$40 Tinfoil Hat?? - KICKFARTED Ep. 2
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,571 words · ~7 min read
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for today's episode of kick farted we'll
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be investigating the claims made by Shield headwear a company that
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specializes in fashionable RF shielding
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apparel to keep your head safe from the harmful radiation that is all around us
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in this digital age they say with their
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Shield head wear signals are hundreds of
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times lower inside with the shielding effect maxing out at 60 DB which would
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mean 99 99% of the incident radiation is blocked
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sounds impressive right I mean I guess so but since I'm not an engineer a
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biologist or why does anyone listen to me anyway
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the point is I'm not going to weigh in on whether RF radiation is harmless or
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the next coming of Satan himself or somewhere in between that's beyond the
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scope of this video what I am going to do is travel to Vancouver Island to
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investigate these CL with Katarina gustavs an EMF consultant
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with a special interest in RF radiation who notably is one of the certified
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Consultants listed on Shield head wear's own website though I doubt after this
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video she'll be there much
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longer Intel skull Canyon knck features
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a sixth generation core i7 quad coreu processor and Thunderbolt 3 learn more
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at the link in the video description so we're not in a lab here strictly
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speaking but we believe that we've created a test environment that's as
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good or better than the one used by Shield headwear so to give you some idea
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of how much control we have over our environment with this Ultra Broadband
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antenna our background RF level is around 3.5 microwatt per square meter
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thanks to our location halfway up Mount Ma so there's hardly even cell phone
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service here compared to on the top of the mountain where the radar pulses can
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hit 10,000 microwatt per square meter or more this is Wilderness folks moving on
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to our gear the first thing we need is our trusty HF 59b RF meter from
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gigahertz Solutions this is the same one used in the testing done by Shield
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headware but it should be noted that our setup for it is a little different we're
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using the more accurate and better shielded log periodic antenna
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that is included with the HF 59b it's actually very unclear to us why Shield
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headware opted for the one that normally ships with gigahertz Solutions lower-end
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model since mixing and matching can deliver unreliable readings and while
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Shield is using the 2.4 GHz mode to
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filter out anything but 2.4 gig Wi-Fi signals we're using a high pass filter
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to cut off anything below 800 MHz though
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since there is so little background RF here this is effectively the same thing
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so for our first trick we need a baseline reading on a bog standard home
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router I grabbed the dlink dir 655 at a distance of 1 and 1/2 M we're
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looking at peaks of around 2.2 Mills per square meter with no connected clients
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it should be noted that due to its nature a Wi-Fi signal will always be
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kind of Jumpy like this rather than giving us a solid reading since a hat
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can be worn a number of different ways for the sake of thess we decided to try
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several different ways for our router to wear the toque or beanie beginning with
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kind of loosely to represent what it might be like if it didn't entirely
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cover the source of the RF radiation and in this scenario we observed a 10x
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decrease not too shabby but not exactly
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hundreds of times better either our second hat position has most of the
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antennas covered and we see another significant Improvement in the signal
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blocking effectiveness of the Hat leading us to our third measurement
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where we carefully cover the entire antenna array and we are able to
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reproduce the results demonstrated in Shield head wear's video but there's a
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problem with this while the general rules for this meter are to use as
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coarse a scale as you have to but as fine a scale as possible and for
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comparative measurements you should stay within the same scale if we use only
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only the course measurement like they did we would think that we've gotten all
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the way down to 2 microwatt per square meter just because that's what it
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displays in the course reading mode we actually have to switch to the Fine mode
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to get a more accurate reading oops 100
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microwatt per square meter so then what would it take to get to the 2 microwatt
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reading from Shield head wear's video we tried wrapping a second beanie on the
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router being careful to eliminate gaps in the coverage in an attempt to
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simulate the effect of a faraday cage and it turns out that yes while this
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method of wearing the product isn't particularly fashionable or comfortable
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the silver fabric material being used is
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capable of the results they demonstrated but radiation shielding
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products I mean these are things that are commercially available and have actually engineering that go into them
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are as much about the design as they are about the materials choice I mean
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titanium is a strong material but it
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wouldn't be a very good idea to wear a solid titanium motorcycle helmet for
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what I'd like to think are fairly obvious reasons so back then to Shield
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headwear we've recreated their test and
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demonstrated that their beanie is not as effective at blocking RF radiation as
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they think it is when used in the manner demonstrated in their video but frankly
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that isn't even the main issue here let's pick through some of the other
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problems by their own admission the material
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reflects signals so when short of sticking your
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head into a microwave oven which isn't recommended by the way the biggest
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source of the signals your headware is supposed to be blocking is the phone
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that you've got your face buried into why did they put a concave reflector in
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the case of the baseball cap right above your face and why are they ignoring the
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findings of these MIT students who determined that wearing a tinf foil hat
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actually resulted in a 30 D or 1,000
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fold amplification of 2.6 GHz signals
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when transmitted to the cranium from
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receivers outside I mean as they do
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point out on their website the signals won't shoot around inside your skull
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like lightsabers but will be mostly absorbed
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by the various layers of tissue in your head but like isn't that the point of
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this stuff that we don't want that and
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somehow their own mention of the Inconvenient Truth that a true signal
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blocking device would cover the head from top to bottom that doesn't stop
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them from claiming that their hat is a personal bodyguard against radiation and
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that it doesn't need to be grounded because Faraday cages don't need to be
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grounded which one is it you guys I mean
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on top of that the RF meter that they and we are using is not for measuring in
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the so-called near field Zone anyway
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like inside of a hat with a smartphone next to it the way people use phones
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making everything that we're testing completely meaningless anyhow and
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finally they specifically make a point of mentioning that their headwear is not
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just a tinf foil hat and we could have
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pointed out the misspelling of signal proof on their website as an indication
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they aren't strong fact Checkers but for good measure we tested that too and
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whipped up a Frugal and Imo quite stylish aluminum foil hat tested it and
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hot damn it works even better so there you have it I'm still
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not qualified to say whether Wi-Fi signals are harmful or not I will leave
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that to the scientists but what I can say with confidence is that if you want
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to protect yourself from them my homemade solution is just as good as the
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30 to 40 Euro one that you can buy on Shield head wear.com though you should
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know that both of these types of shielding hats may not work as intended
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and may even increase your RF exposure
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to your head derp so thanks for watching
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guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check
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out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description
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maybe don't buy this stuff that's okay you could just go to the link and buy
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something else also linked in the description is our merch store which has
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cool shirts like this one and our community for which you should totally
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join now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button
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in the top right corner if you haven't already seen our last episode of kick
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farted on the Neptune Pine a wrist mounted phone that's as dumb as it
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sounds