Lebanon: At least nine dead, thousands hurt after Hezbollah pagers explode Lebanon says at least nine people, including an eight-year-old girl, were killed today after pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded across the country. Israel has been blamed. The Mid-East nation's health minister Firass Abiad added more than 2,750 people were injured, over 200 critically, after the devices reportedly …
What's the mechanism that led to nearly simultaneous explosions of thousands of devices?
Physical introduction of explosive charges and triggers into the supply chain on such a scale seems unlikely. Reports in mainstream media focus on the possibility to trigger thermal runaway reaction in Li-ion batteries by malware. I am not sure I am buying this: thermal runaway occurs when the battery is physically damaged, e.g., punctured - this would require non-trivial physical interference which is, again, unlikely, nor is it a guarantee - or overcharging, which is unlikely to be triggered by malware only, IMHO, since the device must be charging in the first place, and most obviously weren't.
So, any ideas? Can some kind of malware that, say, causes a CPU to overheat cause the battery to blow up with high probability?
Regardless, and as an aside: anyone considering buying a Chinese (or any other) EV with Li-ion batteries should let a second thought at least begin to contemplate crossing his mind (with apologies to Douglas Adams for reusing the turn of phrase that is obviously his).
Given that neither the Hezbollah nor Hamas lack good engineers, there is no way samples of these pagers have not been disassembled and studied prior to distributing them.
My money is not only on physical introduction of explosive charges, but also on their obfuscation - probably as part of the battery. From there, it would be relatively easy to trigger it with a specific modulation/code or whatever. These things all blew up at the same time. You don't get there with thermal runaway only.
At this very moment, somewhere, someone, an already ex-importer is either slurping tequilas enjoying a new life, face and bank account, either running for their life, either slowly having their body temperature leveling with the ambient one.
The battery is certainly the obvious place. It's heavy so a little extra is less noticeable, or perhaps they just reduced the battery capacity. It could even be introduced without the complicity of the pager manufacturer - offer them a good deal on several thousand batteries and they might well take it.
I haven't seen anything indicating how they were triggered. If the software was compromised it could signal to the battery without the need for extra wiring, for example by a pattern of power use.
Folks suggest the pager model is this Apollo AR-924 (from Taiwan -- slooow connection as the whole world tries to access that info simultaneously), which weighs 95 grams including the battery ... would say 30g (1 oz) of "explosive" be enough to cause what is seen in the videos (if it would actually fit in there)?
Yes, munitions expert told the BBC that 10 to 20 grams of military-grade high explosive would do.
It is not just the explosive, you also need a detonator. (It should be easy to determine from the debris where the explosives were located in the devices.) Plastic explosives are really quite stable (I believe, no personal experience, el Reg's resident chemists, please advise) without a proper detonator, some could even be set alight without exploding. I believe that anti-personnel mines designed to look like toys typically carry very small amounts of high explosive in order to maim or injure rather than kill as a wounded person takes up more resources to save, treat and rehabilitate than a corpse (the obscene accountancy of war).
I must admit that the absence of a denial from the Israelis, or even a 'cannot confirm or deny' statement does suggest to me that they are the instigators. Who else would have either the technical capability or the political will. The indifference to the collateral damage affecting bystanders is disgusting. (DISCLOSURE - I have some Jewish heritage, my father's family escaping from NAZI Germany in April 1939. So I am not anti-Israel, I just wish they would all stop trying to kill one another.)
Supply chain attacks are in the news elsewhere: https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/18/afp_operation_kraken_ghost_crimeware_app/ although in that case a software chain, not physical one.
The Chinese got there first
https://uk.pcmag.com/security/150692/us-disinfects-routers-that-china-allegedly-used-for-hacking
The FBI disrupted a Chinese state-sponsored hacking effort against the US by resorting to its own hack to remove the malware from hundreds of infected Cisco and Netgear routers.
The infected routers formed a botnet that a Chinese hacking group called “Volt Typhoon” was allegedly using to try and infiltrate US critical infrastructure systems. But on Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it dismantled the botnet last month by securing court orders, allowing federal agents to secretly remove the malware from the infected devices—some of which were likely owned by regular consumers.
Today’s explosive objects are apparently walkie talkies. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwyl9048gx8t
I’m far from an expert so this is total conjecture, but say the cpu cooked hot enough to combust the battery, there’d surely be a period of time before an explosion where the device was incredibly hot right? You’d assume most people would put it down? Seems as if they all went off very suddenly catching the users by surprise.
Its probably a bit of both (thermal runaway plus explosive) since there's a report that several people avoided injury by noticing their pager was getting hot and throwing it away from them. This suggests that thermal runaway plus a battery with explosive ingredients may be in play. We'll find out soon enough because not all of the pagers blew up.
Someone remarked that "Hezbollah doesn't have the technical skills to figure this out". Despite what we're told not everyone in that part of the world is an ignorant terrorist; its a big region anyway with a lot of different cultures and educational levels, all of which have a vested interest in finding out exactly what happened. This has repercussions far beyond Lebanon; I'm pretty sure that the manufacturer and likely the Taiwanese government are going to be very interested because this could seriously impact global sales of their products.
I suppose everyone realizes that now we're not going to be able to travel with any battery powered equipment -- having successfully hidden bombs in mass produced portable electronic devices and demonstrated successfully how they can be remotely detonated I now envisage the TSA and its followers restricting further what can be carried on a plane. Its also likely to have a knock on effect on product sales from certain countries.........this story's only just got going.
