Yeah I get it. But let's say that the 50s represents an era of stability. I probably wouldn't have been happy in that stultifying environment. At least this madness is like a circus, and in a circus there is plenty of room to be strange.
I would wager you were not alive during this "stultifying environment." I was. I am a month away from age 77. It was a decade of Polio and the vaccines, quarantines, iron lungs, "Duck and Cover" and "DROP" drills in my grammar school, the civil defense tests of the CONALRAD radio alert system (AM 640 AND AM1260 channels) and the once-a-month Friday testing of all the Air Raid Sirens throughout the Greater Los Angeles area.
FWIW, the madness has been around since the watershed incident of 11/22/1963, when a sitting POTUS was murdered in broad daylight in Dallas. And the Sheeple, Normies, Cucks, and Flag-Wavers have been drinking the Leviathan's Kool-Aid ever since. Now that's madness. Life is a vale of tears.
Funnily enough, all of those perceived threats were lies.
There was no “polio virus”, no “safe & effective vaccine”, no “polio”, but several other causes of severe, paralysing illnesses, no nuclear weapons, either.
I grew up in the 50s behind iron curtain. And guess what, nobody made us do the silly duck and cover crap. Even the commies were not that insane... go figure.
Yes. But what else could the schools do? My school: Saint John Baptiste De La Salle-Granada Hills, CA was a very stout two-story brick structure with all-steel external stairways for fire escapes. When we had the "DROP!" drills, it was the job of the students sitting next to the windows to shut them and drop the blinds to catch shattering glass. This is what we all had to work with. I also forgot to mention LA was surrounded by Nike air defense missile bases. Tumultuous times, not stultifying at all. But we survived and prospered.
Just a little over a year behind you (making me a mere child by comparison of course 🙄). I consider 🎶We Didn’t Start the Fire🎶 to be my song for our generation and now, of course, the overly comfortable next gens are trying their own version in a pathetic attempt at claiming equivalency of their experience. 😉 😈
That's a great phrase - "in a circus there is plenty of room to be strange" - perhaps unintentionally so, but I like it. >>>>> One reason that the '50s were stable/stultifying is that the decade before had seen so much death, destruction & evil I would imagine those who lived through the trying times of the Great Depression, WWII, use of atomic weapons, the rise of Communism, etc. just wanted peace, quiet, assurance, constancy. With the U.S. emerging as a superpower from WWII, I submit that putting faith in the govt/military as protector - a 'good' Big Brother', if you will - was a welcome balm.
The 50's were not as stultifying as their promotional team suggests. There was more than enough weirdness if you knew where to look. There are plenty of modern 'creators' who are ripping off chunks of 50's era culture and most people would never know because they think the 50's were poodle skirts, malt shops and happy days thanks to the media.
See: Kiss Me Deadly, the proto Tarantino movie for example.
Do you place a higher value on strangeness and circus like atmosphere than being able to afford housing, utilities, food, a car and some recreational activities on the salary of one high school graduate? There was a much greater distribution of wealth across society then. I was born in 1952, and didn’t notice the general sense of uncertainty and existential dread that seems ever more prevalent. I have never been a conservative and have always been critical of thoughtless conformity but it seems that some of the trades we have made have been trivial compared to what has been lost
The number of times I've shown colleagues how trivially easy it is to rig door locks, or to break in by ignoring the lock and instead removing the frame around the lock, and other such things, well it's plenty of times.
We can include a couple of engineers and designers in that tally, all with the patented come back of "But that's not how it's supposed to be used".
Higher education my hairy breeks, a glue-head teen could figure out how to beat the "siphon-proof" fuel tanks of cars. Or when I was a bovver-boy meself - piece of fishing line, superglue on a coin, and "go fish" in the vending machine. Coin pushes down sensor and trips the feed-out candy function, but doesn't drop into the coin box. Worked on the state's pay phones too.
I'll say this to the end I think: hire clever boys and girls to try and break stuff, before releasing it.
I’m always super impressed with the way the Amish can hack/use technology to get around their religious objections, which includes privacy concerns. I would love to see what they could do with a new Cat Phone.
I’ve noticed that about many other virtue signaling groups of the past and present. Nothing new really. Reference Weird Al’s 🎶Living in an Amish Paradise🎶.
You’ve read about the British teens who figured out how to get out of school? Put Coca Cola on the antigen test strips for a positive. All you need are some teenagers and you can get around anything
Darn kids! In my day (fetches cane with scrimshawed grip - yes, I've really got one like that, I need if the hip is acting up) we held the thermometer to the lightbulb while mum or the nurse wasn't looking.
Or for the serious cases, such as before conscription (age 18), they would eat a tube of toothpaste. Skin goes pale grayish, sweating, shaking, vomiting, the works and the conscript is sent home.
And the perennial favourite of certain girls: PMS and period pain. Well how is a teacher to check that, I ask you!
Probably because in technical areas, these teenagers have not yet succumbed to the institutional indoctrination of "It can't be done!". Train them as engineers and soon they will stop.
Been that way for millennia. Between teens, especially boys, and Darwin I sometimes think that is the main reason humanity makes any progress at all. 🤣😈
Freshman year in college--when a dime still had meaning (at least to me)--I called my mother, let the phone ring once. Hung up. Dime returned and mother called the phone number immediately and we could chat as long as we wished.
This is security engineering. Ross Anderson wrote a hilarious textbook about this; get the first edition, since all the great stories were removed from subsequent editions.
When I was very young we were on vacation at a kids resort, the older kids had shown me how they slid the quarters in but not all the way and then before completely releasing it they used a Popsicle stick to hold it from coming completely out so it could be done and play all you wanted. A paper clip works or used to work on parking meters. A homeless guy would add time to the meter if you gave him something for his efforts.
Years ago, someone broke into somewhere my uncle was staying in nyc by punching out the drywall next to the door and then reaching through to unlock it
I'm not overly a doom-imaginer but I really dislike the idea of drowning in a river because I can't get the damned passenger-side door or window open myself.
I did my primary flight training at an airport whose westbound runway ends at the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. One of the first lessons they teach student pilots was what to do if we had to ditch in the water. One of the steps is tighten your seatbelt, open the door, and jam it open with your headset. Unless you land in open cold water far from shore, 95% of forced water landings are survivable.
I'm not *really* overly-exercised at the thought of landing in water while still in a car. I just extremely dislike having control over the passenger-side door taken away from me by geniuses of design improvement.
One of the things I noticed about flight training is that, unlike driver’s education, there is a laser-focused emphasis on planning for disaster so it doesn’t take you by surprise when it happens. Driver’s Ed is all about staying out of trouble. Flight training is all about taking control of the situation when trouble happens, because sooner or later it will.
