When 0+1+0+1=0.

I hope the next podcast is NOT about a new, improved, backup process and is instead about a quick, easy, recovery you did from your already perfect backups. 😬

A raid is not a backup o0

Or do you mean this is your backup place?
In that case just get a new disk and redo it?

the thing about pagers is they have a nice reliable digital radio in them that you can broadcast to. Since they've gone to the trouble of swapping out a shipment of pagers, I would assume they had a batch of custom PCBs made that mostly function like the originals but have an extra spicy GPIO.

Might even have assembled a batch of complete pagers and just substituted them in transit, it's not like you can't order moulded pager-cases by the 10k from China.

@SteveBellovin we (volunteer firefighters in AU) use VHF broadcast pagers.

Each pager is configured with a list of special strings, might even be regexes. When a page is received, it is displayed if it matches the configured strings.

By distributing modified pagers - they need an extra output for the fuze, plus the explosive itself - they would be probably be programmed to initiate the fuze on receipt of a specific string.

@SteveBellovin after reading the standards, there seem to be two phases for a group call.

In the first phase, a temporary group address is configured by sending control messages addressed to each group member individually. This takes some time, but the users are not being alerted yet.

In the second phase, the actual text messages is addressed to the temporary group address that is now known by the group members. All group members receive the text message at the same time.

etsi.org/deliver/etsi_i_ets/30…

The plot continues to thicken, with another wave of exploding devices reported among Hezbollah members around Lebanon today. This time, it appears to include walkie-talkie-type radios. I've not yet found reliable reports of specific models of radios, so it's hard to even speculate yet on how these might have been triggered - possibly over the air, but also possibly with a pre-set timer.

What's clear is that Hezbollah's supply chain problem is even worse than it seemed yesterday.

ICOM IC-82 handheld VHF transceivers according to

latimes.com/world-nation/story…

so uh, if someone lived somewhere else and had happen to bought walkie talkies or pagers in the last couple years, how worried should they be that they might have inadvertently been exposed to this?

Feels like only a couple boxes in the supply chain have to have been shipped to the wrong spot before things get more awful. How do the manufacturers avoid having to do a full recall?

The thing I don't get: This, as you mention, burns the capability and I suspect it really steps to the line on multiple IHL rules. This was not a particularly well-targeted attack.

All this... to what end? To kill a few people indiscriminately? To briefly disrupt a communication network? Just... to flex?

Maybe they're seeing something I don't but I don't get the strategic value of doing something this gross.

It's likely, IMHO, that was part of the point. They want to disrupt the target's ability to resupply, not just the immediate resources used to attack.

The attack doesn't just maim and kill people and disrupt materiel, it makes all future acquisition of materiel slower as they know it must be vetted thoroughly. Were I a military strategist, that's the kind of long-term damage to an enemy supply chain I could only hope to accomplish.

On the latest round of explosions, so far I've found a couple photos of a mangled Icom model V82 walkie-talkie, a discontinued (but still widely available around the world in counterfeited form) commercial analog two-way radio.

But it's unclear if that's the only type of device that exploded today, and it's also possible that the various photos I've seen are all of the same individual radio. Still haven't seen good authoritative reports of the scope and scale of todays wave of explosions.

Do pagers work on planes?

I've seen people saying this attack could have killed many more if they had gone off on a flight.

The timer theory could have caused that kind of disaster but the signal theory not, if you can't get paged on a flight.

Tomorrow it's gonna be one modern car whose brake-by-wire fails mysteriously at 60 mph.

Doesn't need to be pervasive, or even repeatable. Just need to sow discord & suspicion.

Walkie-talkie radios differ from pagers in several relevant ways here. First, they're larger, and so have room to hide more explosive material; some of the images I've seen show damaged buildings, suggesting larger explosions than we saw with the pagers.

Second, walkie-talkies aren't generally carried around all the time the way pagers are. They typically spend a lot of time off and sitting in a charger, possibly near other radios. This is also consistent with the images of damaged buildings.

Some new details reported in this NYT article (gift link: nytimes.com/2024/09/18/world/m…)

This fills in some gaps, assuming it's accurate (caveat here, given anonymous, presumably motivated sources):

- The pagers were manufactured by a Hungary-based Israeli shell company and used a special battery containing PETN.

- The explosions were trigged in real time, but no details about the specific triggering mechanism.

- No details about how the exploding walkie-talkies worked or how they were inserted.

" kill them all and let the God of Abraham sort it out"- Jewish Space Pagers

Crimes against humanity in the name of Israel is anti-Semitic

After another day, the contrast between the large amount of information known/leaked about the pagers and the paucity of detail about the radios is even more conspicuous to me.

Most of the detail about the pager attack (shell companies, explosives built into batteries, etc) appears to have come directly from Israel, which benefits from advertising that it had this capability now that it's burned. But the radios likely exploited a different channel, probably one they still want to protect.

And we know almost NOTHING about how the radios were compromised, not even insider speculation. We don't even know that it was a supply chain attack in the sense that the pagers were.

My guess, with no inside information, is that the radios may have been compromised with the help of a recruited agent working for Hezbollah and still inside Lebanon. That's obviously not something you'd want to draw attention to if you're Israel.