Isn’t this that part of the world where they loaded hundreds of tons of volatile fertilizer into a storage silo in the middle of the city and left it there until it blew up?
That's not down to lack of brains. It's because Lebanon is ungovernable because it's such a mess of factions - and worse has Hezbollah in it - an armed state-within-a-state / terrorist group / army - heavily armed by, and beholden to, the Iranian government and at permanent war with Israel. The rest of Lebanon's border is Syria, whose government also used to regularly interfere in Lebanese politics and occassionally invade - but are now busy with a civil war - which means Syria is full of Iranian troops and Hezbollah militias joining in the fight. Thus Hezbollah are getting more training/experience and even more weapons from Iran over that border - rather than by sea.
"we're not going to be able to travel with any battery powered equipment"
Yeah, right. So even though many people use electronic tickets on the phones, we're now going to be told to leave our phones at home when we want to fly anywhere? I'm sure everyone will just go along with that. It's not like our phones pretty much run our lives nowadays. I guess we should all buy shares in Filofax? (had to think about that for 10 seconds, as it's been so long since I heard that product name)
I think people will put up with taking off their shoes and belts at airports, but not being able to travel with all electronic devices is a step too far.
They will just be doubly sure they scan those things going through security.
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The reports (AP etc.) tell us that the explosives, 2-3grams, wasn't hidden in a battery. The pagers were sourced from / through a Hungarian shell company that licensed the design from the Tiawanese company and the explosives were incorporated into the fabric of the circuit making it "impossible to detect".
The latest news is that people's H/Ts (two way radios) have started blowing up, killing and injuring people.
This is going to get like bomb/mine defusing during WW2 -- an arms race between bomb makers and ordnance disposal with the obvious next step being to incorporate some kind of anti-handling fuse in the mechanism so if anyone attempts to dismantle and so discover how things work
Let's hope that the enhanced scanners at airports (the ones that can tell a bottle of liquid explosive from a bottle of gin) are reliably able to pick up these boobytrapped batteries then, otherwise it's just another excuse to limit everyone's freedom of travel, ahead of WWIII..
And given that (any) explosive ingredients were not detected at an airport - given the cross section of the the people carrying these, including a diplomat, then, that brings into question both the effectiveness of the screening/and the way those were defeated by this lot
Overcooking the CPU isn't going to cause the battery to explode like that. I bet the processor in a pager is tiny, so hardly any volume to actually generate a decent amount of heat energy in the first place. More likely the CPU would just overheat and then fail, shutting the whole process down. I'm not even sure how you would remotely make the CPU get that hot anyway without the sort of access to the device that means it's probably easier to put a bomb in it.
These pagers have a stopwatch function in them - I'm wondering if that function (possibly in combination with programming them to hide the stopwatch function which is also an option to show/hide pager screens) was used to trigger some sort of capacitor (which could have gotten hot) to create sufficient charge to discharge suddenly into a detonator built into the 10-30g of plastic explosive which someone inserted into the pagers.
This could all have been done without the pager manufacturer's knowledge if the shipment was intercepted.
Plausible - but for me the most plausible explanation is that the boobytrapped batteries were designed to explode (with a dedicated explosive charge) when short-circuited. e.g. an electric fuse (such as those used by professional fireworks) placed in series with the battery, perhaps with a diode across it to stop it exploding when charging. Normal operation wouldn't draw enough current to set it off, but if the pager suddenly started drawing a lot of current, it would ignite the fuse.
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The AP-900 Apollo pagers use standard AAA alkaline batteries (https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/ap-900-this-what-we-know-about-one-of-the-pagers-that-exploded-in-lebanon-18209359). So all posts about li-ion batteries go out of the window.
May be the explosives where hidden in a 'special' batch of AAA batteries. Leaves the question how the explosion was triggered.
If you have the funds of even a small country, you can afford pay any Ukrainian or Russian hacker to make pager shells out of C-4 and program them to output enough current when they receive the triggering message. You'd just have to tell the Russians that you have a contract to sell pagers to the Ukrainians, or vice versa.
Adding my 2 Eurocents to the bunch of answers .
Beside the fact that the pagers exploded (many people concentrated on that already in the thread), to get simultaneous explosions, you only need to send a specific broadcast message.
tha message once receved would trigger whatever mechanism led to the explosions.
Pagers are really simple devices.
First and foremost :
They are one way devices, they can only receive, they cannot transmit anything. ( which is why Hezbollah went with them... you can't locate something that doesn't give away it's position )
They are also devices that only react to their own "phone number" (by displaying the messge received) or to a broadcast message. (by displaying the broadcast message)
They are using radio-frequencies that have a very long range ( parse that as 100Km or more range... in the 90s it took 6 emitters to cover France for Alphapage ).
It probably takes 1 or 2 emitter to covers the whole Lebano, thus he simultaneity of the explosions.
Now, all of that shows several things from my point of view :
- somebody prepared the whole operation carefully, hacking into the pagers at sme point to load a microcode that when receiving a specific message triggered smething that led to an explosion.
- somebody prepared the whole operation carefully, making sure the above couldn't be found as well as anything that was added to make pagers explode.