Yes, that's a useful attitude. I get slammed for "crossing my bridges before I've reached them"---I consider it mental preparation. As in, "accidents happen to the unprepared".
I just read a long article about survival in a submerged car (about 400 people a year don't). It is complicated, depends on the type of glass and a lot of other circumstances. It does seem like my little hammer is likely to be useless.
Yes, that's a really lethal aspect of modern car designs. The shipping tycoon Angela Chao drowned in her Tesla less than 10 feet away from the edge of a small pond which might even have been shallow enough for her head to be above the water if she had been standing outside the car.
Any country that has elections coming up, should probably not assume they will actually happen. Those days are gone, and the performative gloves are coming off.😉
Admittedly it's been years since I was read-up on the bits and bobs of islamic apocrypha, and I'm certainly no scholar, but I do recall reading about no one with a deformity of body being admitted unto god (which could possibly extend to limb-loss in some interpretations, as per the cutting off of hands and such).
I do recall that the path to god after death is across the edge of his scimitar, laying edge up over the chasm of Hell, so that the faithful can gaze down on the condemned for eternity, and vice versa.
But caveat et cetera, it's late, I'm full of food, and things sort-of blend together not unlike rum poured over vanilla ice cream with vodka-pickled cherries on top of.
I cannot wrap my head around that, although have some thoughts. Pentateuch shows requirement of sacrifices (animal, grain, wine) continually. Abraham directed to sacrifice his only son Isaac on a stone, burning involved. Does circumcision of foreskin represent a human sacrifice without actual death?
Gin&tonic, my go-to lifesaver when I was in Jugoslavia.
Back when there was a Jugoslavia, that is.
Still remember a little hole-in-the-wall in downtown Dubrovnik, where you could get a beer, a schnapps and a drink plus a packet of smokes for the eq. of 1-2 Deutschmark. All East Bloc brands of course - imported stuff was way more expensive, but who goes abroad to get the same stuff you have at home, I ask.
At one point when we had imbibed most unscrupulously, I accidentally mixed my order up. Instead of either a gt or a rum and coke, I ordered gin and rum.
This has been a concern about outsourcing so much electronics production to China for decades now. When Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama turned over production of national security and defense industry electronics production to China it was always insane. From the standpoint of embedding hidden espionage capabilities in them, to embedding remote self-destruct capabilities. There were warnings...ignored...as they usually are.
So here we are. A day may come when I'm in the middle of commenting something verboten on Bad Kitty's Substack and my hands go Boom! and it's light's out for me. Not good. Not good at all.
On a somewhat more somber note, I was struck by the sudden infusion of $$ into INTC just the other day. Funny, but most of those aging weapon systems & avionics use 8080-8086 to 80386 etc chips that can no longer be sourced for replacement. Changing to new chips is not feasible - the old ones must be replaced with identical form/fit/function in order to not require an entire upgrade program ($$$$) with engineering, design, test, V&V, and so on.
The amount of Government code that's just FORTRAN wrapped up in a Java interface - because it's just not cheap to replace for all the reasons noted - is mid boggling. And the old programs still produce good results.
if musk had half a brain he's build one like that and optimize it to be a p2p node in a distributed social media system and a wallet/transactional node."
Couple of points to make here gato. 1) Open source software cannot solve this problem. Go back to 2014 with truecrypt full disk encryption: "WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues," text in red at the top of TrueCrypt page on SourceForge states. The page continues: "This page exists only to help migrate existing data encrypted by TrueCrypt. The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP. Windows 8/7/Vista and later offer integrated support for encrypted disks and virtual disk images. Such integrated support is also available on other platforms (click here for more information). You should migrate any data encrypted by TrueCrypt to encrypted disks or virtual disk images supported on your platform."
The speculation is that because it is open source, the NSA or whoever submitted an extremely advanced parameterized algorithm to break it. And not one could figure out how: they basically put something like stuntnex into the code and no one could figure out how because it was too complicated.
""Whenever the people need a hero we shall supply him" -Albert Pike
And 2) Musk is the hero we the people have been given. Meaning he isn't one. The only way forward is through God and local engagement. Your actions can have such a profound positive effect on others - it's like a super power. Use it to the fullest extent you can. None of us will make it out alive, but we sure want to have the cleanest most pristine souls possible when we arrive for judgement.
Who is Elon Musk? Beneath all the glitz and glamour and limitless spurious hype surrounding this man and his technology - who is this cult of personality - and what does Elon Musk actually stand for when you really dig underneath the surface? Ah yes, he stands for technocratic globalism. Surprise, surprise, just like almost everyone else in his peer group, his goal is to control you:
Not seeing a lot of alignment between previously videos Li-ion meltdowns and the pager explosions caught on camera. Seems pretty likely that explosives were added. However, even without explosives, Li-ion battery meltdowns themselves are pretty dangerous, so I think your overall point still stands.
perhaps worth considering that this is because most thermal runaway's on batteries are accidental and partial as opposed to be optimized for sudden release.
i don't have a definitive claim on the physics of the specific pager, but comparing accidental melt downs to deliberate full criticality may be misleading rather than illuminating.
Are you saying the "worm" was placed there through something like a thumbdrive on the network at physical location or was it through frequency manipulation via base stations?
One possibility would be to swap the regular battery with a replacement battery but without the pressure relief vent. You can easily get someone in China to make it. Then wrap it in some nichrome wire and have the board run some power through it. The nichrome wire will overheat the cell really quickly causing the cell to rapidly over pressurize and potentially explode. But I dunno - have it work in 2000 (!) cases simultenously? I am gonna go with a small explosive charge perhaps hidden near the battery compartment, like 10-15g of semtex or something.
Sounds like the story from about 12 years ago where US spy guys (FBI?) intercepted Cisco routers at the airport, opened and inserted chips into the devices in a room in the airport and then let them be delivered and installed into large company networks. From that point the data packets were forwarded to the spy agency from inside the networks...
Found this: "The Model of the pagers that exploded in Lebanon are Gold Apollo AR-924. Apollo Electronic Paging Company is a company based in Taiwan."
Looks to me like the Mossad intercepted a few shipments and made them extra spicy. Thankfully the good guys did this! Imagine the outrage if the bad guys did this? *sigh*
Yes, I was wondering as well if the Covid Vax impairs sarcasm recognition, or if those who lacked the ability to recognize sarcasm where the ones who primarily took the Vax. I think we should do a study.
I have observed for a few decades that those considering selves "progressive" lacked a sense of humor. And the vax uptake seems to have shown a fairly strong political orientation. Thus, I conclude that far more vaxxed lack the humor gene.
