ryan on Nostr: Fun fact: When you "turn off" wifi on your phone, it doesn't turn off the radio. It ...
Fun fact: When you "turn off" wifi on your phone, it doesn't turn off the radio. It merely stops connecting to networks for a while. Both Apple and Google have features that will "helpfully" silently turn wifi back on if it detects your cell data is slow, or on a timer to download updates.
Before I knew about this, I often wondered why my podcast player (old phone) would occasionally prompt me to enter a wifi password while I was out on the road.
And of course, when in this "off" mode, it still pings all nearby networks, sending out your BSSID, just in case it needs to connect. I've talked about why this is a problem before: https://angrytechnews.com/index.php/tag/wifi/
There are ways to tell the phone "no, really, I mean shut it down", but they're intentionally obscure and harder to do. Consult your phone's owners manual how to do it. (Ha! Remember when products had a manual? Yeah, I meant do a web search. YMMV)
Before I knew about this, I often wondered why my podcast player (old phone) would occasionally prompt me to enter a wifi password while I was out on the road.
And of course, when in this "off" mode, it still pings all nearby networks, sending out your BSSID, just in case it needs to connect. I've talked about why this is a problem before: https://angrytechnews.com/index.php/tag/wifi/
There are ways to tell the phone "no, really, I mean shut it down", but they're intentionally obscure and harder to do. Consult your phone's owners manual how to do it. (Ha! Remember when products had a manual? Yeah, I meant do a web search. YMMV)