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Wireless Networking Communications Network United Kingdom

Broadband Engineers Threatened Due To 5G Coronavirus Conspiracies (theguardian.com) 92

Posted by BeauHD from the baseless-theories dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Telecoms engineers are facing verbal and physical threats during the lockdown, as baseless conspiracy theories linking coronavirus to the roll-out of 5G technology spread by celebrities such as Amanda Holden prompt members of the public to abuse those maintaining vital mobile phone and broadband networks. Facebook has removed one anti-5G group in which users were being encouraged to supply footage of them destroying mobile phone equipment, with some contributors seemingly under the pretense that it may stop the spread of coronavirus and some running leaderboards of where equipment had been targeted.

Video footage of a 70ft (20 meter) telephone mast on fire in Birmingham this week has also circulated widely alongside claims it was targeted by anti-5G protesters. Network operator EE told the Guardian that its engineers were still on site assessing the cause of the fire but it "looks likely at this time" that it was an arson attack. The company said it would be working with the police to find the culprits. The problem has become so bad that engineers working for BT Openreach, which provides home broadband services, have also taken to posting public pleas on anti-5G Facebook groups asking to be spared the on-street abuse as they are not involved in maintaining mobile networks. Industry lobby group Mobile UK said the incidents were affecting efforts to maintain networks that are supporting home working and providing critical connectivity to the emergency services, vulnerable consumers and hospitals. Telecoms engineers are considered key workers under the government's guidelines.
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Broadband Engineers Threatened Due To 5G Coronavirus Conspiracies More

Broadband Engineers Threatened Due To 5G Coronavirus Conspiracies

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  • Amanda Holden, is a god damned liar!.

    • Re:Amanda Holden Thinks 5G Casues CoronaVirus ?! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by anonymouscoward52236 ( 6163996 ) on Friday April 03, 2020 @07:00PM (#59906164)
      5% of humans dying is dangerous. But 5% of humans believing in a nutty conspiracy threatening people is also very dangerous!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Indeed.

        • Re:Amanda Holden Thinks 5G Casues CoronaVirus ?! (Score:5, Insightful)

          by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Friday April 03, 2020 @09:22PM (#59906478)

          84% of the world believes in magical being(s) living in the sky/space/whatever and controlling our lives/destiny.

          That's really scary.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by gweihir ( 88907 )

            84% of the world believes in magical being(s) living in the sky/space/whatever and controlling our lives/destiny.

            That's really scary.

            Still that many? Damn. I had thought that the number of children in adult bodies had dropped a bit further in this supposed age of enlightenment. Apparently most human beings continue to not be adults and to believe in fairy-tales with no evidence whatsoever to support them. I did answer "Jedi Knight" in the second-to-last census when asked after religion, though, I hope that, and our noodely friends are not counted in these 84%.

          • Re:Amanda Holden Thinks 5G Casues CoronaVirus ?! (Score:5, Informative)

            by cusco ( 717999 ) <brian.bixby@gmail . c om> on Saturday April 04, 2020 @10:23AM (#59907636)

            And coincidentally I just ran into this:
            https://www.counterpunch.org/2... [counterpunch.org]

            While places of worship have been shut down to facilitate social distancing, nobody had the courage to stop a ‘gaumutra’ (cow piss) party on March 14. Guests drank the urine from mud bowls. They recited prayers before a holy fire beseeching the virus to leave. Swami Chakrapani, the president of the Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha that organised the event, said, “Coronavirus has come because of the people who kill and eat animals. When you kill an animal, it creates a sort of energy that causes destruction in that place. They (global leaders) should get cow urine imported from India because the almighty resides only in the Indian cow and not in any foreign breed. I request all the presidents and prime ministers of the world to take cow urine on a daily basis. You have all these scientists who don’t know the cure, we have the cure given to us by the gods.”

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by zixxt ( 1547061 )

            84% of the world believes in magical being(s) living in the sky/space/whatever and controlling our lives/destiny.

            That's really scary.

            It's not scary at all!

            • Well that depends on the evidence. Which religious people ignore as a matter of faith, because "faith" means believing something in the face of any and all countervailing evidence.

              That sort of belief is really dangerous in people who have to interact with the real world.