You said, "He's unvaxxed, so he knows how to use the tool of sarcasm ..."
What was implied is that those who don't immediately recognize sarcasm online are "vaxxed". This was confirmed by your reaction to another comment stating, "Yes, I was wondering as well if the Covid Vax impairs sarcasm recognition, or if those who lacked the ability to recognize sarcasm where the ones who primarily took the Vax."
That said, let's stop calling those Covid shots "vaccines". We are talking about an experimental gene therapy that was sold as a "vaccine" in order to trick the public at large into submitting to this experiment.
Agreed. I have an Apollo pager - used to be sales rep for them. Didn't like the product and never sold any. It isn't feasible to detonate the battery on a stock pager. The charge/discharge circuit is usually separate from the paging capability. This took more than a firmware update to do this.
The other thing is these are POCSAG pager. This is data protocol but I believe it is too limited to push out an over the air firmware update. I too lazy to look anything up right now but pretty sure the pagers where completely swapped enroute rather than intercepted and modified.
Taiwan, you say? Interesting… Can you post the source pls? Taiwan was also crucial in the stuxnet affair, because the virus certificate of authenticity was stolen from Realtek, a Taiwanese company. Looks like they’re relying on T. for things like these.
Was seeing the same general comments - that just the batteries aren't really enough for that sort of damage, but ... it's a valid concern for machines that could have other issues and overheat / start fires or the like.
On the more political side, the people affected who shouldn't carry a pager for Hezbollah seems to be interesting. And it's an interesting way to affect your actual enemies without the whole "civilian shield" thing.
There's no way a pager or a cell phone battery has enough combustion energy to make a serious explosion. Could darn sure give you a case of roasted nuts, though.
A Tesla has about 12 to 20 (depending on model) 5.3 kWh battery modules. Hi-end cell phones have a battery capacity of about 4 Wh and pager batteries are probably 1/10 that (or less). So each Tesla module is about 1200 times bigger than a cell phone battery. And each car is carrying modules that total to about 20,000x cell phone batteries and 200,000x a pager battery. Hence El Gato Malo's comment about WMD.
Probably still quite a bit less energy than a Class 8 truck diesel tank. But diesel doesn't spontaneously combust and it's easier to extinguish. Lithium ion battery fires are pretty much impossible to extinguish.
Ok, for those of us who are technologically challenged in the 21st century, here's some info re: Li-ion meltdowns: (Hope I didn't just spill the beans to any wayward Machiavellians 😳)
Introduction to Thermal Runaway
Thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries is a critical safety concern, often overlooked until it’s too late. This phenomenon occurs when a battery becomes self-destructive due to uncontrolled thermal conditions, leading to potential hazards. Understanding thermal runaway is crucial, not just for battery manufacturers but also for end-users, ensuring safety in various applications, from smartphones to electric vehicles.
Defining Thermal Runaway
At its core, thermal runaway is a chain reaction within a battery that leads to rapid temperature and pressure increase. This reaction starts when the battery’s internal temperature reaches a point that causes a breakdown of the internal components. It can escalate quickly, potentially leading to a fire or explosion. Defining thermal runaway involves understanding its stages, from the initial trigger to the final catastrophic event.
Hmmmm... thermal runaway. Pretty much the exact same scenario as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, Fukushima. And all the anti-nuke folks who carry around cell phones & laptops, maybe even driving Teslas, are happily bringing an inherent threat right into our midst huh?
A cell phone battery has about 10 watt-hours or 36,000 joules of stored energy. A pager battery is probably smaller.
A hand grenade is about 1,000,000 joules or roughly 30 times as much as a cell phone.
So, while no joke, if you could get a cell phone battery to release all its energy in a few milliseconds, it probably wouldn’t blow off a limb. Nasty burns for sure, but I doubt the explosion would amount to much.
The true measure of an explosive is power, the amount energy released per second. An explosion is an extremely rapid energy release. A Li-ion battery with 40k Joules of energy could probably not release that energy as rapidly as a piece of TNT or RDX with the same potential energy, thus making it a far less efficient explosive.
Old tech pagers used a single AA cell, usually NiCad and they lasted a long time. I doubt anyone would spring for a Li-ion battery instead, given the price differential.
NiCads contain a lot of energy and if you short one it'll get very hot, so hot that you'd notice it before it burst. It is unlikely that there is any component in an unmodified pager that could be recruited to cause the battery to drain at a rate that would make it a useful weapon without destroying the component long before the battery heated up sufficiently.
Most likely new pagers were modified to explode, a pretty small amount of some military explosive, would do serious damage. In order to get the target to buy new pagers, the Israelis could have jammed the pager network making it unreliable such that Hamas would get new pagers.
Coincidently I just bought a few of these "Go Dark Bags" for when I want to be off line--since you can no longer remove the batteries on most phones "power off" will not take you completely off line.
It wasn't a short circuit caused by a hack or malware. Just ask Yahya Ayyash. Israel killed him in 1996 using a cell phone with 50 grams of explosives. They had a collaborator who handed him a cell phone with the idea that his father would be calling him. When the call came through, they asked if he was Yahya Ayyash and when he said he was they hit the detonate button. He was a bomb maker for hamas and ended up with his brains scattered across the room. He would have appreciated the poetic nature.
hezbollah is no different than any government, they have needs for communication and since Israel has gotten very good at eavesdropping on cell phones, they are almost as good as the US Government, hezbollah had to take a step back to the 90's and give their terrorists pagers to keep in contact without giving away their positions. You know, normal messages like, "meet us at the school playground, we are going to kill some Jews by launching missiles". Normal stuff in other words. Send that out as a text and you can map out every cell phone that receives it and pay particular attention to which one sent it and then track the location and deliver a JDAM to it.
So, what went wrong? Being like government, hezbollah shopped around for cheap pagers and found a deal that saved them $10 of US taxpayer money and allowed them to give all their guys a way to be contacted. They just didn't do due diligence and look to see who they were buying them from and then really screwed the pooch. Terrorists, like those who share their religion hate dogs. But a dog could have smelled the explosives hidden in each of the thousands of pagers they received. It doesn't even take much training to get a mutt to the level of literal 100% accuracy. But dogs are unclean or some such shit so achmed is now a dead terrorist. Or at least he won't be reproducing and have fun with those 72 virgins ya nutless wonder.
As for this being applied on a wide scale. No one has to worry about it, at least no one with a bomb sniffing dog. But I can promise you right now, every person in the country with a government issued phone, made in china, is looking at their phone right now and wondering what sort of booby trap was built into it. Or maybe not, the government seems to be working for china lately.