- somebody prepared the whole operation carefully, hacking into the pager operator system to send the triggering message as a broadcast message
(because t's obvious it was a broadcast message due to the simultaneity of the exploding pagers, if the message had been sent to each pager it would have taken enough minutes for many to be warned, and whomever planned the whole operation couldn't guess which "phone numbers" were going to be attributed to which pager)
Simples
Intercept crates of pager models that are used by the terrorists. Barely anyone else will have them as they will use smartphones.
Pay people to open the pagers up, to "fix" an issue, they wont know they are basicallly just the paid help.
This "fix" can be a replacement battery, although pagers tend to use alkalines some may use li-ion. The new Li-ion battery is a "special" one. Perhgaps the protection circuit has been removed. Or you can just add in a board with a little banger attached.
Either way, you then update the pager firmware to short the battery or trigger the detonator on the board when you just happen to send a "special" pager message on the totally open easy to intercept pager "network". Shorted li-ion battery with no protection circuit = fire and bangs. Little boom box embedded inside pager = boom and bangs.
You might want to look up Stuxnet.
Dont underestimate the ease and ingenuity a state funded project like this can accomplish. Again, look up Stuxnet. Then watch Enemy of the State and ask yourself if you really know how these state funded groups which employ people out of universities etc operate and what they are really capable of. Once the SNowden stuff came out I rewatched Enemy of the State, which I had always liked, and understoood to be true(ish) but that post-snowden re-watch really makes the film seem more of a documentaty with thriller elements.
They all thought we we all idiots wearing tonfoil hats, linking double yolk eggs with Alien visitations etc. Post snowden they are in our camp.
> Does Hezbollah have centralized pager procurement so that only Hezbollah members carry them or do innocent people also have them (seems so, if there's an eight-year-old girl killed)?
She was a daughter of Hamas member. He probably asked her to bring a pager lying somewhere in the house when it went off because he was too lazy to stand up himself.
I suspect it was a centralise procurement by Hezbollah for Hezbollah members that got “contaminated” on its way between the manufacture to the buyer.
Funny that not so long ago I was heavily downvoted for saying that unfriendly state could install a backdoor in EV cars allowing it to remotely control the car causing it to crash or even cause battery to catch fire.
That combined with ability to know the location of the car could prove an effective avenue to exploit if suddenly we found ourselves to be at war.
I think there should be more regulation when it comes to importation of such cars.
One being that the government should have full access to the firmwares and the cars should be programmed in the UK.
You got downvoted because, like all your posts, it was unintelligible garbage. Yet again, you miss the point. Loads of recently purchased pagers which were not on charge suddenly blew up (not overheated, not started thermal runaway, they exploded) ALL AT THE SAME TIME. This might even allow you to understand the hardware on these NEW pagers had been interfered with
Isn’t there an article about Raspberry Pi’s that you want to go post some weird stuff against??
My point is: I have one. Unlike you, who lack a point - and could therefore be described as “pointless”.
Can I suggest a forum used by technical people who are able to reason, think and discuss is not really your proper habitat. Maybe an account on TikTok Tok or X would be more suitable for your posts, and you might find an audience that does not realise that everything thou write is sooooooo wrong…
@itsthemonkey
My point is: I have one. Unlike you, who lack a point - and could therefore be described as “pointless”.
Can I suggest a forum used by technical people who are able to reason, think and discuss is not really your proper habitat. Maybe an account on TikTok Tok or X would be more suitable for your posts, and you might find an audience that does not realise that everything thou write is sooooooo wrong…
is there really such need for this level of bullying?
so you don't like their comment, use the downvote button like everyone else does!
> You got downvoted because, like all your posts, it was unintelligible garbage
Short term memory is obviously not working in you thus you never placed the facts into long term memory. EIther that or your recall is crap.
The attack this poster is reffering to has been proven and covered extensivley, on The Register no less and it is so simple and old that it doesnt need somethinga s modern asn an EV.
A large number of cars, especially ones with GSM modems are right now hackable and can have their brakes for example remotely operated or disabled.
The curse of fly-by-wire controls. It was even demonstrated on LIVE TV a couple of years ago.
I agree there is a potential threat there.
I don't exactly see how "giving the government full access" is a fix. The proposal is essentially to make sure only good, homegrown, domestic backdoors and supply chain exploits exist? Because that's what will happen.
Domestic or not, patriotic "good guys" or not, a door is a door.
Let end users have full access to the source. But no, everyone will hate that, it's about control, not about "whether it's secure".
Yes, backdoors will exist one way or another, but surely it is better have "our" backdoors than from an unfriendly state.
You can also mitigate the risk by having independent reviews of what goes in.
End users will not have access to the source. You don't want people to turn their cars into missiles after following a tutorial on TikTok.
See there you go. This is why you should not be allowed a keyboard Elsergrundler. “Turn their cars into missiles after following a tutorial on TikTok Tok”.
So which language or command do you think they will use for this software that causes a car to suddenly become an airborne directed device? One which is no longer bound by the laws of gravity?.
Or maybe it’s just a variable in your mind
Car_can_fly = “YES”
Please stop, I feel sorry for you at the moment but my pity is wearing thin
> but surely it is better have "our" backdoors than from an unfriendly state.
That's the exact argument the UK Government uses when they want to break all encryption.
Guess what, if you break it once it's broken. Anyone given enough time will discover the back door(s) and will exploit them.
You probably got down voted (going by this post) for either Xenophobia and / or naivety.
The first part is reasonable in that it's true they can be hacked.
