug it in!

willmore • May 29, 2020 1:05 PM

Let’s be honest, this device provides all the protection you need from 5G.

Another Mouse • May 29, 2020 2:10 PM

If a 128GB usb stick protects a household when powered, what massive sized shield will an 8TB HDD provide?

Clive Robinson • May 29, 2020 4:00 PM

@ Bruce,

the description sounds like snake oil

The trouble with “snake oil” is it’s so 19th Century along with “riden out of town on a rail” and “tar and feathering”. We are in the 21st Century with “quantum widgetry” we need a more upto date term.

Maybe time for a small conpetition after all if physics can have P-brains then we should be able to come up with something atleast as good…

Clive Robinson • May 29, 2020 4:23 PM

There is a lot of nonsense spouted aboit 5G and unfortunatly it has attracted a certain kind of person…

You may have heard that in the UK a number of “nut cases” have some how come to believe 5G is responsible for Corona Virus abd the second comming of Satan and such like. As a result they have gone out and set fire to what they think are 5G radio masts… The problem is to them ordinary cell masts and even electricity pylons are “5G Masts”…

There are various people claiming all sorrts of things…

Dave over on EEVblog in Australia has decided to take a look at one bunch of nutters web site and point out some of the nonsense,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4vHx-UyIM9M

Hopefully other people will find it as amusing as Electronics and Communications Engineers do.

Chris • May 29, 2020 4:44 PM

5G and viruses

Hi yes I agree and i believe this is a psyop that has worked very well.

I had a long conversation with someone that is a big customer of ours, and it was just loos talk about the virus this and that and we started to to go into this 5G thing

My background is radio and i know the RF things almost better than IT stuff, but i dont work with radios since thats just how things happened for me in my life.

When i explained to him “the person on the phone being a customer of mine” about how 5G works and what is the real problem he was reliefed.

Personally what we have here is
– Europe with Nokia Ericsson Siemens
– US Motorola iPhone and what not
We have been passed and we cant really
figure out anylonger how to follow since
– Our scholls are not intrested in teaching knowledge
– We are greedy and put knowledge to china
And so on
But lets focus on just this 5G and also
– 1945 -> 1992 +- USA / Europe listened into every conversation that was worth to listen to via nicely worked out intelligence services programs that controlled .. the paths where important voices talked

Now.. with 5G 2 things happens theoretically
but one thing happens 100% sure!
-1 nobody can intercept your comms
-2 maybe someone can but now its no longer
UKUSA etc now its CHINA

So…
This is what its about

Chris • May 29, 2020 5:08 PM

So here i want to ask you guys here that i think is more important or, equally important regarding operating systems

ARM projects
I like them but there are some things i dont like since many projects in ARM are SOC baed where we dont know what is going on such as Qualcomm

But. Risc based stuff personally i like them better than Intel processors

Now here is a thinking thing
Intel today is run via Telaviv
It doesnt matter what you think about that fact its just the way it is. so …

ARM is am Brittish? based thing and as it now seems it would also be outside of EU
However its an SOC where its really hard to know what is what, almost as the Chips in Taiwan

What i see here is the following
and btw it has allways been this way!

1.)
Who is my enemy
– 1945 – 1991 Sovjet Block
/Avoid Sovjet Both ways nothing in nothing out
2.)
– 3 or 4 or 5 blocks are active after coldwar
* usa / ukusa
* china using united nations with
getting africa and asia on the board via
paying them with infrastructure etc
* eu (looks very communistic/marxistic byrochratic lets see, could be its dismantled via its stupid byrochrasy or something sinister happens “typical europe”)
* china totally focusing its long term projects into this millenium and whith their schooling knowledge and people you need to pay attention!

What i see is going to happen short and long is
-1 china is going to war now using assymetric warfare like nothing you have seen before
covid.19 ?
-2 china is going to challenge
* ibm
* motorola
* google
* anything that usa have had !
If we look in the long term the following is going to happen
*** China wins
*** History will look at this and wonder
why did we even have USA ?
Ok this is probably going to be deleted
but, if you are concerned with secrets
** Dont use a smartphone
** Dont use chinese smartphones since they spy on you
** Dont use american smartphones since they spy on you
** Dont use european smartphones since they spy on you

—
Hah
Have a nice day

metaschima • May 29, 2020 6:03 PM

I remember in the 90s when I got my first cell phone they were selling these small metallic stickers on TV that were supposed to protect you from the EM radiation coming from your phone. My parents got me some, they really looked silly to me, but I put them on my phone until they fell off. Totally snake oil.

Rj • May 29, 2020 6:46 PM

@Clive: That’s “P-brane”, as in “membrane” from which we got “M- brane” before we got “P-brane”; the pun of the latter being “pea-brain”.