Writing on paper an letting a bird send it might be the only secure way to send out info pretty soon. Unless a good hunter comes along. Always something.
Very well said, gato. Remember the glorious days of Napster, p2p was so much freedom. We worried about things like Echelon, which of course sounded a conspiracy theory - except a few years later it ends up in Hollywood movies, like ‘everyone knows about it, what’s the big deal’. Yeah, right. A colleague of mine encrypted all his emails with PGP, he was a militant, I thought he was a little paranoid. Another used only Linux, the genius even wrote his own code. Seems like millennia ago. We were naive. Privacy was easy, then.
And I agree, this looks like a Stuxnet for pagers. I hope someone is inspired by your post and builds that kind of phone.
All cell phones rely on the network. There are only a few network providers; "independent" providers use one of the main providers as carriers. As far as I know, your cell phone traffic is basically IP packets. Following all the protocols required for cell phone traffic in order to be routed etc.
Whatever else the 21st century may be, it's certainly not dull.
I'd really rather _not_ live in "interesting times", though. :(
No worries, our phones are soon to blast us back to the stone age...or maybe just the pre-industrial age. Then we will live in boring times.
I hope so. The Chinese saying " may you live in interesting times" is a curse..not a blessing.
Boring times means peace, food, a roof....and allows humans to excel.
It begins with a blessing
But it ends with a curse
Making life easy
But making it worse
My mask is my master
The trumpeter weeps
But his voice is so weak
As he speaks from his sleep
Saying
Why why why are we sleeping?
https://www.songlyrics.com/kevin-ayers/it-begins-with-a-blessing-once-i-awakened-but-it-ends-with-a-curse-lyrics/
is the trumpeter weeping for the fact that there is not hole flap in his mask to blow through?
Boring times when we are constantly on the verge of starving....
Yeah I get it. But let's say that the 50s represents an era of stability. I probably wouldn't have been happy in that stultifying environment. At least this madness is like a circus, and in a circus there is plenty of room to be strange.
I would wager you were not alive during this "stultifying environment." I was. I am a month away from age 77. It was a decade of Polio and the vaccines, quarantines, iron lungs, "Duck and Cover" and "DROP" drills in my grammar school, the civil defense tests of the CONALRAD radio alert system (AM 640 AND AM1260 channels) and the once-a-month Friday testing of all the Air Raid Sirens throughout the Greater Los Angeles area.
FWIW, the madness has been around since the watershed incident of 11/22/1963, when a sitting POTUS was murdered in broad daylight in Dallas. And the Sheeple, Normies, Cucks, and Flag-Wavers have been drinking the Leviathan's Kool-Aid ever since. Now that's madness. Life is a vale of tears.
Funnily enough, all of those perceived threats were lies.
There was no “polio virus”, no “safe & effective vaccine”, no “polio”, but several other causes of severe, paralysing illnesses, no nuclear weapons, either.
https://jermwarfare.com/conversations/michael-palmer-atomic
Isn't it ridiculous that we were told to hide under our desks!! LOL
Of course it was ridiculous. But the purpose behind it was to scare the crap out of kids by putting the thought of extreme danger into young minds.
I grew up in the 50s behind iron curtain. And guess what, nobody made us do the silly duck and cover crap. Even the commies were not that insane... go figure.
Yes. But what else could the schools do? My school: Saint John Baptiste De La Salle-Granada Hills, CA was a very stout two-story brick structure with all-steel external stairways for fire escapes. When we had the "DROP!" drills, it was the job of the students sitting next to the windows to shut them and drop the blinds to catch shattering glass. This is what we all had to work with. I also forgot to mention LA was surrounded by Nike air defense missile bases. Tumultuous times, not stultifying at all. But we survived and prospered.
I get you it’s just that, I mean, did parents tell kids “you know getting under your desk really isn’t going to save you”. I am betting some did.
Just a little over a year behind you (making me a mere child by comparison of course 🙄). I consider 🎶We Didn’t Start the Fire🎶 to be my song for our generation and now, of course, the overly comfortable next gens are trying their own version in a pathetic attempt at claiming equivalency of their experience. 😉 😈
You call that decade "stultifying"--is that from personal experience?
That's a great phrase - "in a circus there is plenty of room to be strange" - perhaps unintentionally so, but I like it. >>>>> One reason that the '50s were stable/stultifying is that the decade before had seen so much death, destruction & evil I would imagine those who lived through the trying times of the Great Depression, WWII, use of atomic weapons, the rise of Communism, etc. just wanted peace, quiet, assurance, constancy. With the U.S. emerging as a superpower from WWII, I submit that putting faith in the govt/military as protector - a 'good' Big Brother', if you will - was a welcome balm.
Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone.
The 50's were not as stultifying as their promotional team suggests. There was more than enough weirdness if you knew where to look. There are plenty of modern 'creators' who are ripping off chunks of 50's era culture and most people would never know because they think the 50's were poodle skirts, malt shops and happy days thanks to the media.
See: Kiss Me Deadly, the proto Tarantino movie for example.
Do you place a higher value on strangeness and circus like atmosphere than being able to afford housing, utilities, food, a car and some recreational activities on the salary of one high school graduate? There was a much greater distribution of wealth across society then. I was born in 1952, and didn’t notice the general sense of uncertainty and existential dread that seems ever more prevalent. I have never been a conservative and have always been critical of thoughtless conformity but it seems that some of the trades we have made have been trivial compared to what has been lost
"May you live in interesting times." is allegedly an old Chinese curse...
No matter when you are alive, times will always be interesting because you are in constant survival mode.
It has always surprised me that no one figured out at the design phase that "childproof car locks" are also "kidnap victim-proof car locks" too.
Any programmable thingy ain't never gonna remain your friend.
The number of times I've shown colleagues how trivially easy it is to rig door locks, or to break in by ignoring the lock and instead removing the frame around the lock, and other such things, well it's plenty of times.
We can include a couple of engineers and designers in that tally, all with the patented come back of "But that's not how it's supposed to be used".
Higher education my hairy breeks, a glue-head teen could figure out how to beat the "siphon-proof" fuel tanks of cars. Or when I was a bovver-boy meself - piece of fishing line, superglue on a coin, and "go fish" in the vending machine. Coin pushes down sensor and trips the feed-out candy function, but doesn't drop into the coin box. Worked on the state's pay phones too.
I'll say this to the end I think: hire clever boys and girls to try and break stuff, before releasing it.
Or in other words: hire the refined sort of hooligan to break into your system and show you its basic flaws.
Yep.
Same idea why Swedish military partake in UN, NATO (PFP) and US operations:
Can't simulate real-life experience and in the field testing.