But saying that we should ban imports and trust the UK government, boy that's scary.
For starters, they would be amongst the first allowing remote take over of cars "to stop terrorism and child molesters". You can guarantee the access it will be shared with the usual suspects"
So sure say we should keep an eye on it, but I would trust anyone really.
This is not proper to EVs - every car with a full set of driver assistance features sold today would be hackable and very, very, crashable.
Throttle by wire to accelerate, GPS location to know when you're in the correct sharp turn, then use the emergency stability system to lock say just the two right or two left wheels for a second, and your car goes wherever it needs to go to transform it into a flying car for a few seconds.
EV batteries are but a nice addition to this cocktail, which can increase the lethality from say 200% to 500% - all good and dandy, it's above 100%.
Adding EV batteries in the current discussion would be supposing there would be an implanted explosive charge in the batteries - which, if it could be a thing, could very well be implanted in a gas tank as well.
The only difference, so far as I can see, is that a petrol tank aka "gas tank" can be more easily inspected. Battery packs are sealed at the manufacturer (usually a different manufacturer to the car) and are fairly difficult to dismantle, and doing so would usually be destructive / void the warranty, so batteries are a more ideal place to hide explosives. But that doesn't mean this sort of thing can't be done with any other product.
This has nothing to do with batteries per se, more to do with blindly trusting imported black-box tech.
Yes, but there are two issues here:
1: How did the explosives, detonators and 'kill' command get into the pagers for the Hezbollah?
2: Did the attackers prevent the booby-trapped pagers getting to anyone else (and if so, how)?
I suspect that everyone with a pager from that company is now keeping is at a distance and awaiting the arrival of the Bomb Disposal Squad.
Also, can the explosive ones be detected using standard equipment / dogs?
1: How did the explosives, detonators and 'kill' command get into the pagers for the Hezbollah?
2: Did the attackers prevent the booby-trapped pagers getting to anyone else (and if so, how)?
Hezbollah placed an order for 5000 pagers (probably via an intermediary), because they were concerned that Mossad was tracking their adherents via their cellphones. Once that order was fulfilled and ready to ship I'd guess that the delivery driver who turned up to collect it from the factory was a Mossad agent, who then took them somewhere where they could be modified, and then reinserted them into the supply chain. It's very likely that they do something like that (not necessarily with explosives, perhaps also with locating or listening devices) as a matter of course for all technology heading for Iran, Hamas or Hezbollah, they just need to have compromised the purchasing systems. Terrorist organizations generally can't buy such things openly, but have to work though shady intermediaries, and I'm quite sure that state intelligence agencies know exactly who those intermediaries are, and leave them to work unmolested for exactly this reason.
Probably downvoted now, and in the past, because the average car has enough security holes to not need malicious people from an unfriendly state to install backdoors. Wasn't there a demonstration not so long ago of some researchers hijacking a "smart"(ish) vehicle simply by driving up beside it?
As for thinking that giving the government access to anything would be useful, think again. Their approach to dealing with "cyber" problems is the ICO, an outfit that isn't even worthy of having it's name spoken out loud, they're that useless.
And no, the government wouldn't bodge things because "think of the children" as was mentioned in another reply, because it's the government we're talking about. How soon, would you imagine, until the entire source code of all the firmware in all of the UK cars ends up on a USB key that was "mislaid" on the 10.40 to Penzance? Still, that's better, I suppose, than expecting some random minister (any of them) from having the slightest clue when it comes to computers. To give you an example of the utter technological cluelessness, here's a headline from 2018: Over 24,000 attempts to access porn sites from parliamentary computers since election
Tesla not allowed in China military bases I think. reason being surveillance I think.
https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/tesla-cars-banned-from-chinas-military-complexes-on-security-concerns-sources-idUSKBN2BB18R/#:~:text=(Reuters)%20%2D%20The%20Chinese%20military,of%20the%20directive%20told%20Reuters.
works both ways
Its a bit like discovering that monitoring Fitbits allowed people to establish duty patterns and other pertinent information about military personnel on US bases. (...and, of course, the Russians had to learn the hard way that personal electronics in a battlefield situation rapidly becomes 'personal targeting tech')
“Funny that not so long ago I was heavily downvoted for saying that unfriendly state could install a backdoor in EV cars allowing it to remotely control the car causing it to crash or even cause battery to catch fire.“
I don’t see how this is far-fetched. The pagers beeped for several seconds prior to exploding, so there was a software hack that caused the pager to attract attention before blowing up in someone’s hands. Also a hardware hack to incorporate both the explosive and the trigger.
People scoff at the potential but the fact is many nations have forbidden Huawei from providing 5G network equipment. So why was that, if not because of some malicious activity?
Read it for yourself:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/huawei-5g-explainer-1.6461391
Bin Laden avoided cellular for years and years because he knew that’s how he would be identified and targeted. Modern EVs are the same, hell any GM has an On Star radio that can be used to surveil and target the vehicle just as it sits! This very publication has reported numerous times on the ability of hackers to attack and disrupt these very cars: this is fact, not fiction!
If bad actors can hack and booby trap a tiny little pager radio (or thousands of them), they can definitely do the same to an EV.
No, it doesn't cost as much to start a company to build 1000 pagers, or at least dis- and re-assemble 1000 pagers, but good luck placing an order for 1000 vehicles. Where are you going to get 1000 used yet road-worthy Toyota Hilux pickup trucks without having your photograph taken with Toyota's Salesman of the Month.
