140
How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers
(www.nytimes.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2024
140 points (93.8% liked)
World News
38602 readers
2968 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News [email protected]
Politics [email protected]
World Politics [email protected]
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
You know the more that I think about it, the more I realize that if the CIA or NSA were tasked with eliminating Hezbollah using the same vulnerability, they probably would have set up the same shell company, but install a hardware wire backdoor into every device which would let them do insane espionage or setup widespread jamming or even fake intel, complelty remotely too.
They already have so many systems that do similar things, it wouldn't even be that difficult for them to pull off and cause Hezbollah to disintegrate by having them run around falling into easily laid traps.
But of course this is Israel, so they went with explosives to maximize that sweet civilian collateral like they're trying to top the bang for buck warcrime leaderboard.
I'm left wondering how they were triggered. Were they all just set on a timer? Or were they able to somehow remotely send a signal? And if they were able to send a signal, were they also able to intercept messages?
It's a device designed to receive signals ;p
I think for the pagers the consensus is that a particular code would have been sent to the devices.
From the sounds of witness reports, it was either 1 message setting off a 5-10 second timer, or it was 2 messages in a similar spacing. It was designed to get someone to look at the pager before it blew up in their face. Apparently doctors have been dealing with it blinding shit tons of people.
Yes but only specific signals. That's the whole point.
Yes, so if someone sent a very unique message, I'm not sure how many characters fit on a pager, but something nobody would ever send, then it could be the activation "password".
I never had or used a pager, but I think it's possible to send short alphanumeric messages to them via the cell phone network (GSM, or whatever)
https://pagersdirect.net/pages/how-do-you-send-a-page
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager
I don't think you understand. The whole point of the network they built was for security. If just anyone can send a message, that would be a huge security vulnerability.
I must admit I thought pagers used the gsm (cellular) network, but could only receive messages and therefore couldn't be triangulated / located like a mobile phone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager#Security
Reading deeper, if it's radio signals then I can't imagine Israel would have any problems replicating or spoofing them.
Got news for you, pretty much all wireless communication is via radio 😀
Yes, it sounds like Hezbollah built their own personal network. Yet another benefit of pagers, it's far less expensive to communicate when you're talking about just a few bytes of data.