I’m always super impressed with the way the Amish can hack/use technology to get around their religious objections, which includes privacy concerns. I would love to see what they could do with a new Cat Phone.
I’ve noticed that about many other virtue signaling groups of the past and present. Nothing new really. Reference Weird Al’s 🎶Living in an Amish Paradise🎶.
It's quite the rabbinical approach.
This is essentially the cause of The Clone Wars.
From an old Dark Horse Star Wars comic (before the Dark Days, before Disney):
Clone trooper goes to a burger joint and orders food. While waiting, the cook hollers: "Order 63! Order 64!"
You see where it's going. Hilarity ensued when it was "Order 66!"...
Customer 65 cuts in front of 66, to server* "I said 'no pickles.'"
Saves the Galaxy
Sounds like the ancient adage, “Set a thief to catch a thief.”
Like that old TV show To Catch A Thief
Tell 4chan what you’re doing, and they may just volunteer.
Well gosh. How much Pine Sol will I need to remove the smell afterwards?
You'll never get the stains out of the upholstery.
Well. I'm not going to let them sit down, and they've got to leave their shoes at the door. But those socks....
Coleman?
So appreciate his work.
You’ve read about the British teens who figured out how to get out of school? Put Coca Cola on the antigen test strips for a positive. All you need are some teenagers and you can get around anything
Darn kids! In my day (fetches cane with scrimshawed grip - yes, I've really got one like that, I need if the hip is acting up) we held the thermometer to the lightbulb while mum or the nurse wasn't looking.
Or for the serious cases, such as before conscription (age 18), they would eat a tube of toothpaste. Skin goes pale grayish, sweating, shaking, vomiting, the works and the conscript is sent home.
And the perennial favourite of certain girls: PMS and period pain. Well how is a teacher to check that, I ask you!
Well l, I guess nobody thought of using bloodhounds…. I’ll let myself out.
!! 🤣
Probably because in technical areas, these teenagers have not yet succumbed to the institutional indoctrination of "It can't be done!". Train them as engineers and soon they will stop.
Been that way for millennia. Between teens, especially boys, and Darwin I sometimes think that is the main reason humanity makes any progress at all. 🤣😈
Isn't that how the best hackers get cushy jobs in Internet security? 😂
When I was a kid in the 50’s slugs still worked.
Freshman year in college--when a dime still had meaning (at least to me)--I called my mother, let the phone ring once. Hung up. Dime returned and mother called the phone number immediately and we could chat as long as we wished.
This is security engineering. Ross Anderson wrote a hilarious textbook about this; get the first edition, since all the great stories were removed from subsequent editions.
When I was very young we were on vacation at a kids resort, the older kids had shown me how they slid the quarters in but not all the way and then before completely releasing it they used a Popsicle stick to hold it from coming completely out so it could be done and play all you wanted. A paper clip works or used to work on parking meters. A homeless guy would add time to the meter if you gave him something for his efforts.
Years ago, someone broke into somewhere my uncle was staying in nyc by punching out the drywall next to the door and then reaching through to unlock it
Car window open/shut mechanisms which rely on the ignition. Much dislike.
I'm not overly a doom-imaginer but I really dislike the idea of drowning in a river because I can't get the damned passenger-side door or window open myself.
There is a little hammer-type device you can keep in your car for such an emergency.
I'm flattered that you think I'd have the presence of mind to retrieve said hammer & use it correctly to smash myself outta that predicament.
The best play appears to be to hit the power down button on your windows the second you are in the air.
Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. 😏
🤣🤣 this is SO me too!!!
"The first thing people do in a situation is panic."
"Oh, good. I'm doing it in the right order!"
There is quite the basic absurdity in your comment.
I did my primary flight training at an airport whose westbound runway ends at the edge of the Chesapeake Bay. One of the first lessons they teach student pilots was what to do if we had to ditch in the water. One of the steps is tighten your seatbelt, open the door, and jam it open with your headset. Unless you land in open cold water far from shore, 95% of forced water landings are survivable.
I'm not *really* overly-exercised at the thought of landing in water while still in a car. I just extremely dislike having control over the passenger-side door taken away from me by geniuses of design improvement.
One of the things I noticed about flight training is that, unlike driver’s education, there is a laser-focused emphasis on planning for disaster so it doesn’t take you by surprise when it happens. Driver’s Ed is all about staying out of trouble. Flight training is all about taking control of the situation when trouble happens, because sooner or later it will.
Yes, that's a useful attitude. I get slammed for "crossing my bridges before I've reached them"---I consider it mental preparation. As in, "accidents happen to the unprepared".
One of the things I wonder about in flight training is how to deal with engine failure when you only got one engine.
I'd think the most basic lesson is never fly in a one-engine plane. Like ever.
I just read a long article about survival in a submerged car (about 400 people a year don't). It is complicated, depends on the type of glass and a lot of other circumstances. It does seem like my little hammer is likely to be useless.
Get a bigger hammer -- also with a spikey end. Rock hounds use them all the time, though not usually on windows.
My objection to your comment is of the forest/trees species.
Same thought. Haven't yet put a hammer in each car (and I think there are enough spares here)
Yes, that's a really lethal aspect of modern car designs. The shipping tycoon Angela Chao drowned in her Tesla less than 10 feet away from the edge of a small pond which might even have been shallow enough for her head to be above the water if she had been standing outside the car.
She happens to be the sister of mrs. Turtle. Perhaps a message was being sent? Suspicious.
The only necessary message was "don't drive while drunk."
One of you fellow geezers want to tell the junior peanut gallery what a slug is in this context? Hint: It ain’t the slimy variety. 😇
Well put.
CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER:
We must postpone the election for everyone's safety...and please hand over all your communication devices...cuz safety....
Now I really feel as though life is imitating a Tom Clancy novel.
Any country that has elections coming up, should probably not assume they will actually happen. Those days are gone, and the performative gloves are coming off.😉
Yup
🤫
Actually, I think the most important question is what to do with those 72 virgins when your shmeckel has been incinerated.
I like your sense of humor! But that 72 virgins thing is a bad translation. Martyrs get '72 Vegas.
I had a '72 Ford Pinto.
I probably didn't give it my all. *shrug*
No doubt it is restored to you in your heavenly body--of course, that idea is coming from another Abrahamic religion, so maybe not pertinent
Admittedly it's been years since I was read-up on the bits and bobs of islamic apocrypha, and I'm certainly no scholar, but I do recall reading about no one with a deformity of body being admitted unto god (which could possibly extend to limb-loss in some interpretations, as per the cutting off of hands and such).