Furthermore, automotive software (and hardware) is heavily reviewed, as is most software that has to do with functional safety. Also.. as has been mentioned before, there is nothing EV specific about a car being a two ton murdermachine. Get on the hifgway and turn the wheel the wrong way for asecond, and the deed is done.
From an operational perspective, it is much easier to hack the bungle of code found on most small devices nowadays and add a small explosive charge. Then all you need to do is to have your victim press said charge against his ear / groin / whatever part you want to maim.
> Funny that not so long ago I was heavily downvoted for saying that unfriendly state could install a backdoor in EV cars allowing it to remotely control the car causing it to crash or even cause battery to catch fire.
Why the hell were you downvoted for that? That attack has already been prven and covered in detail on this site and it doesnt need anything as new as an EV.
A simple device plugged into the OBD port is all that is needed, and GSM connected cars are hackable and controllable practically via the web. Proven. All becaise cars are an interconnected network of computers and subsystems that unsurprisinly, have zero concept of security.
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They switched to pagers because of concerns their phones would be too easy to hack.
I remember back in the day when pagers were used widely in this country, especially by the political parties. There was a point when just how easy the messages were to intercept and decode was made bloody obvious. Someone passed on messages sent by the the Labour party, to a national newspaper, who printed some of them. This resulted in
Mobile pager companies are to hold an urgent meeting to discuss security measures next week after the revelation that hackers monitored messages sent to aides of the Labour Leader, Tony Blair
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/pager-firms-move-to-block-hackers-1356582.html
If I remember correctly it was very easy to do, it just required a basic computer, a radio capable of receiving the correct frequency and some small software that (from memory could fit on a floppy &) was available on the internet. Tracking down someone doing this was next to impossible because as the pager could be anywhere in the UK, the message had to be sent all across the UK to make sure it was received by the recipient. Therefore you could be in London, Liverpool, Llandudno, Lostwithiel, Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel etc. and
Yes there is a much much lower chance you can be tracked with a pager. Hopefully however they’ve fixed the ease with which messages can be read once intercepted.
Yes, none of the pager standards have any encryption whatsoever. And in the modern area, you can get some models of USB TV tuner, run it as an SDR (Software Defined Radio) which is not using the actual TV decoder part of it at all, and watch any pages come through if there's still any pager system whatsoever in your area.
Equipment cost, about $15 (well, maybe $30, electronics costs have gone up the last year or two) for the USB tuner and $0 for the software (and whatever for the computer, this is somewhat but not too much CPU-intensive so if you really don't have a random Linux box sitting around... I suppose you "could" use Windows but I don't recommend anyone use that... then a Raspberry Pi would have enough muscle to do this.)
> If I remember correctly it was very easy to do, it just required a basic computer, a radio capable of receiving the correct frequency and some small software that (from memory could fit on a floppy &) was available on the internet.
I was talking about this exact thing with my other half yesterday.
Back in the very late 90s, me and a friend did exactly that. All you had to do was hook up the audio output from a radio scanner to a computer’s sound card, tune to the right radio frequency (or frequencies, I can’t remember), run the appropriate POCSAG decoder software, and hey presto. My mate already had the radio scanner, so all it needed was a 3.5mm-to-3.5mm minjack cable.
It was laughably trivial even back in 1999; I’ve no idea if similar radio systems are in use now, but if they are I imagine it’s even easier with cheap and freely available SDR dongles.
I hasten to add that I only did this once, and it was out of pure curiosity with no malicious intent. We only actually captured a handful of complete (and utterly mundane) messages, because a handheld radio scanner that a 17/18 year old could afford in ~1999-2000-ish didn’t exactly have the best antenna.
I'd rather my cardiac surgeon have a pager to get him/her to the theatre in the event of my relapse than relying on SMS or Whatsapp.
Newer doesn't always mean better - and as should be self-evident to anyone with a jot of knowledge about IT & comms it certainly doesn't mean more reliable.
A web search for "Emergency Services Network" might be enlightening to those who disagree. Unless of course they're happy fo have their tax contributions spaffed on non-functional, over-budget, behind schedule infrastructure.
Since when is WhatsApp and especially SMS unreliable?
I was still getting pager messages (back when I had a pager) when my colleagues with mobiles had no mobile signal. I remember being driven on the edge of Dartmoor and none of the rest of the party got the SMS because they had no service. My pager did however and we turned round having read it. The same was true in Harrods and a few other large buildings in the London. I currently have a WhatsApp message that refuses to send, it has a big red circle next to it with a white i in it. Rebooting the app and even the phone makes no difference.
SMS delivery is far from guaranteed, particularly when passing between mobile operators, and doubly so internationally.
I recently attended a dentist appointment only to find the building closed after a fire. When I enquired I was told "we sent you a text back in May" but I never received it. An email or, heaven forfend, an actual phone call would have been more useful.
We use text alerts at work but need a premium SMS service to increase the reliability of the message delivery. Even then it's always backed up by email notifications.
Unlikely, but I am going to be a lot more suspicious about vapes in future!
I noticed recently that some disposables have a suspiciously large amount of electronics i.e. what looks a microcontroller (qfn24 package, no part number, natch, but identical package to many esp32 chips), soic8 (flash chip?), digital microphone (well, they use microphones as a vacuum sensor, but no reason why this one couldn't listen if it has a microcontroller) as well as what looks suspiciously like a PCB antenna. This is in addition to the usual charge control ic and transistors.