              Fortunately, religion is dieing in significant parts of the world. It would be better if it were dieing everywhere in the world, but with POTUS45 (known as the Tangerine Shitgibbon around here) encouraging America's religious to go to chur

          • Religion is literally why you will die one day. Without religion, we'd already be at the "brains in jars with conciousness still running", or somehow simulated/ran in a computer. With religion, people are less afraid of dying, so we're not there yet with life extension technologies.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday April 03, 2020 @09:55PM (#59906574)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • This would be funny if not for people believing it. https://youtu.be/6QrmQ2d_ilI [youtu.be]

    • You can't fix stupid :-(

      • Yes you can. The doctors Smith and Wesson made a few applicators for curative tablets that can be applied through any orifice of the body. You can even create your own.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • She got famous by cheating on her Z-list husband with another Z-list actor, in the UK this has somehow made her the arbiter of who has enough "talent" to be pushed as the public's newest flash in the pan entertainer. Now that the show is off the air she's desperate to remain in the public eye but this is a new low even for her. I wonder if her husband has been through her phone yet, I doubt they're married for actual love but rather a cut of the money from selling the wedding photos to some rag that somehow
    • who the hell is Amanda Holden, lol ... first time i hear the name

  • People are freaks... And they vote! (Score:4, Funny)

    by fustakrakich ( 1673220 ) on Friday April 03, 2020 @06:46PM (#59906094) Journal

    Pray to your dog for mercy

  • They even hate 4G and landlines.

  • Is it worse (Score:3)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Friday April 03, 2020 @06:56PM (#59906146) Journal

    Is it worse than windmill cancer?

    • Is it worse than windmill cancer?

      No. Windmill cancer is a conspiracy dreamed up by the chemtrail proponents to try and deflect attention away from their constant drugging of the population.

      But joke's on the windmill deniers! Chemtrail drugs actually prevented 5G from causing covid19 but once the flights were heavily reduced we saw an explosion of covid19 cases. ... and if you believe that I have an entire county full of bridges to sell you....

      It's amazing how easy it is to come up with a plausible-sounding conspiracy theory that some idiot

      • You should have stopped halfway through paragraph 2. I love the idea that chemtrails prevent coronavirus, and all the grounded flights contributed to the pandemic. This is how the best conspiracy theories spread, you just have to pretend to be serious.

      • But windmills are essential! Without them, we won't have any air movement!

        Proof: Ever noticed how it's curiously calm whenever they're not moving?

        • Proof: Ever noticed how it's curiously calm whenever they're not moving?

          They thought they could trick us but you caught them. This will rank right up there alongside my finding that wet streets cause rain.

  • Call it 'evolution in action', perhaps?
    I really can't wrap my head around where some of these nonsense claims come from, and more to the point: how people are actually persuaded to believe they're true.
    Has anti-science rhetoric actually gained such a foothold that crap like this actually gets serious consideration from people?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Sertis ( 2789687 )
      Just encourage them to get together for a rally, and let nature run it's course.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        Megachurches in Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee and Kentucky all held services last weekend with from 500-1200 attendees at each. (Probably the preachers wanted to shear their sheep before they're confronted with next month's mortgage payment and no income.) If many of those people didn't have non-stupid relatives I'd say "Good", but they're infecting everyone around.

    • People are morons. Even the smart ones

    • Anti-science rhetoric is a good part of it. A lot of it is people who have been consistently lied to about what the scientific evidence says or even about the nature of scientific evidence and what constitutes good evidence. These people honestly believe that these beliefs are "scientific." They're proven, everybody says so!

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • Let's say that the right tends to ignore the needs of the people and the left their vices.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by zixxt ( 1547061 )

            The republican party embraces Anti-Intellectualism. That is their whole shtick with mocking the liberal elite.

            The liberal "elite" are not intellectuals. This is obvious from their fondness for socialism.

            -jcr

            Liberals hate Socialism.

      • These people, like most people, never learned how to apply the scientific method. Our schools use rote learning and a demand to believe authority, i.e. "learn this, it's true because I say so, don't question me!"

        Then people find out eventually that their teachers not only didn't know everything but sometimes even were wrong but couldn't let their ego accept that their students won't gobble up any bullshit they lay out in front of them because yes, teacher sometimes do have an agenda themselves, too, that th

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tsa ( 15680 )

        "They're proven, everybody says so!"

        That is the same as saying: "98% of climate scientists agree that the climate changes due to human activity, so it must be true!" But, as Newton and Einstein showed, one man can revolutionize science. So those 2% need attention too.

  • The stupid, it burns! (Score:3)

    by MichaelSmith ( 789609 ) on Friday April 03, 2020 @07:03PM (#59906178) Homepage Journal

    An ex of mine, who is a doctor, once asked me if computer viruses are made of the same stuff as viruses which infect humans, animals, etc.