@Chris: Just don’t use phones at all, or any other electronic means of cumminication. The only hope for real security is to use strong cryptography send steganegraphically, and prefferably split at least 3 ways and posted by 3 different uncorrelatable sources. Or better yet use spread spectrum RF communications with micro-meteorite ionosphere reflection/scattering so the direction of LPD waveforms is undeterminable.

Or… you could just continue to self-quarantine and not communicate at all — in other words, die. :-0

Rj • May 29, 2020 6:49 PM

@Clive: And of course, “membrane” is just the prosaic word for the mathematical concept of a manifold — a continuous and differentiable subspace of the hyperspace in which it is contained. In 3D such a manifold looks like a membrane.

Lawrence D’Oliveiro • May 29, 2020 6:59 PM

But then again, why disabuse them of their fantasies? At least some of them are going to claim that this debunking is all part of the “conspiracy”, anyway.

Especially if having something like this around will assuage the need they feel to burn down 5G masts.

myliit • May 29, 2020 9:24 PM

@Stephanie

“ Bruce, are you saying that I spent all that money for nothing?!”

+1

I’m glad that I wasn’t the only person to fall for it.

Gunter Königsmann • May 30, 2020 1:19 AM

Sounds a bit like https://barcodekiller.de/Barcode-Killer [unfortunately german-only]: A site that sells extremely expensive pens that alloe to draw connecting lines that hinder the lines from barcodes from vibrating and thought-controlling you: “You will have seen: The more you have to do with barcodes the more money you will have spent.”
I don’t doubt they will send you a pen if you are willing to pay for it. But since they claim that the pens not only deactivates barcodes, but also the NCC1701 I guess the site is satirical, as well.

There was a nice English word describing an inverse intelligence test crooks do with would-be victims in order to make sure that they talk to someone who will fall victim to their scheme. Could any of the native speakers help me out and tell me how that was named?

Clive Robinson • May 30, 2020 4:05 AM

@ Rj,

My bad but I shall blaim the spell checker 0:)

When I first read about branes the joke did not occur to me. It was only later when someone asked me what I was reading and I said it out aloud that I realised from the look on their face[1]…

Of all the “physics jokes” it must be one of the more obvious (the “Why did the cat slide of off the roof?” being one of the worst). But heck put enough intelligent people in a room for long enough and word jokes and practical jokes will arise to relieve the boredom, as will secret codes. @Wael and myself have swapped a few in our time and I’d discussed using HTML tages for sending “bits of information” and @Wael and @Ratio went on to use gaps in unicode to send non-visable to the human eye messages through this blog (it fell foul of the 100 comments page, which uses a length count to terminate messages, thus the fact there was something “hinky” with the messages did become visable).

The SciFi writer Issac Asimov half humerously postulated in one of his short stories the idea that humour has been inflicted on the human race by some entity using us like “maze rats” and wondered what would happen should we actually ever discover it. Douglas Adams also used a similar idea to make god disapear “in a puff of logic”.

Is humour a sign of intelligence, I don’t know but there is if you look some correlation between observational humour and intelligence. That is you have to be smart to spot the mildly incongruous and then describe it in a way that is humourous to others.

[1] And for those who have watched Eureka, the P-brane joke does come up and gets the line “Why, aren’t physicists alowed to have a sense of humor?”.

Ismar • May 30, 2020 4:39 AM

In a strange way this provides a piece of mind to those gullible enough to believe 5G requires a protection from so for ~$500 it might still be cheaper than a couple of sessions with a psychiatrist ????. Plus you might be able to use it as a normal USB as well – so good on those who came up with the scheme

Ismar • May 30, 2020 4:41 AM

Forgot to add, as any other talisman, this modern version, more you pay, the more you believe in its protective powers

Clive Robinson • May 30, 2020 5:06 AM

@ Ismar,

so good on those who came up with the scheme

Can I interest you in my “Anti-terror embedded crystal”?

You carry it in your pocket and if it feels warm then there is a terrorist near you. It uses an ultra modern form of bio-feedback mechanisum configured to focus on a special crystaline mass with latent energy de-dispersive thus prolonged retentive properties. The more you use it the more sensitive it becomes thus significantly increasing it’s effective range giving you an increased sphear of warning.

c1ue • May 30, 2020 10:53 AM

@Martin Potter
No, the people who created this product, previously sold a similarly themed “quantum DNA” dietary supplement product called Immortalis.
Scammers through and through.

c1ue • May 30, 2020 3:10 PM

@Chris
It isn’t clear what you’re asking.
Are you implying that the processor designers are somehow building in bad things?

If you’re worried about that, I’d worry far more about ARM than anything else.
The Intel/AMD processors are proprietary and manufactured (mostly) in vertical supply chains.

