Exploding Pagers

[IanF]

Exploding walkie-talkies a day after..

https://news.sky.com/story/middle-east- ... eblog-body

[Zonda_]

Where do you even get pagers these days? I thought they were obsolete as soon as mobiles came out.

[Mito Man]

I thought the NHS was the biggest user of them.

[integrale_evo]

I remember a couple of people having them at uni in 1998

[Rich B]

I remember a couple of people having them at uni in 1998

they gave them out with the student bank accounts. i had one for a bit from HSBC. it was a complete waste of time though as it just meant you always had to pay to call them back. i got a mobile about a month later.

Funny to think we grew up before mobiles were “standard”.

[Carlos]

I thought the NHS was the biggest user of them.

That was fax machines lol

[integrale_evo]

I remember a couple of people having them at uni in 1998

they gave them out with the student bank accounts. i had one for a bit from HSBC. it was a complete waste of time though as it just meant you always had to pay to call them back. i got a mobile about a month later.

Funny to think we grew up before mobiles were “standard”.

I got a cell net phone with my student account, the SIM card was full credit card size behind the battery.

Funny that not long after it meant the phone was huge compared to others, but now we all carry one which would easily swallow one (width and height wise anyway)

[dinny_g]

Funny to think we grew up before mobiles were “standard”.

I was explaining “Friday nights” back when I was in uni to some of the office Millennials recently.

If the plan was not made before I went home on Friday afternoon, you had one choice.

Get the bus into Dublin around for around 19:45 to 20:00. Wander around about 8 or 10 pubs hoping to find my mates. If you didn’t find them, try McD’s. Still no joy, then have a pint somewhere to kill 30 mins and the try the pubs again, in case you missed them.

If you find them, you had a night out, if not, I’d be home by 10:00

[Carlos]

Walkie Talkies blowing up now! Blowing up people in a funeral procession for those who died yesterday seems a bit dark

[integrale_evo]

I would love to know how they’ve done it.

Several experts saying that there’s enough energy in a lithium battery to cause an explosion, but I can’t see how you could use the existing electronics to trigger such a rapid release. Most battery ‘explosions’ are a rapid burn over a few seconds. Sure it can be nasty, but not really an explosion.

Unless they have some sort of casing around the battery tough enough to contain the release for so long until it goes ‘pop’

[Jobbo]

Where do you even get pagers these days? I thought they were obsolete as soon as mobiles came out.

No GPS etc so can’t track people using them easily.

[Mito Man]

I would love to know how they’ve done it.

Several experts saying that there’s enough energy in a lithium battery to cause an explosion, but I can’t see how you could use the existing electronics to trigger such a rapid release. Most battery ‘explosions’ are a rapid burn over a few seconds. Sure it can be nasty, but not really an explosion.

Unless they have some sort of casing around the battery tough enough to contain the release for so long until it goes ‘pop’

Really hope that’s not the case otherwise we can say goodbye to ever carrying an electronic device with lithium batteries in an airplane or potentially busy public place ever again.
FWIW I’ve chucked metal clad lithium AA batteries onto a fire because of the “warning explosion” - it’s just a disappointing parp and they let the smoke out…

[integrale_evo]

It seems an unlikely way of doing it to me. I can see how there could be enough stored energy, I don’t see how you could get it to release quickly enough without specifically being designed to do so from the outset. But then managing to open and add explosives and circuitry to set it off only in a specific circumstance to thousands of devices also seems pretty far fetched!

[Mito Man]

The company which manufactured them in Hungary appears to be a recently set up shell company in a residential looking building. Could have been a Mossad outfit all along, which then makes it more plausible.

[Beany]

LiPo batteries as bombs? Nah.

LiPo batteries only explode when they don't vent as designed, and even then, they don't reliably pop with enough force to mutilate, nor do they do so without serious warning (heat and smoke). I used to run high power LiPo batteries at near dead short with no electrical safety nets for many a year, vape nation yo etc so I'm pretty familiar with their failure modes.

The batteries would also be in a highly visible location too, relatively risky if you've modified it, might get spotted etc.

Given that the reports are that the pagers were tampered with in the supply chain - possibly at the final assembly or the delivery stage - and given a small C4 implant, then that seems entirely feasible for the walkie talkies too and with what we know seems to be the most realistic option given the damage being done, reliably, by these devices.

You can get an ESP32 micrcontroller and 15g of high explosive to fit in the space an AA battery takes up, and there's likely an AA battery sized space left over in a cheap walkie talkie.

https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/tiny ... 5102674003

This one is postage stamp sized:
https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/tiny ... 0012234835

And that's just commercial off the shelf stuff - you can buy the 7mm x 7mm RP2040 microcontroller by itself, design a small board for it and it'll be smaller than that tinypico. I could theoretically design a custom board for that tonight, and get it sent over from china by next weekend. This is not the realm of specialists any more, anyone can do it.

https://jlcpcb.com/

A simple microcontroller that listens for a tone or series of tones coming in over the radio (having been tapped into the walkie talkes analogue audio output) and then sends a signal to an LED is something even I could probably breadboard up without too much difficulty - just get something smaller and custom made, get into the supply chain, and change that LED for a small explosive device.

Get a big enough transmitter, sweep that message through all the ranges those devices can receive on, and there's yer chaos. Don't need to get all of them, just enough of them to make them not trust walkie talkies, just like they don't trust pagers now.

I'm less familiar with pagers as a technology because I'm not that old, thankyouverymuch, but again, I'm quite certain there'd be many ways to tap a signal into a microcontroller (either from the RF receiving end, or after signal interpretation; you send a number to the display, and the microcontroller sees that number as it's signal to 'light up the LED'.

You blast that signal/message from a rogue base station (far from outside the reach of Israels capability - such equipment is available to the US police, easily available to a nation state) and pop go the pagers.

Oh, and the subversion of civilian infrastructure to create a mass casualty event is likely a war crime anywhere else in the world, but no-one cares about that when the IDF do it, apparently.

[Nefarious]

Oh, and the subversion of civilian infrastructure to create a mass casualty event is likely a war crime anywhere else in the world, but no-one cares about that when the IDF do it, apparently.

I'm pretty sure that the Geneva convention specifically outlaws follow-up strikes with artillery etc. i.e. you're not allowed to bomb somewhere, wait 20 mins for the emergency services/rescue operation to turn up, then hit it again.

Hitting the pagers is arguable in the sense that it appears more targeted firing rockets at a civilian building that a legitimate target may or may not have been in at some point previously, but a second hit on walkie talkies does feel like it is likely to be hitting people seeking medical attention, attending funerals, and generally sorting out the damage from the first hit.

But, as you say, who is going to take the IDF to task on this when they have the US in their back pocket.

[Jobbo]

The company which manufactured them in Hungary appears to be a recently set up shell company in a residential looking building. Could have been a Mossad outfit all along, which then makes it more plausible.

I thought it seemed a bit odd that a Chinese company would have outsourced manufacturing to Europe.

[dinny_g]

Anyone else slightly unnerved by Beany's knowledge...

[JonMad]

Those ESP32s are ace. Done some IoT stuff with them - nothing with radio waves though, I did buy a packet of receivers (here) to try and use those with some controllers from some remote control plug sockets but never got round to it.

[Beany]

Anyone else slightly unnerved by Beany's knowledge...

Be more afraid that I'm not even that knowledgeable on it - I just have a passing interest in electronics and microcontrollers.

None of this is magic, or high level stuff any more, like it would have been even twenty years ago - twenty years ago this works have been cutting edge espionage.

Today, it's just run off the mill, outside of the supply chain infiltration.