4 ms·

>provided there's no deception. First of all, your caveat does not hold. This article is deceptive in full. None of the advice presented here is good at all...

by ouid 8y ago

>provided there's no deception. First of all, your caveat does not hold. This article is deceptive in full. None of the advice presented here is good at all... "divide the room into quadrants and search each quadrant"? Why? Just search the entire room. The article fundamentally gives the impression that you will not actually be able to locate any spygear unless you have an RF detector and a camera beacon simply by not giving any good advice otherwise. "Check if the outlet covers have been changed?" right, because when I bug a house that I own, I also buy a new outlet cover. No one trying to sell you something is going to tell you how you could effectively live your life without their product. This is fundamentally deceptive, and seems to have gone so far as to have fooled even you.

booleandilemma 8y ago
None of the advice presented here is good at all... "divide the room into quadrants and search each quadrant"? Why? The article answers that: Splitting the room into sections will help you to systematically and meticulously go through the room and clear each section without skipping over any of the fine details. This strategy is generally known as “divide and conquer”.
- ouid 8y ago
  no, the strategy of divide and conquer exclusively refers to situations in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, in this case they are exactly equal. In military parlance, it means that you have a much greater advantage against 2 armies of half size separately than against them both simultaneously. This is known as Lanchester's law, and the whole point is that it's non-linear. In algorithms, the idea is roughly that, given a method which solves a problem, it is often cheaper to split your input, solve each half, then merge them, than it is to run the algorithm on the entire input. Again, non-linear. Dividing your room into quadrants provides NO advantage to searching your room. You still have to search each unit area methodically.
  - pergadad 8y ago
    The suggestion is not about efficiency, it's about not forgetting anything.
    - ouid 8y ago
      I'm pretty sure most people have a pretty intuitive understanding of how to perform a methodical search of a room. The article promises clever tricks for finding bugs and cameras in a room without having to spend any money, and fails to deliver on that premise, deceptively, because it is solely an advertisement for a device that is FAR more expensive than it needs to be.
      - mrob 8y ago
        >I'm pretty sure most people have a pretty intuitive understanding of how to perform a methodical search of a room And surgeons were pretty sure they'd never leave an implement inside a patient, but the stats still improved with the introduction of checklists. Like checklists, the quadrant method means there's less demand on your memory, which means less chance of forgetting things if something unexpected happens.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Thus, the article would be much better if it provided a checklist with concrete, actionable steps instead. This is a difference between content marketing and actually caring about informing the reader.
        logfromblammo 8y ago
        The checklist can also be ordered such that the lowest-hanging fruit is covered first. Start with the vent covers, overhead lights, and smoke detectors, because those are the places where it's easiest for an unskilled spy to hide monitoring devices. Any hole cut into the sheetrock for a legit purpose could also have a peephole near it. I bought a house that had a slight dimple in the heating duct of a ground-level bathroom, mostly concealed by the vent cover. I went down into the basement, and surely enough, from a certain spot, I had a clear view of the toilet and shower from below. I bent the duct back flush with the edge of the hole, and concluded that was probably one of the reasons that the sellers were getting divorced. So you might not find a camera. There might be an actual eyeball there sometimes. An electronic scanner isn't going to find that.

by ouid 8y ago

booleandilemma 8y ago

None of the advice presented here is good at all... "divide the room into quadrants and search each quadrant"? Why? The article answers that: Splitting the room into sections will help you to systematically and meticulously go through the room and clear each section without skipping over any of the fine details. This strategy is generally known as “divide and conquer”.

ouid 8y ago
no, the strategy of divide and conquer exclusively refers to situations in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, in this case they are exactly equal. In military parlance, it means that you have a much greater advantage against 2 armies of half size separately than against them both simultaneously. This is known as Lanchester's law, and the whole point is that it's non-linear. In algorithms, the idea is roughly that, given a method which solves a problem, it is often cheaper to split your input, solve each half, then merge them, than it is to run the algorithm on the entire input. Again, non-linear. Dividing your room into quadrants provides NO advantage to searching your room. You still have to search each unit area methodically.
- pergadad 8y ago
  The suggestion is not about efficiency, it's about not forgetting anything.
  - ouid 8y ago
    I'm pretty sure most people have a pretty intuitive understanding of how to perform a methodical search of a room. The article promises clever tricks for finding bugs and cameras in a room without having to spend any money, and fails to deliver on that premise, deceptively, because it is solely an advertisement for a device that is FAR more expensive than it needs to be.
    - mrob 8y ago
      >I'm pretty sure most people have a pretty intuitive understanding of how to perform a methodical search of a room And surgeons were pretty sure they'd never leave an implement inside a patient, but the stats still improved with the introduction of checklists. Like checklists, the quadrant method means there's less demand on your memory, which means less chance of forgetting things if something unexpected happens.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        Thus, the article would be much better if it provided a checklist with concrete, actionable steps instead. This is a difference between content marketing and actually caring about informing the reader.
        logfromblammo 8y ago
        The checklist can also be ordered such that the lowest-hanging fruit is covered first. Start with the vent covers, overhead lights, and smoke detectors, because those are the places where it's easiest for an unskilled spy to hide monitoring devices. Any hole cut into the sheetrock for a legit purpose could also have a peephole near it. I bought a house that had a slight dimple in the heating duct of a ground-level bathroom, mostly concealed by the vent cover. I went down into the basement, and surely enough, from a certain spot, I had a clear view of the toilet and shower from below. I bent the duct back flush with the edge of the hole, and concluded that was probably one of the reasons that the sellers were getting divorced. So you might not find a camera. There might be an actual eyeball there sometimes. An electronic scanner isn't going to find that.