I'm a sucker for photos of first responders (and others) saving pets from floods and other disasters.
"A crew member with the Wilmington Fire Department's high water rescue truck carries a dog through flood waters in Kure Beach, North Carolina."
Hezbollah pager operation casualty update (confirmed and double-checked)
⚡4,000+ Hezbollah members injured
⚡400+ in critical condition
⚡18 High-Ranking commanders injured
⚡500+ lost their eyesight
⚡11 Hezbollah members dead
⚡Numbers from Syria are not yet known
This is the biggest blow to Hezbollah since it was founded
Israel now KNOWS WHO had the Hezbollah pagers!
#AureFreePress #News #press #headline #breaking #breakingnews #Israel #gaza #Hamas #Lebanon #hezbollah #Iran
So, my yearly reminder that seed funding for Oracle was provided by the CIA. I'll just set that here.
Oracle cloud AI will enable mass surveillance, says Ellison
theregister.com/2024/09/16/ora…
Ellison declares Oracle all-in on AI mass surveillance, says it'll keep everyone in line
Cops to citizens will be 'on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting'Brandon Vigliarolo (The Register)
Some very good tips, and then suddenly he becomes very pretentious for a brief second and back to giving advice.
Good stuff but I might have told him to stuff it if we'd met in real life...
So it's a live-in caretaker position, with none of the working conditions, eg Workcover, that an employee could normally expect.
The relevant authorities need to know about this. I don't think a place could be deemed safe if there's no way of exiting in case of fire or whatever. Whole thing very dodgy.
democracyjournal.org/magazine/…
#Educating for #Democracy: The Case for a New #Civics
By Danielle S. Allen Carah Ong Whaley
..."This situation urgently calls for excellent civic education to foster informed and engaged citizens prepared to uphold democratic values and processes. A decades-long reduction in civic education investment, however, has led to significantly less funding for civics compared to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. The U.S. government allocates over 100 times more funding to STEM programs in public schools—about $54 per student annually—than to civic education programs, which receive less than 50 cents per student each year. This underinvestment has contributed to a decline in civic knowledge and engagement among Americans, particularly among young people. And it is partly to blame, too, for young Americans’ disillusionment with democracy and alarming levels of interest in illiberal forms of governance.
Reimagining and reinvesting in civic education can help reverse these trends by preparing individuals to participate responsibly and effectively in democratic processes and institutions. High-quality civic learning fosters reflective patriotism, understanding of democratic principles, and engagement in civic activities. The result will be a more informed, active, and resilient citizenry capable of sustaining democratic institutions and values. Congress has a crucial role to play in addressing this need by prioritizing and funding civic education initiatives that can counteract the negative trends and strengthen the foundation of American democracy.
The Civics Secures Democracy Act has garnered broad bipartisan support, with more than two dozen co-sponsors from both major political parties, and is endorsed by nearly 200 organizations with diverse viewpoints. This bipartisan backing reflects recognition across the political spectrum of the importance of civic education and has forged a shared understanding that civic education is not a partisan issue but a national priority essential for the future of American democracy.
...
Experiential learning, which involves students directly in their own learning processes, is also an important part of an excellent civic education. Such programs nurture collaboration, discovery, and service to the community, and help learners develop a deeper understanding of policy and decision-making processes. Furthermore, through experiential learning, students can apply their content knowledge and analytical skills to problems confronting their own communities. Examples range from the Girl Scouts and Junior ROTC to Chicago’s Mikva Challenge, which gives young people the opportunity to participate in real-life democratic activities. Simulating or participating in real-world civic activities helps young people not only develop skills that are critical for a functioning democracy, but also build self-confidence and social capital, improve conflict resolution skills, and develop a sense of social belonging.
...
Cross-partisan approaches, such as the Educating for American Democracy initiative, also help ensure that civic education receives the funding and resources it needs to be effectively implemented across the country. Furthermore, cross-partisan efforts can help counteract the politicization of and contestation over civics curricula that we are currently seeing in some states, including Florida and Texas. By forging coalitions that are diverse in identity and viewpoint, we can foster a more inclusive and comprehensive approach to teaching civics. This helps to build consensus around the importance of civic education for a healthy democracy and encourages collaboration among educators, policymakers, and community organizations."...
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Saw 'em play many a time, may have even clambered on stage for an idiot
dancing interlude during out demons out at a couple of gigs... Had copies of their first two albums bee coarse me bird was secretary at Blackhill enterprises wot
managed 'em... I even met the Broughton boys mum, she was lovely, dose were
the daze...
))...
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?
reshared this
Democracy Matters, Chuck Darwin and mcc reshared this.
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.
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.
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.
@mvario
" 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.
Bunnie has a credible breakdown of the engineering required to make a version of this. I would guess in both the pager and radio case the signaling used the host device's radio and firmware mods or bugs.
An important tl;dr takeaway from this whole story: These explosions were not caused by a software bug or cyberattack that could be arbitrarily repeated against ordinary pagers, radios, or phones. This was an extremely sophisticated, at least somewhat risky, and definitely expensive intelligence and sabotage operation that involved covertly getting special devices rigged with explosives into the hands of Hezbollah affiliates.
In other words, no one can just type a command to blow up your phone.
@fullyabstract It is one of those ideas too good for those desiring to do harm to leave on the table, now that it's demonstrated.
It does strike me as an attack vector only open to nation-state (or de-facto nation-state) actors though. Individual corporations would have reputations that could suffer if they used this to attack other organizations, and smaller outfits wouldn't have the supply-chain penetration (unless they were functioning as the government over a portion of the chain).
@EricFielding : what I don’t understand is how you manage to get from "signal received" to "activate explosion".
It means, that their should be some new wires through which the reprogrammed pager will send current when a given message is received ?
Or it could be a whole shunt of, for example, the screen with its own chipset which would analyse what is diplayed and activate explosive when "xxxx" is displayed.
How do you debug such a code…
A bit more info has come out about the exploding walkie-talkies: according to a Lebanese source in this article, several battery packs exploded that were not attached to radios. That suggests that the radios themselves were likely not tampered with, and that the rogue battery packs were self-contained bombs, with an integrated trigger that didn’t rely on the host radio.
Kim Possible reshared this.
Ultimately, the interesting part of this whole story isn't the specifics of how the explosives worked. It's not particularly surprising that a county like Israel could manufacture and conceal explosives (and a trigger, etc) inside working 2-way radio battery packs or pocket pagers.
The truly sophisticated and frightening capability here is injecting those rigged devices, at scale, into their (presumably also sophisticated) adversary's hands without being noticed.
bunniestudios.com/blog/2024/tu…
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield stated that the United States has reviewed President Zelensky's plan for ending the war and considers it a viable option.
She emphasized the importance of engaging with world leaders during the meetings in New York to explore ways to support this plan.
Thomas-Greenfield expressed hope for progress, indicating the U.S.'s intent to contribute to the effort through diplomatic discussions with other nations.
#AureFreePress #Ukraine️
prasoon
in reply to Aure Free Press • • •>This is the biggest blow to Hezbollah since it was founded
Is this also "confirmed and double-checked"?
Unfollowing your sensationalising reporting of a terror attack which is aimed at flaming such narratives!
Petesmom *has moved*
in reply to Aure Free Press • • •