Israel reaches cease fire with Hezbollah, fighting shifts to Syria

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duluoz said:
My first thought was that I can’t imagine there was much precision in an attack like this. So Hezbollah are using pagers, but who else might be using pagers? That sounds funny to people who are used to upgrading to the latest iPhone as soon as it’s available… but Lebanon is a very different place.

Not to mention bystanders, babies being held or kids playing with dad’s pager, etc.

Israel has shown they DGAF as much as Hezbollah/Hamas DGAF. Their moral high ground is an imagined one and that’s becoming more and more clear to the western world.
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I read elsewhere that pagers are passive - they don't broadcast a signal, only receive. So perfect for a network of people that doesn't want to have their location tracked. IT staff and doctors have used them in the past but I don't know anyone who still does. There has long been software to route the "pages" to the on-call persons cell phone. (eg: pagerduty.com)

It will be interesting to see if this was:
  1. a 0day exploit in the stock pager software that blows up the battery
  2. Mossad loading new firmware on the pagers with an exploit to blow up the battery
  3. physical altering the pagers to add in explosives and way to trigger them (hardest to pull off logistically IMO)
 
Calheel said:
Took out? Sounds like it only killed a couple.
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Pagers aren't deadly weapons. There's not going to be a huge amount of shrapnel, and the explosion isn't going to be at high velocity. Moreover, people don't necessarily carry pagers near their vital organs. So I'd expect a lot of injuries and few deaths, which is what was reported.

The virtue of this attack was disrupting Hezbollah communications; making the Hezbollah operatives afraid of infiltration; and sure injuring some fighters can't hurt but I don't think it was the point of the attack. I'm no military strategist, though.
 
NCK9 said:
I read elsewhere that pagers are passive - they don't broadcast a signal, only receive. So perfect for a network of people that doesn't want to have their location tracked. IT staff and doctors have used them in the past but I don't know anyone who still does. There has long been software to route the "pages" to the on-call persons cell phone. (eg: pagerduty.com)

It will be interesting to see if this was:
  1. a 0day exploit in the stock pager software that blows up the battery
  2. Mossad loading new firmware on the pagers with an exploit to blow up the battery
  3. physical altering the pagers to add in explosives and way to trigger them (hardest to pull off logistically IMO)
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The pagers might be used passively, but I have a hard time believing they don't have two-way capabilities. It would be a trivial cost to add to the device and it would open up functionality for those who need it.

Anyway, you can still cause a lot of mischief with a software hack. Try this bit of code on a processor that isn't cooled and has no throttling capabilities.

While i == 0 {
i = i + 1 ,247.3345}

When I was programming and was managing a team of programmers, one of my guys was an idiot who didn't know what he was doing. At one point, he set off a query that did a Cartesian product between three very large tables. Anyone who knows the first thing about databases knows that is a very, very bad idea. The folks who ran the hardware had the system tuned to turn off throttling and the server overheated. It didn't explode or anything, but it had to be restarted and there might have been a meltdown in one of the network cards.
 
superrific said:
The pagers might be used passively, but I have a hard time believing they don't have two-way capabilities. It would be a trivial cost to add to the device and it would open up functionality for those who need it.
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There were two-way pagers - but that was right around when phones included SMS. A traditional passive pager was receive only and would go for a month on a AAA battery since it didn't emit a signal (and therefore can't be tracked like a cell phone can as it is constantly pinging a tower). Guessing they've ditched the AAAs for built in rechargeable batteries now?

 
CNN now says that 9 are dead from these explosions (and I imagine that number is still premature).

I think that Israel (assuming it's Israel behind this) somehow got into the supply chain for pagers for the Lebanese market and added something to these pagers to enable them to explode like this. I just hope that most of these pagers were actually used by Hezbollah and that they were not generally available to the general public.
 
Ddseddse said:
Uh... history says otherwise. The US is estimated to have dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs on Cambodia alone (a country we have never been at war with). To put that in perspective we dropped just over 2 million tons in all of WWII (source).

TBH, my first instinct was to qualify it and say the US is not big into *secret* bombings, but then I remembered that the Cambodia bombings were all *secret* at the time, so that went out the window.

EDIT: And if you're properly horrified at that then, for the love of God (and this is one of those rare times when "for the love of God" gets used in it's literal sense) PLEASE STOP ELECTING REPUBLICANS!
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I agree to stop electing Republicans but disagree on being horrified about the bombing on
superrific said:
Well, let me rephrase my observation.

1. Obviously the US military has dropped lots and lots of bombs on civilians. But that's the military, not the CIA -- and during an actual US war. Bombing Cambodia just isn't the same thing from a strategic perspective. First, it was secret because there wasn't a lot of surveillance equipment in or around Cambodia at the time. It wasn't hard to keep under wraps -- at least not compared to today. Second, it was in war. An unjust war, to be sure, but the fact that it was war localized the conflict. It wasn't as if random people in China or the Soviet Union had to be worried about suddenly being hit by a explosive device (except for the constant low-level fear of WWIII).

2. The CIA has done nasty deeds, but I can't imagine the CIA is cool with mass explosions in markets and such. Even if you go with a keys of power approach, and think of CIA decision makers as ruthless actors willing to kill if required, it doesn't make strategic sense. The CIA is supposed to be secret. Its job is not to spread fear or panic, as that undermines American interests. True, it has supported dictators who use fear and panic, but from a political/PR perspective, it's long been understood that the CIA propping up dictators isn't really the same as the dictators' own torture and terror. In part that's because the CIA only had limited control over the dictators it supported.

3. Cambodia was a long time ago. The American armed forces and intelligence community has learned lessons. As importantly, Cambodia was desperation. It didn't really start, I think, until after the war was looking dire for the U.S. I won't say it was a last gasp, but it was a product of the war effort going poorly.
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Also the NVA and Viet Cong were using the Ho Chi Minh trail to send supplies to the south.

I'm not going to look an 18 year old American soldier in the face and tell him there is nothing we can do to stop the flow of arms from the north to the south because it is happening in another country.
 
2ManyBlueCups said:
NYT reporting approximately 200 people were critically wounded. Lots of severe injuries to extremities. If you blow someone's arm or leg off you make it much harder for them to fight against you in a military conflict.
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But you said they took out “thousands”
 
2ManyBlueCups said:
Thousands wounded, 200+ in critical condition. Many not critical but with life-altering injuries to their eyes or extremities. An extremely effective and highly precise attack.
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"Casualties" in war parlance - someone taken out of the fight
www.merriam-webster.com

Definition of CASUALTY

a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action; a person or thing injured, lost, or destroyed : victim; serious or fatal accident : disaster… See the full definition
www.merriam-webster.com www.merriam-webster.com
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
I'm not going to look an 18 year old American soldier in the face and tell him there is nothing we can do to stop the flow of arms from the north to the south because it is happening in another country.
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Well, first, happening in another country really is kind of a big deal, unless we want to be fighting everyone all at once.

Second, if you were looking that soldier in the face, wouldn't it be better to tell him that he's being shipped home because we're not fighting this stupid war any more? It's one thing to inflict casualties in a war of necessity like WWII. It's another thing to pick fights around the world, decide that these fights require a massive war effort involving hundreds of thousands of Americans, and then claim that bombing other countries is fine because we're trying to win a war. How about: if we can't win a war without committing gross human rights violations, maybe we shouldn't be fighting the war unless utterly necessary.
 
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