I do recall that the path to god after death is across the edge of his scimitar, laying edge up over the chasm of Hell, so that the faithful can gaze down on the condemned for eternity, and vice versa.
But caveat et cetera, it's late, I'm full of food, and things sort-of blend together not unlike rum poured over vanilla ice cream with vodka-pickled cherries on top of.
Yummy. Reading Pentateuch showed me that Hebrews’ god forebade men with deformities coming into the worship space.
That kinda put the kibosh on that whole circumcision thing, doesn't it?
I cannot wrap my head around that, although have some thoughts. Pentateuch shows requirement of sacrifices (animal, grain, wine) continually. Abraham directed to sacrifice his only son Isaac on a stone, burning involved. Does circumcision of foreskin represent a human sacrifice without actual death?
"a human sacrifice without actual death?"
🤔 *considers how, despite best efforts, he might be pious after all*
"things sort-of blend together not unlike rum poured over vanilla ice cream with vodka-pickled cherries on top of."
It's Taco Night. I think I'll mix up a Hendrick's and Tonic.
Tying these two comments together: https://www.sput.nl/~rob/gin_n_tonic.html
Gin&tonic, my go-to lifesaver when I was in Jugoslavia.
Back when there was a Jugoslavia, that is.
Still remember a little hole-in-the-wall in downtown Dubrovnik, where you could get a beer, a schnapps and a drink plus a packet of smokes for the eq. of 1-2 Deutschmark. All East Bloc brands of course - imported stuff was way more expensive, but who goes abroad to get the same stuff you have at home, I ask.
At one point when we had imbibed most unscrupulously, I accidentally mixed my order up. Instead of either a gt or a rum and coke, I ordered gin and rum.
It was a most sobering experience.
"gin and rum"
If your date gets a Tonic and Coke, y'all are set.
"Two straws, Garçon!"
"shmeckel"
That sounds a little... Hebrew.
This has been a concern about outsourcing so much electronics production to China for decades now. When Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama turned over production of national security and defense industry electronics production to China it was always insane. From the standpoint of embedding hidden espionage capabilities in them, to embedding remote self-destruct capabilities. There were warnings...ignored...as they usually are.
So here we are. A day may come when I'm in the middle of commenting something verboten on Bad Kitty's Substack and my hands go Boom! and it's light's out for me. Not good. Not good at all.
I would add pharmaceuticals to your concerns. It has always astounded me how “trusting” we are with sourcing ingredients.
On a somewhat more somber note, I was struck by the sudden infusion of $$ into INTC just the other day. Funny, but most of those aging weapon systems & avionics use 8080-8086 to 80386 etc chips that can no longer be sourced for replacement. Changing to new chips is not feasible - the old ones must be replaced with identical form/fit/function in order to not require an entire upgrade program ($$$$) with engineering, design, test, V&V, and so on.
The amount of Government code that's just FORTRAN wrapped up in a Java interface - because it's just not cheap to replace for all the reasons noted - is mid boggling. And the old programs still produce good results.
Yes and no one has accurate documentation for the Fortran code. It would have to be reverse engineered - another huge cost full of pitfalls.
"fully open source software and auditable.
if musk had half a brain he's build one like that and optimize it to be a p2p node in a distributed social media system and a wallet/transactional node."
Couple of points to make here gato. 1) Open source software cannot solve this problem. Go back to 2014 with truecrypt full disk encryption: "WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues," text in red at the top of TrueCrypt page on SourceForge states. The page continues: "This page exists only to help migrate existing data encrypted by TrueCrypt. The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5/2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP. Windows 8/7/Vista and later offer integrated support for encrypted disks and virtual disk images. Such integrated support is also available on other platforms (click here for more information). You should migrate any data encrypted by TrueCrypt to encrypted disks or virtual disk images supported on your platform."
The speculation is that because it is open source, the NSA or whoever submitted an extremely advanced parameterized algorithm to break it. And not one could figure out how: they basically put something like stuntnex into the code and no one could figure out how because it was too complicated.
""Whenever the people need a hero we shall supply him" -Albert Pike
And 2) Musk is the hero we the people have been given. Meaning he isn't one. The only way forward is through God and local engagement. Your actions can have such a profound positive effect on others - it's like a super power. Use it to the fullest extent you can. None of us will make it out alive, but we sure want to have the cleanest most pristine souls possible when we arrive for judgement.
Who is Elon Musk? Beneath all the glitz and glamour and limitless spurious hype surrounding this man and his technology - who is this cult of personality - and what does Elon Musk actually stand for when you really dig underneath the surface? Ah yes, he stands for technocratic globalism. Surprise, surprise, just like almost everyone else in his peer group, his goal is to control you:
https://tritorch.com/degradation/ElonMuskAndTheWEFALoveStory.jpg [image]
https://tritorch.substack.com/p/elon-musks-x-app-is-the-one-ring
Time is wearing thin. Don't be afraid everyone, just be the best possible person you can be to everyone you come in contact with.
Maybe an anagram would be appropriate - Lone Smuk
Sold! =)
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 Bravo. Precisely.😉
Not seeing a lot of alignment between previously videos Li-ion meltdowns and the pager explosions caught on camera. Seems pretty likely that explosives were added. However, even without explosives, Li-ion battery meltdowns themselves are pretty dangerous, so I think your overall point still stands.
perhaps worth considering that this is because most thermal runaway's on batteries are accidental and partial as opposed to be optimized for sudden release.
i don't have a definitive claim on the physics of the specific pager, but comparing accidental melt downs to deliberate full criticality may be misleading rather than illuminating.
Are you saying the "worm" was placed there through something like a thumbdrive on the network at physical location or was it through frequency manipulation via base stations?
Sorry if dumb question.
Dumb? I can barely understand the question! So you are already light years ahead of me.
One possibility would be to swap the regular battery with a replacement battery but without the pressure relief vent. You can easily get someone in China to make it. Then wrap it in some nichrome wire and have the board run some power through it. The nichrome wire will overheat the cell really quickly causing the cell to rapidly over pressurize and potentially explode. But I dunno - have it work in 2000 (!) cases simultenously? I am gonna go with a small explosive charge perhaps hidden near the battery compartment, like 10-15g of semtex or something.
Now I don't understand any of the words in your sentence. 😳
The interesting thing is that I haven't heard reports of aircraft explosions.
My old radio pager (before my flip-phone) had a range of 50 miles at least.
With the number of reported devices and injuries someone must have been aloft. Are they safe in "airplane" mode?
Sounds like the story from about 12 years ago where US spy guys (FBI?) intercepted Cisco routers at the airport, opened and inserted chips into the devices in a room in the airport and then let them be delivered and installed into large company networks. From that point the data packets were forwarded to the spy agency from inside the networks...
