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>or firmware hack.

There's still the question of how the explosive capsule would have been triggered. It couldn't just explode at the first incoming call. There must be more to that.


The microcontrollers inside the pagers probably have a spare GPIO pin, so they'd just have to modify the software and attach the detonating electronics to that gpio pin.

Since i'm supposedly "posting too fast", to answer the post below:

> Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that scale I don't think wireless is possible though.

Technically it is, but requires additional electronics and antennas. It's much easier to just use the existing pager network and trigger when some specific message (or pager code) is detected. Paging networks are simple to implement.


It seems pretty plausible that the actual supply chain attack here would have been Israel subbing out whole shipping crates of pagers for sabotaged devices Israel manufactured itself, which would allow for arbitrary complex designs.


Maybe they bought a large quantity of pagers from the same supplier and modified beforehand? I think a few grams of high explosives is good enough.


Just curious, is it possible to program the pins so that it triggers by wireless or satellite command? With that scale I don't think wireless is possible though.


the pager is already wireless. So adding functionality to trigger wirelessly (over the phone network) is trivial. And it can trigger only with a special message.


Yeah you are probably right. I'm an electronics newbie and don't know exactly how pagers work in wireless. I'm going to read some material on it.


Thanks, I wonder how does one do that. I'll probably need to read how pagers work.


My best guess is explosively formed penetrator in the display.

I don’t think wholesale replacement of the pagers was likely to work for a number of reasons.

They had to go one step up the supply chain.

The EFP display could be set to trigger on a certain message, or even the clearing of a certain message, which in devices without said display would do nothing.

The display is most likely to be pointed at the user’s face, or opposed to their waistline (EFPs sort of fire both ways but in one axis.

The battery, if it were a cylinder as would be likely, would fire tangentially, likely not hitting much.

A prismatic battery would make a good place for an EFP but difficult to interface with and likely requires a second compromised component.


Theory: A prismatic battery with an explosive core and an electronic fuse swapped to trigger the explosive instead of disconnect the battery. Firmware change to short the battery. No visible signs of tampering even in iFixit like conditions.


The best evidence we have now suggests that the devices used had removable (AAA) batteries, not built-in batteries.

If I was buying pagers and had previously been hit by intelligence ops I would be buying batteries in random supermarkets.


I'm looking at pager teardowns and there's nothing even close to the volume of the battery in there. Big transistor and the speaker housing.

Which sort of leans back toward the theory that nobody checked the pagers at all.


15g of explosives is sufficient, probably, based on the analysis I’ve seen.

15g of explosives is not very big.

The speaker is another potential home, that is a good point. Big cone and heavy magnetics.

This display weighs 15g, and uses cheap glass and old liquid crystal: https://www.crystalfontz.com/product/cfag12864u3nfhe11-128x6...

Would someone be able to make one that worked but weighed eg five grams, then fill the rest with explosive? Would anyone be able to discern that the back of the glass wasn’t liquid crystal but explosive, especially as they are usually taped over?


What would happen if you walked through airport security with such a device?


Nothing, they aren’t looking for 2”x1” sheets of copper within electronic devices, and presumably the thin layer of explosives would be sealed and washed.


Might be a hardcoded date and time. Does the legit pager messaging network give the time? If not, continually powered digital clocks drift slowly.


>Whoever did this just killed that as an information channel as both the devices and the network are now compromised.

This is also true for Hezbollah. They must now distrust their own network, equipment and procurement channels. The reshuffling resulting from the casualties will make the organization less effective, at least temporarily, thus delaying any attack plans and allowing moles to rise through the ranks.


What is your grief with Clojure (because I'm just trying to get familiar with it)?


Lack of documentation around performance related stuff and high memory usage because of immutable data structure.

Otherwise it's great. I try to do it in my free time since most of the clojure services are stable(in terms of features) and we are just scaling it up as we see increase in traffic but it's not really helping right now.


I guess it depends what the tech stack was before?

Where I work, we were previously a ColdFusion shop when I joined, and after a false start with Scala, I introduced Clojure and it stuck: we cross-trained the CF devs and slowly rewrote the platform from the bottom up in Clojure.

We had struggled with automated deployments, and the size of servers, when we were a CF shop but after the switch to Clojure we had a fully-automated deployment pipeline, with rolling cluster updates, and much smaller servers than we needed before, running more processes than before.


The platform was written in Clojure from ground up since the team was small and rest of the company was using Clojure mostly in combination of Java.

Now most of the company moved out of Clojure for various reasons but they didn't try to write performant code and instead just chose to rewrite which I want to avoid. Try as much as possible before deciding to rewrite since rewrite is expensive given the codebase has lot of things.

I am glad, it's not Java though.


>"if China does something we should do the opposite"

Maybe not that. But China is proof that a country isn't necessarily better when it is governed by engineers and scientists.


Surely you understand that if you have two systems that depend on millions of variables, and you compare 1 single variable, you cant assign the outcomes being different to that one variable?

I mean, maybe you don't understand really basic critical thinking, maybe my bar is too high here?


I think it means something like "secretly". It's millenial slang.


I think it's more like "unobtrusively"


Of course, there will always be someone who has it way worse or lives inside an underdeveloped region but this isn't some kind of competition. To observe the lifelong negative effects of growing up poor one doesn't have to grow up in absolute squalor.

Living in a large German city, I also never owned a car and didn't feel poor for the fact.


> Of course, there will always be someone who has it way worse or lives inside an underdeveloped region

It's not "someone". It's the majority of the world's population. 150 years ago, it was all of the world's population, including the rich people.

Was everyone severely traumatized back then?


>Living in a large German city, I also never owned a car and didn't feel poor for the fact.

Lacking a car doesn't make one poor, and if you're growing up in one of Germany's largest cities (where one does not need a car to survive), you're already in an incredibly fortunate position in terms of lottery of birth compared to the rest of the people on the planet.


I think the parent is pointing out that this description is of someone literally above average.

In no other circumstances would it be referred to in this way.

e.g. it’s like saying someone with above average work ethic is ‘lazy’, someone with above average intelligence is ‘stupid’, etc…


Well sure. Poor depends on where you are too. Poor in an American city can still be rich compared to poor in a very poor country. I don’t think that negates the point though.


Does ‘lazy’ and ‘stupid’ also depend on location?

i.e. at a conference of neurosurgeons perhaps the vast majority of the HN userbase, including perhaps everyone commenting here, would be considered ‘lazy’ and ‘stupid’.

If it’s fine to refer to people in this manner, depending on their physical location, then I think it would have some pretty big implications.


Strange question, perhaps, but I'm curious because I always wanted to try Nattō:

If you eat it regularly, do you also smell like it?

I ask because people who eat a lot of garlic (or masala spice) often have strong body odor due to consuming these spices.


I notice the smell a bit. Not sure if anyone else notices my body odor changing. It's pretty common to eat it here in Japan. Do you mean the odor clinging to clothes or some physiological smell change?


>If the customer service representative complies that's a bot not a human

Either that, or they're a junior developer struggling to find an entry-level position with a software company in the current job market while also needing to somehow make ends meet.


Very nice.

I combine the /etc/hosts approach with the StayFocusd browser extension.


That only has an effect when you're logged in.


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