Freedom of stefu
 

Completely disabling a persons ability to communicate? Thats more dangerous than a gun, though this technology has actually been available for years.




http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/...h-jamming-gun/

Two Japanese researchers recently introduced a prototype for a device they call a SpeechJammer that can literally “jam” someone’s voice — effectively stopping them from talking. Now they’ve released a video of the device in action.

“We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking,” write Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada in their article on the SpeechJammer (PDF). “However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately disrupt other people when it is their turn … rather than achieve more fruitful discussions.”

The researchers released the video after their paper went viral Thursday, to the authors’ apparent surprise. “Do you know why our project is suddenly becoming hot now?” asked Kurihara in an e-mail exchange with Wired.com.

The design of the device is deceptively simple. It consists of a direction-sensitive microphone and a direction-sensitive speaker, a motherboard, a distance sensor and some relatively straightforward code. The concept is simple, too — it operates on the well-studied principle of delayed auditory feedback. By playing someone’s voice back to them, at a slight delay (around 200 milliseconds), you can jam a person’s speech.

I thought they were doing something similar to noise isolating headphones where they play back the inverse of a sound to cancel it out. But it looks like they are just confusing the victim.

I think if someone points a box with a laser at me face I too would lose all track of what i was doing by being distracted.

I call hoax.

Eh, why? It's just noise cancellation, nothing special.

it isn't noise canceling, they are playing back whatever the person says at a 200 millisecond delay which causes havoc on your brain and stops you from talking. It is an effect that sometimes is seen by people talking into a microphone with a lot of echo. You may continue to try and speak, but because your audio cues are messed up by the delay, gibberish is the best one can accomplish.

Noise canceling plays the opposite sound/sound wave to cancel out noise.

There is a low tech counter to all of their high tech recording/playback equipment, though. Simply put your finger's in your ears.

Kind of underwhelming....

well if you notice it doesn't make what they say suddenly become cancelled out, it just confuses them into shutting up.

its like if you were talking at a seminar and I was there and as you were speaking I suddenly stood up and flopped my penis out and then slapped it against the person next to me in full view you would start to become phased, unless you like that sort of thing.

This used to happen occasionally when I worked as Tech Support via phone. Occasionally there would be a echo in the line reporting back everything I had said, but with a delay long enough that when I was trying to speak, my mind was trying to understand the audio. It did mess up my speech patterns.

One day it happened on every phone call. After near 7 hours of it I got VERY good at learning to speak through and ignore the echo. But I still had issues understanding the customer because I was focusing on speaking my mind and ignoring my hearing.

It can be ignored but it will definitely trip up anyone.

If you have audio software on your computer that can take live audio and introduce a short delay you can attempt to hold conversations with someone on the phone like that. Its very difficult to speak your mind then.