My phone feels hot!.....
I read that they were intercepted and explosives planted. Then later, boom.
99% sure explosives were added.
Found this: "The Model of the pagers that exploded in Lebanon are Gold Apollo AR-924. Apollo Electronic Paging Company is a company based in Taiwan."
Looks to me like the Mossad intercepted a few shipments and made them extra spicy. Thankfully the good guys did this! Imagine the outrage if the bad guys did this? *sigh*
Mossad are the good guys?
He's unvaxxed, so he knows how to use the tool of sarcasm ...
Yes, I was wondering as well if the Covid Vax impairs sarcasm recognition, or if those who lacked the ability to recognize sarcasm where the ones who primarily took the Vax. I think we should do a study.
I have observed for a few decades that those considering selves "progressive" lacked a sense of humor. And the vax uptake seems to have shown a fairly strong political orientation. Thus, I conclude that far more vaxxed lack the humor gene.
Kinda like driving alone with a mask on.
You don't need a Harris-Walz sticker on your car. I already knew who you were voting for.
Yes. Exactly. Common sense and sense of humor seem highly correlated in my experience.
If you want to test this hypothesis go sit through a school districts board meeting.
Well, the joke's on them.
Note to self: refresh before snarkinalating.
I'm unfamiliar with "snarkinalating". Is that the Queens English?
👍👍👍👍👏👏👏👏 !!!
🤣🤣🤣🤣
I suggest you remember what is said about those who assume.
He chose "Unvaxxed Canadian" as his nom-de-plume in this thread; therefore I did not "assume" anything ...
Do YOU assume, he is a liar ??? ... 🤔🤔🤔
You said, "He's unvaxxed, so he knows how to use the tool of sarcasm ..."
What was implied is that those who don't immediately recognize sarcasm online are "vaxxed". This was confirmed by your reaction to another comment stating, "Yes, I was wondering as well if the Covid Vax impairs sarcasm recognition, or if those who lacked the ability to recognize sarcasm where the ones who primarily took the Vax."
That said, let's stop calling those Covid shots "vaccines". We are talking about an experimental gene therapy that was sold as a "vaccine" in order to trick the public at large into submitting to this experiment.
I think maybe NoVaxCanuck just forgot to close his Sarcasm tag. </sarc>
If you need to put a </sarc> at the end of a sentence, it's not really sarcasm, is it.
pretty impressive if they then tracked the spicy pagers just to the intended victims!
My understanding is that normal people there use regular cell phones--pagers are only used by terrorists who can't risk being tracked.
Agreed. I have an Apollo pager - used to be sales rep for them. Didn't like the product and never sold any. It isn't feasible to detonate the battery on a stock pager. The charge/discharge circuit is usually separate from the paging capability. This took more than a firmware update to do this.
The other thing is these are POCSAG pager. This is data protocol but I believe it is too limited to push out an over the air firmware update. I too lazy to look anything up right now but pretty sure the pagers where completely swapped enroute rather than intercepted and modified.
Taiwan, you say? Interesting… Can you post the source pls? Taiwan was also crucial in the stuxnet affair, because the virus certificate of authenticity was stolen from Realtek, a Taiwanese company. Looks like they’re relying on T. for things like these.
Isn't RealTek basically a technology on every laptop and desktop?
That could be scary
Stolen by??
Was seeing the same general comments - that just the batteries aren't really enough for that sort of damage, but ... it's a valid concern for machines that could have other issues and overheat / start fires or the like.
On the more political side, the people affected who shouldn't carry a pager for Hezbollah seems to be interesting. And it's an interesting way to affect your actual enemies without the whole "civilian shield" thing.
Yes. Exactly. PsyWar
There's no way a pager or a cell phone battery has enough combustion energy to make a serious explosion. Could darn sure give you a case of roasted nuts, though.
I know it's not a cell phone, but even scaled down that would leave a mark.
https://www.wsaz.com/video/2023/02/08/lithium-battery-explosion-inside-phoenix-garage-caught-camera/
A Tesla has about 12 to 20 (depending on model) 5.3 kWh battery modules. Hi-end cell phones have a battery capacity of about 4 Wh and pager batteries are probably 1/10 that (or less). So each Tesla module is about 1200 times bigger than a cell phone battery. And each car is carrying modules that total to about 20,000x cell phone batteries and 200,000x a pager battery. Hence El Gato Malo's comment about WMD.
Probably still quite a bit less energy than a Class 8 truck diesel tank. But diesel doesn't spontaneously combust and it's easier to extinguish. Lithium ion battery fires are pretty much impossible to extinguish.
Ok, for those of us who are technologically challenged in the 21st century, here's some info re: Li-ion meltdowns: (Hope I didn't just spill the beans to any wayward Machiavellians 😳)
Introduction to Thermal Runaway
Thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries is a critical safety concern, often overlooked until it’s too late. This phenomenon occurs when a battery becomes self-destructive due to uncontrolled thermal conditions, leading to potential hazards. Understanding thermal runaway is crucial, not just for battery manufacturers but also for end-users, ensuring safety in various applications, from smartphones to electric vehicles.
Defining Thermal Runaway
At its core, thermal runaway is a chain reaction within a battery that leads to rapid temperature and pressure increase. This reaction starts when the battery’s internal temperature reaches a point that causes a breakdown of the internal components. It can escalate quickly, potentially leading to a fire or explosion. Defining thermal runaway involves understanding its stages, from the initial trigger to the final catastrophic event.
https://blog.ecoflow.com/us/understanding-thermal-runaway-in-lithium-ion-batteries/
Hmmmm... thermal runaway. Pretty much the exact same scenario as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, Fukushima. And all the anti-nuke folks who carry around cell phones & laptops, maybe even driving Teslas, are happily bringing an inherent threat right into our midst huh?
Time to get that old printing press out and Selectric typewriter too.....and the land line as well.
For quite some time I’ve seriously been thinking about getting an old mimeograph. I’m thinking the time is now.
Nothing beats a Ditto.
#BlueNose
I used to make such a mess with those things in high school
Still use (and pay for) the landline. Only get junk calls on it, though. But then, junk calls come on the cell phone, too.
Same
Check and check. Mebbe tin cans and string? Ham radio?
Pony Express and Falcons!
Soooo. . . how would someone log on to PornHub then?
Asking for a friend.
*scribbles CavePorn UN and PW on parchment, affixes to pigeon's leg*
"Rikard. Don't make that face - just stay out of reach of the cane this time!"
I see a bright new market for 3D-printed avatars of lust, ancient-times style.
Just need to train the swallows to carry on on a piece of string.