The vape in question is an "IVG Air 2400" if anyone else would like to take a look!
Battery looks normal but it is far bigger than it needs to be!
Makes me feel like a paranoid nutjob that I even bothered to look, but this recent news from Lebanon is.. Worrying.
My guess: Just to do power delivery over USB-C you need a pretty full-on microcontroller with flashable firmware, maybe even a Bluetooth debugging channel and who knows what else, because why not. It's just tiny sculptures made from sand, a few boron atoms and a tiny dribble of copper. May as well put all the capabilities in everything just in case.
The whole situation is a wet dream for supply chain attackers.
It doesn't do PD. It charges at 5V 0.5A according to my PinePower.
The uC is ostensibly for driving a single RGB LED, for which it has three extra transistors on the board.
It doesn't enumerate on USB, but I wonder if it might, if you spoke in chinese and told it that you are the secret police and you want it to divulge conversation logs of its former user..
That's very interesting, I might have to get one of those and rip it to bits. I've dismantled a few others that people have thrown away and all that's in them is a vacuum sensor, heater, and battery. Plus filthy chemical fake flavour-infused nicotine fluid of course. How anyone manages to retain their sense of smell after using these is beyond me.
Botulinum cigars nearly worked!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_assassination_attempts_on_Fidel_Castro#:~:text=The%20assassination%20attempts%20reportedly%20included,%2C%20mafia%2Dstyle%20execution%20endeavors%2C
The assassination attempts reportedly included cigars poisoned with botulinum toxin, a Eumycota fungi-infected scuba-diving suit along with a booby-trapped conch placed on the sea bottom,[20] an exploding cigar (Castro loved cigars and scuba diving, but he quit smoking in 1985),[20][21] and plain, mafia-style execution endeavors, among others
Who will trust anything made in Israel >?
Now that the movement is started , what prevents , for example , China to build-in explosive charges in their consumer products ?
Americans doing the same in their products , cars >? Nothing.
Israel's actions have broken the chain of trust in consumer electronic and other products and the mess they created has a domino effect.
That was one hell of a bad move. They didn't think this one one bit. Personally , i will never m ever the hell ever buy anything made for / by / or in association with Israel.
They broke trust and there's no going back,
The pagers were not made in Israel - just modified by them to become a very effective anti-Hezbollah weapon system.
Congratulations to Israel for one of the most effective strikes to date against the Hezbollah terrorist organization.
Icon for what should happen to all terrorist groups =====>
"The pagers were not made in Israel - just modified by them to become a very effective anti-Hezbollah anti-personnel weapon system."
FIFY
"Congratulations to Israel for one of the most effective strikes to date against the Hezbollah terrorist organization."
Yes, because the women, children and non-combatants killed and injured just don't count. As long as you get 'your man' it's all OK, right? Who cares about collateral damage (even the Iranian ambassador was injured in the explosions).
So, exactly who is using terrorist tactics now (but people will never admit that to themselves, will they)??
Hezbollah are terrorists - totally agree because they engage in violent acts with no regard for innocent bystanders. (Although that could also be laid at the door of many a Western government's military actions.)
Hamas - the same. (And by the way, who almost certainly killed & kidnapped Israelis deliberately so as to cause the inevitable slaughter of Palistinians in the Israeli government's knee-jerk over-reaction.)
The IDF are terrorists because they indiscriminately bomb Palestinian camps on the pretext that there may be Hamas therein. (In which case there might also be Israeli hostages there too but that doesn't seem to worry them.)
But if it turns out that the IDF or Mossad are connected to this then it's clear that the Israeli government has turned Israel into a terrorist state.
Antisemitism is an irrational hatred of Jews. Disgust at the Israelli government is not antisemitism - otherwise there are a lot of antisemitic Jews out there both inside & outside of Israel.
It's unpopular to say so but frankly the Israeli state has become as fascist as the AfD who are alarmingly close to taking over several of the Bundesländer in eastern Germany and Trump's rednecks might in the USA.
I just hope that Nigel Farage's "I'm not racist, but ..." buddies are kept in check in the UK.
> The IDF are terrorists because they indiscriminately bomb Palestinian camps
And you ar3 an idiot listening to Muslim Arab supremacist propaganda.
First - they are not “camps”, they are cities with real houses and shops and everything where people who live there lived for generations. The only reason they are called “camps” is because UN is in the Arab pocket. These “Palestinians (Levantine Arabs in reality - same as those living in Jordan or Syria) are the only people on Earth where “refugee” status and UN payout are inheritable by multiple generations.
Second - if IDF actually bombed indiscriminately, there will be nothing left of Hamas and Gaza by now. The problem for Israel is that it is IDF that is expected to care about Arab lives more than the Arab government (Hamas) cares about their own people. Hamas, the government of Gaza, included civilian death and hiding behind civilians as part of their original plan on how to survive the aftermath when they planned last October’s massacre.
"Antisemitism is an irrational hatred of Jews. Disgust at the Israelli government is not antisemitism - otherwise there are a lot of antisemitic Jews out there both inside & outside of Israel."
And in many parts eg Australia you are not permitted to distinguish between Judaism and Zionism although to be fair the local Jewry don't either.
As an outsider I see one as a political ideology, the other a tribal religion.