ARM, on the other hand, is a software license. The finished product processor is customized as the licensee desires. This includes adding whatever they want, wherever they want, however they want. On top of which, much of the manufacturing is performed in 3rd party companies like TSMC, GlobalFoundries, UMC, SMIC etc.
TSMC is basically US even as they are in Taiwan. GlobalFoundries was bought and paid for by Middle Eastern money. SMIC is mainland China.
The foundries above also can theoretically insert anything they want into manufactured processors (or other chips).

So ARM processors are fully exposed to modification at every single point of their manufacturing chain, by multiple parties.

Trudi Fenster-Klotz • May 30, 2020 10:41 PM

Re: branes

If I may, a small point of clarification

Branes are a special kind of manifold. The term is not interchangeable with the term “manifold”.

Also, embeddedness is not part of the definition of manifold. In fact the notion of manifold encompasses the intrinsic global properties of certain kinds of topological and geometrical objects. Whether a manifold can be embedded in e.g. a Euclidian space of some dimension and the dimension required are the subject of famous theorems, e.g. for the smooth and metric cases, of H. Whitney and J. Nash.

Martin Potter • May 31, 2020 12:26 PM

@c1ue

Thanks. If they were previously selling a dietary supplement, I’ll bet they laughed all the way to the bank. “Scammers through and through” probably, but even some criminals have a sense of humour. As I said, their “catalyser” website was traditional British satire.

Except for the price, I would have bought one of their anti-5G devices, just for the fun of it. Then I noticed that they were all “on back order”. Ha, the joke was on me.

Agammamon • May 31, 2020 11:17 PM

<

blockquote>Turns out that it’s just a regular USB stick.

No, no, no – its a quantum USB stick. Until you opened it up and made a measurement it was both real and snake oil at the same time.

Ismar • June 1, 2020 3:12 AM

@Clieve – sure , I will by your crystal but only if it is very expensive ;-). BTW – are there any more of those paradise entry tickets the Church was selling ages ago – I may be interested in one of them too .

Clive Robinson • June 1, 2020 5:55 AM

@ Ismar,

are there any more of those paradise entry tickets

Sorry that boat sailed a while ago 😉

I’m still trying to work out the “Prime price” for my anti-terror crystal after all the longer you hold on the more it becomes hot stuff.

So in the search for such primality somebody mentioned that multiples of 6 are good to avoid. And they had a crystal healing machine for $10,000 but then with a slip of the Crown, Sterling became favoured currancy of comment as they tried to slip out the back in a Black Hat they tried not to pay for. 😉

myliit • June 1, 2020 10:48 PM

Iirc, there was a youtube scammer video where a guy spent 36 hours leading on a guy, while he was pretending to be female, …, above

Any equivalent or better post, about how to resist fraudsters saying, remotely and getting you to click on something, something like, your computer has a problem …?

Wael • June 3, 2020 2:27 AM

@Clive Robinson, @Rj,

(it fell foul of the 100 comments page, which uses a length count to terminate messages, thus the fact there was something “hinky” with the messages did become visable).

Not always. The first versions fell foul because the top 100-comments page counted invisible characters. Subsequent “hidden” messages were better steganographized.

This is a rudimentary example, followed by the script that de-steganographizes the message. There were other secret message-passing techniques used here as well: poetry, limericks, time-based obfuscations, etc…

A limerick and it’s decoding.

Disclaimer: Corona Borealis has nothing to do with COVID-19, but I get to correct the spelling 🙂

Another Data Point • June 3, 2020 5:40 PM

“The most important, golden thing in politics is a cellphone number,” said Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital efforts in 2016 before leading the 2020 campaign. “When we receive cellphone numbers, it really allows us to identify them across the databases. Who are they, voting history, everything.”

Taken from Verizon’s mouthpiece of yahoo news while talking about the Trump App.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-23/verizon-sees-4-billion-tax-cut-boost-solace-from-wireless-woe

Putting it all together now – can you imagine how much information and what vulnerabilities that app might bring you and yours. It’s trending in the Top 3 on Apple’s App Store.

Peder Thorsø Lauridsen • June 15, 2020 9:35 AM

Well – the funny thing if, that if it actually did work, it would be restricted by the different national institutions governing the use and influence of the radio spectrum. So the fact that it is being sold (legally) is that is doesn’t work.

Clive Robinson • June 17, 2020 4:39 AM

@ ALL,

As noted this is an out right scam and can not be legaly sold or imported into many countries.

But what of the people behind it? It appears atleast on is a compleate fruitloop / fruitcake / nut bar with deity delusions…

I mentioned above that Dave over on EEVBlog had done a debunk video on “5G gives you …” where the nut bars put in COVID, Male Pattern Baldness, etc, etc.

Well it appears this UK based scam device has gained such worldwide interest that Dave has done another debunk video this time on this very device,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aJURlsuui4I

You only need view as far as the “I am God” bit to get the fun out of it the rest is for those who still think “5G gives you glowing globes” or similar ailment yet to be seen by science or the medical profession…

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