Pigeons! 🐦
😂
"Mebbe tin cans and string?"
I knew saving all this used twine would pay off one day.
I’m work on it.
My thoughts exactly
I love the cat images that highlight your stories....I get a big laugh!
Reminds me of the scene in "Law Abiding Citizen" (I think?) where the attorney (again, I think?) answers his cell phone and it kills him.
Edit -- found it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eIDCUE5B7c -- it was a judge that was a her, but otherwise my memory was correct
Thx for sharing. Totally forgot about that scene. Good memory SC
"Remembering stuff from the past" is my superpower ;)
I can't even remember where I left my other sock.
The style of wearing mismatched socks is underrated.
It extends the life of socks
It’s probably in my drawer with the other socks that materialize through the time vortex in my laundry room.
Those are my socks your time vortex took, Please send them back as I'm told I look silly wearing only one sock. Thank you.
One sock is a little off, no doubt.
But that shirt, B. What were you thinking?
You’re going to have to be more specific. I’m looking at a pretty big pile. 😉
Cool.
So, if you see my other "My therapist is a dog" sock, please let me know.
I was planning on wearing the tan khakis tomorrow.
By the way *grabs wavy Tupperware lid - no, the round one* I think this might be yours.
Wow 😳
That was a crazy movie, SC!
That's a pretty sick (twisted) movie. That opening scene where the guy loses his limbs is brutal.
Wow. That was epic.
Was that a statue of the virgin Mary in her office?
I searched “gügle” for the following data.
A cell phone battery has about 10 watt-hours or 36,000 joules of stored energy. A pager battery is probably smaller.
A hand grenade is about 1,000,000 joules or roughly 30 times as much as a cell phone.
So, while no joke, if you could get a cell phone battery to release all its energy in a few milliseconds, it probably wouldn’t blow off a limb. Nasty burns for sure, but I doubt the explosion would amount to much.
if it were in your pocket, 36,000 joules could do serious damage.
gunpowder is about 3000 joules/gram, so that's 12 grams, roughly 2.5 M-80's.
not a grenade, but sure not somehting you'd want in your hand or next to the family jewels either.
a laptop can have around 80-100 watt-hours so you're getting up into some bad territory there.
an EV can be 40-100 kWh so now you're into the level of serious munitions.
What's scarier to me is the PsyWar. I mean this kind of technical stuff might as well be the new "Latin" of the "clergy".
My cynical/sinister side can come up with a lot of ways to weaponize that alone.
The true measure of an explosive is power, the amount energy released per second. An explosion is an extremely rapid energy release. A Li-ion battery with 40k Joules of energy could probably not release that energy as rapidly as a piece of TNT or RDX with the same potential energy, thus making it a far less efficient explosive.
A localized flash fire up against your hoodles could definitely make you think differently about your behavior.
Yeah, but I don't carry RDX in my pocket near my hoodles.
It's good advice!
Old tech pagers used a single AA cell, usually NiCad and they lasted a long time. I doubt anyone would spring for a Li-ion battery instead, given the price differential.
NiCads contain a lot of energy and if you short one it'll get very hot, so hot that you'd notice it before it burst. It is unlikely that there is any component in an unmodified pager that could be recruited to cause the battery to drain at a rate that would make it a useful weapon without destroying the component long before the battery heated up sufficiently.
Most likely new pagers were modified to explode, a pretty small amount of some military explosive, would do serious damage. In order to get the target to buy new pagers, the Israelis could have jammed the pager network making it unreliable such that Hamas would get new pagers.
Especially my battery which never seems to have much juice.
Coincidently I just bought a few of these "Go Dark Bags" for when I want to be off line--since you can no longer remove the batteries on most phones "power off" will not take you completely off line.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09BGTVBKG?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1
I would venture to say that Elon has at least half a brain.
It wasn't a short circuit caused by a hack or malware. Just ask Yahya Ayyash. Israel killed him in 1996 using a cell phone with 50 grams of explosives. They had a collaborator who handed him a cell phone with the idea that his father would be calling him. When the call came through, they asked if he was Yahya Ayyash and when he said he was they hit the detonate button. He was a bomb maker for hamas and ended up with his brains scattered across the room. He would have appreciated the poetic nature.
hezbollah is no different than any government, they have needs for communication and since Israel has gotten very good at eavesdropping on cell phones, they are almost as good as the US Government, hezbollah had to take a step back to the 90's and give their terrorists pagers to keep in contact without giving away their positions. You know, normal messages like, "meet us at the school playground, we are going to kill some Jews by launching missiles". Normal stuff in other words. Send that out as a text and you can map out every cell phone that receives it and pay particular attention to which one sent it and then track the location and deliver a JDAM to it.
So, what went wrong? Being like government, hezbollah shopped around for cheap pagers and found a deal that saved them $10 of US taxpayer money and allowed them to give all their guys a way to be contacted. They just didn't do due diligence and look to see who they were buying them from and then really screwed the pooch. Terrorists, like those who share their religion hate dogs. But a dog could have smelled the explosives hidden in each of the thousands of pagers they received. It doesn't even take much training to get a mutt to the level of literal 100% accuracy. But dogs are unclean or some such shit so achmed is now a dead terrorist. Or at least he won't be reproducing and have fun with those 72 virgins ya nutless wonder.
As for this being applied on a wide scale. No one has to worry about it, at least no one with a bomb sniffing dog. But I can promise you right now, every person in the country with a government issued phone, made in china, is looking at their phone right now and wondering what sort of booby trap was built into it. Or maybe not, the government seems to be working for china lately.
Writing on paper an letting a bird send it might be the only secure way to send out info pretty soon. Unless a good hunter comes along. Always something.
I remember a scene in Green Zone where they said the Iraqis were evading US military tech by passing paper notes to each other.
Were they writing in cursive:-)?
Finally. A useful skill I learned in school.
*updates 'Code Breaker's CV*
Very well said, gato. Remember the glorious days of Napster, p2p was so much freedom. We worried about things like Echelon, which of course sounded a conspiracy theory - except a few years later it ends up in Hollywood movies, like ‘everyone knows about it, what’s the big deal’. Yeah, right. A colleague of mine encrypted all his emails with PGP, he was a militant, I thought he was a little paranoid. Another used only Linux, the genius even wrote his own code. Seems like millennia ago. We were naive. Privacy was easy, then.
And I agree, this looks like a Stuxnet for pagers. I hope someone is inspired by your post and builds that kind of phone.
All cell phones rely on the network. There are only a few network providers; "independent" providers use one of the main providers as carriers. As far as I know, your cell phone traffic is basically IP packets. Following all the protocols required for cell phone traffic in order to be routed etc.