Expressing rational disdain for an ideology is normally permitted in the western liberal tradition except in this peculiar case.
It would be a typically russian cockup for their Z emblazoned tanks to have pulled up 2000km short of their nominated target.
Sadly the à propos "For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind" KJV Hosea 8:7
I agree - especially your point that being disgusted with the Israeli government and IDF operations does not mean one "hates Jews" and is antisemitic.
I hate the US government when it is busy butchering innocent people on the pretext of stopping some arbitrary "them."
I hate the Canadian government when they do the same.
And I hate the Israeli government for doing the same to the Palestinians and the Lebanese.
As long as the tit-for-tat continues, the only thing assured is that the next generation of terrorists on both sides is being born, full of hatred for the death of their parents.
> The IDF are terrorists because they indiscriminately bomb Palestinian camps
You mean Hamas bases built in and underneath such camps??
The rules of war allow a defending country to attack military targets. If civilians get in the way by will or by force then they may be willingly (by their own will) or unwilingly (by the force of the enemy using them as sheilds) in the line of fire.
This is not a movie or TV series where the whole war is brought to a standstill because some bunch of families are being held hostage by the enemy. International pressure has already made sure Israel is well aware it is in the limelight and will do more than usually required to shift the civvies out of the way.
But as wel all know from the leaked phone conversation where an Israili is trying to convince a Palestinian to move out of the flat they live in and go to refuge areas etc, over and over he tells them to, as soon that area will be targeted, the civvie male seems damn proud to have himself and HIS KIDS in the firing line as their deaths will look great on social media!
So when you have civilians willingly stepping in front of bullets and happily laying their still innocent underage children over the top of Hamas tunnel entrances, what are you supposed to to?
It's the trolley problem. Do you stop the war to avoid blowing up the little kid who is abused by his own parents by being placed as a sheild over a tunnel entrance? Or to save the hundreds of men women and children inside those tunnels, being raped, starved, tortured by an already understood to be inhuman group of men who hate women gays etc, risk blowing that kid up too?
You mean Hamas bases built in and underneath such camps??
The ones Israel seems to have such remarkable difficulty in photographing? You'll recall that hospital which they said had a huge Hamas centre under it. They showed diagrams of tunnels, conferences rooms, armouries, dormitories and so on ... but when they took over the hospital (with regrettable loss of life among the patients) all they seemed to find was a shed with a couple of guns in it. Odd, that.
See the Ig Nobel prize awards:
"The Peace Prize was awarded to the so-called Pigeon Project—a 1940s investigation by psychologist and inventor BF Skinner that tested the feasibility of putting live pigeons inside missiles to guide the weapons’ path."
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/anus-breathing-animals-and-pigeon-guided-missiles-ig-nobel-prizes-reward-unusual-but-valuable-science-180985090/#:~:text=The%20Peace%20Prize%20was%20awarded,to%20guide%20the%20weapons'%20path.
We really are an ingenious species.
It’s not about god, it’s about resources. Put lots of people in a small space, divide them into two camps then restrict access to something they need: food, water, deep water port, jobs, political representation - and you will get this result.
Jews and Muslims coexisted quite happily in the Spanish caliphate for hundreds of years, and there were big Jewish populations in the Ottoman Empire too. It only became complicated after 1948
and thanks Allah they were, because their views about Jews in 1939-1945 were pretty 'radical'. But then, again, it's impossible to verify how much the views of the population aligned (or not) with the views of their leader:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-official-record-what-the-mufti-said-to-hitler/
btw, I'm sure that the Jewish views on Arabs were equally 'radical'.
Don't mention the war.
Very much on the same content-Asia-which most of the casualties of WWII. Also, the German army was within 200km of Palestine at El Alamein. There were plans to continue Eastward to connect with the Soviet War, and the Palestinians including their Grand Mufti, had discussions with Adolf Hitler about joining their cause.
Jews and Muslims coexisted quite happily in the Spanish caliphate for hundreds of years
As long as you don't mind being a second-class citizen being at the beck and call of your Caliphate masters. Yes, Jews were allowed to be physicians but only because they were removed from the local political structures and were ultimately expendable if someone important died.
Want to own property? Want to practice your religeon freely? Didn't happen for anyone non-Islamic in the Spanish Caliphate.
Or anywhere else for that matter - in Christian countries Jews were encouraged to be money lenders because if the king/random noble borrowed more than they could repay a quick pogrom fixed the issue. And the Catholic church was always happy to burn a few Jews if it ran out of Protestants or non-conformists to burn.
Being allowed to exist as a second class citizen by your "benevolent masters" from another religion is not "getting along." I completely fail to see how you came up with that phrase with regards to the Spanish Caliphate.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been at war over their religious beliefs ever since the first soothsayer of each religion started foreseeing and foreshadowing the appearance of a "prophet" of some kind. Once they had their own "prophet" or "saviour" or whatever label you choose to apply to the iconic figure, they had a rallying point around which to declare themselves "different, but better" than everyone else around them. No one is about to say "Hey, lets join this sub-group, they believe in something really stupid that will make me look like an idiot." They all believe that this particular group that they've joined is the "superior" one.
Brutality, prejudice, and even direct personal assaults and all out wars have resulted from the outgrowth of that fundamental "we're better, and god is with us" mentality. I don't think we're ever going to see peace in the middle east until long after humanity has escaped Earth's gravity well permanently, and maybe not even then. We could very well end up with Mel Brook's "History of the World, Part 1" scene at the end about "Jews in Space" with their "Star of David" ship or some fool divisions around nationality in the future instead of humanity trying to survive. Period.
