Correction: Tin foil hats are not protective

I need to apologize to my loyal readers (reader?). I may have led you to believed that the government was jamming garage door openers and implied that tinfoil hats might have thwarted them.

I was wrong.

A new study at MIT reports that aluminum foil hats may not actually protect you from the government's intrusive radio waves. In fact the conclusion of the study was that the hats allow through and may even amplify the very frequencies set aside by the government for GPS and satellite communications, the same ones they use to locate us!

I always thought that Gauss's law implies that no radio waves can leave or enter a closed conductor (in this case, an aluminum foil hat), and that this is the basis on which a Faraday cage protects equipment inside from an electromagnetic pulse or from snooping and detection from outside of the cage. Maybe the aluminum hats don't work so well because they are not completely enclosed, or it is due to a near field effect. You can play with a simulation of a charge and a room with a door (or a aluminum foil hat with a hole, use your imagination) here.

There was no word on how to reduce the hats crinkly sound for when I sleep with it on.

Found at Slashdot (like they need my link)