    So its not impossible an impossible leap that people are making here: their computer got a virus through 5G, so why can't that same virus infect them?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Well, whenever you think the human race has reached peak stupid, somebody like this comes along.

    • A doctor in what? Art History? Theology? Please tell me she got her degree online.

      • Medicine, from a real university.

        But she wasn't trained in computing at all, of course. So when computer people start discussing viruses she has no real way of understanding what they are on about.

        • There is no excuse for anyone who will use computers so much during the course of their jobs as a medical professional to be able to graduate with so little knowledge of computing. Any educational institutions which enable that are failing at education, period.

          • There is no excuse for anyone who will use computers so much during the course of their jobs as a medical professional to be able to graduate with so little knowledge of computing.

            Sorry but horseshit. Nothing about using a computer involves knowing how computer viruses spread.

            • "Nothing about using a computer involves knowing how computer viruses spread."

              Nothing except not getting your computer infected with one, you mean?

      • It could reasonably be medical doctor. It could be she knows a good deal about biological viruses but nothing about computer viruses, so she still doesn't know that they're not the same thing.

        • I would expect a medical doctor to (a) know that viruses can only infect biological organisms, and (b) be able to distinguish biological organisms from nonliving things like computers. It is not necessary to know the first thing about computer viruses to know that they must be fundamentally different from biological ones.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

            The original computer bugs were actually bugs. They'd get trapped in the relays.

            These things are not always obvious without domain knowledge.

            • You've ignored the specifics of what I said. The domain knowledge of basic biology is already sufficient to tell one that biological viruses cannot infect nonliving things.

              Oh, and FWIW, the "original bugs" were not actual insects. I presume you are referring to this [thenextweb.com], a little joke which actually implies that computer bugs predate moths in the relays.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

                And I disagree -- knowing what viruses do to living things tells you nothing about what they do to non-living things. If helium can break MEMS sensors, then why can't a virus get stuck somewhere and cause a malfunction? Yes I know you can explain why they won't. But if you don't understand electronics in general, it might as well be the work of angry pixies. Maybe they get colds.

                • knowing what viruses do to living things tells you nothing about what they do to non-living things

                  Except, that it does. Or rather, it tells you what they do not do. Knowing that viruses have to co-opt the specific machinery of certain living cells in order to reproduce tells you that, in the absence of living cells, the virus will not reproduce, and therefore not 'infect'. See, if we were talking about bacteria here, I might agree with you, but viruses have very particular requirements about where they can 'live'.

    • Well, in a 100 years, I can imagine creating a computer virus that can manufacture physical viruses for humans, and make them be attracted to computers and have a strong urge to input something to spread the computer virus... :)

      Sadly, today there is no omnipresent device that could enable this. ^^
      But hey, the Samsung Galaxy 53 might get a gene syntesizer and a protein creation proteins starting set! ;)

    • You're a friend of "doctor" Hovind? Or did your friend just get his degree in the same trailer as that funny fellow?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by atheos ( 192468 )
      My first wife was 'tarded. She's a pilot now.
  • Amanda Holden?

  • 4chan (Score:2)

    by theCat ( 36907 )

    4chan trolling the normiez again.

    • Yup. There's currently two pandemics haunting the nation. One is spread by close contact between people. The more dangerous one is spread via the internet. I think we should let people go out and meet in person, the dangers to society are certainly lower.

  • It needs to be tested more first before they can roll it out. It seems way too rushed to get it out there, and for some reason Israel is not having it anywhere.

  • Stop lying (Score:3)

    by LenKagetsu ( 6196102 ) on Friday April 03, 2020 @10:21PM (#59906630)

    with some contributors seemingly under the pretense that it may stop the spread of coronavirus

    This is a lie. This is identical to the fucking lie that "Bald men are being killed in Africa because idiots think their heads contain gold". It's a fucking lie, those bald men died because the killers were murderous thugs. Same way these vandals are just destructive cunts, it's nothing to do with the wuhan disease or preventing it.

    Stop with the lies.

  • How could 5G cuase coronavirus in England, 5G doesn't even work in rain.

  • The question is whether Amanda Holden was born stupid or if she practices?

    #AmandaHoldenIsStupid

  • I think I now have some idea what it must have been like in Salem during the witch trials. This time we don't have ergot-contaminated bread to blame for the lunacy though - so what the fuck?

    "Crazy glue sniffers" used to be a thing - do we now have "crazy Fox sniffers", where Fox is the 'gateway drug' to Breitbart, Alex Jones, and Magda Havas?

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