It is also quite possible that Israel learned of a planned Hezbollah attack and triggered the explosions to disrupt or prevent the planned attack.
Between the Hezbollah casualties and the disruption to their communications, any attacks that were planned to be launched by Hezbollah over the next few months are unlikely to now take place.
At a cost of a few innocent casualties, Israel has taken a large number of Hezbollah out of the combat - some permanently and has massively damaged their communications.
This attack on Hezbollah caused far fewer innocent casualties than would be possible by any other attack causing the same number of Hezbollah casualties.
Hezbollah are bad news for the people of Lebanon. The army there needs to do what it should have done long ago and kick these terrorists out. It's like allowing the IRA to set up their own private army in, say, Birmingham, and just letting them stay there for years.
The army there needs to...
You mean the Lebanese army? Reporting to the Lebanese government? The government led by the March 8th Alliance coalition between Hezbollah and the PDF? OK, you tell them.
A better analogy would be like having the Northerrn Irish Government allowing the UDA to set up their own private army and then allowing them to join the British Army as a reserve regiment called the UDR.
The UDR wasn't a reserve regiment, it was a normal infantry regiment. It originally recruited from both communities in NI, and had a substantial Catholic presence in the early days, until the IRA threatened to kill any Catholic who joined.
For most of its life there was no distinct NI government, since Stormont was prorogued in 1972 just after the UDR was formed, and the NI assembly didn't reappear until 1998, years after the UDR was disbanded.
given that pretty much 100% of passangers carry electronic devices and that pretty much 100% of commercial airlines carry those passangers, I have a feeling that the solution will be some public farts from both the authorities and the airlines, and the airports, that "we have carried out a thorough assessment of the situation and we have ensured the implementation of enhanced security measures so that the passanger flow can continue (and so does our profit), move on, nothing to see here, move on, have a nice flight, etc'.
Dont muslims have a saying if Allah wills it ?
If they believe in Allah's will then why are they fighting at all ?
Where is their trust in Allah to protect them and for Allah to do the "right" thing ?
The more violence we see from them and Iran or the Saudis, the more we see they ae hypocrits who dont trust Allah at all, because if they did , they would sit back and pray and not try and fight.
So was this a specific batch of pagers 100% of which were sent to Lebanon, or are there more of them in circulation ?
Also, with the current evidence pointing to a manufacturer in Hungary, it would be interesting to know where the explosives were introduced - I'd have thought that a crate of 2000+ explosive pagers might have been detected before being loaded onto a normal cargo flight.
1. Too many Hezbollah hot shots get killed as collateral damage because a rocket aimed for their mobile phone explodes.
2. Hezbollah decides to procure 1000's of pager devices for key members, since a pager is a radio and does not leave radio waves that can be tracked.
3. A mole inside Hezbollah reports that to his peers.
4. The mole manages to influence decision making in the Hezbollah organization, enabling its enemy to develop explosive modifications for the device that was chosen.
5. The mods are tested.
6. The supply chain is compromised allowing insertion of something like semtex, detonator, firmware modification, hardware modification in the shape of wiring from an unused CPU pin to the detonator.
7. To allow a sufficient penetration level of the device among members before discovery, the firmware will trigger the detonator only when a specific message is received.
7. The mods are rolled out on many thousands of devices.
8. After it is made sure most members have been supplied with the new paging device, the trigger is pulled.
Most of the leaders of H are old men, they probably dont have pagers or phones anyway, they let their minions carry those. These old men dont actually need to be in constant touch with stuff, they just sit back and every now and then give a command to someone and let whatever happens happen. This is whats happening with Putin as well, he doesnt actually give direct commands for every single little thing, he has an idea and lets all the idiots below him take care of details and die along the way.
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I guess people will have to learn something now. All your electronics come as component parts and you assemble them yourself. Plus some sort of generic sofware to make use of the gps and internet.
Bye bye apple,microsoft etc etc,why should anyone trust big tech?
For a start this was not "big tech" being hacked as pagers are hardly a billion dollar business.
Secondly it depends on who you are, or more specifically if there is an agency that wants you really badly. In that case you really can't trust anything or anyone. Bin Laden did a good job of evading the US forces by going totally off-grid, but they got him eventually.
For us plebs such an attack is hardly worth bothering about when they can just send to local police round to pick you up instead.
This is a prime example of the corruption in Hamas. Its obvious a few took the money and bought some cheap deal because they could make some money off their brothers, instead of doing the smart thing and buying random radios and pages from random shops just like everyone else instead of trying to buy bulk.
The 'sales rep' persuaded the buyer that the pagers would be impervious to Israeli spying.
The explosives were virtually impossible to detect even if the device was disassembled.
Hezballah actually disassembled some and x-rayed them but did not find anything wrong. (some earlier reports had said that the plan was executed earlier than expected due to suspicious by Hezballah)
About 3000 members were killed and injured.
The message received told the users to press on two buttons to review a secured message and this insured direct injury.
Plastic explosives are plastic, an xray isnt going to tell you much.
Secondly most boards already have large bits of glue blobs etc, most people would nt have a clue telling the difference between plastic explosives or blobs of glue ... or capacitors...
My guess is they simply changed some capacitors,
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