Only tangentially related, but emojis allegedly owe their existence to beepers: https://one-from-nippon.ghost.io/emoji/
The forgotten war on beepers
241–250 of 405 posts
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
The dose makes the poison. The LD50 for lye is 4,090 (rats) - 6,600 mg/kg (mice). The LD50 for fentanyl is 3.1 mg/kg in rats and 0.03 mg/kg in monkeys. So, very different.
And? The only way someone is ingesting that accidentally is if a classmate is attempting to poison them. There are a lot of other poisons that can be ingested in small doses if someone is trying to injure you. Fentanyl is not going to leap out of someone's pocket and fly down your throat. It's not magic killing dust.
Accidental drug dosing happens all the time, with things with much larger effective doses. People mix up drugs. Drugs absolutely fall out of people's pockets on a near constant basis.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#243Pagers in the 450 to 470 mHz frequency are still used in the senior living nurse call industry. It is still taking time to transition to an android or iOS device because of the cost to replace a $500 to $1000 device versus a $100 one, after it falls in a toilet.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#244In the late 1990s, my dad attended night classes with other adult learners to earn his MBA. Everywhere he went during those years, my dad had a beeper clipped to his belt for an on-call hospital rotation. During his first week of class, my dad's beeper loudly went off during the middle of the lecture. As my dad scrambled out of the lecture hall to call the number on the little screen, the professor accurately guessed…
A lot of doctors still prefer to carry beepers
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#245It really upsets me that the VHF pager networks were shut down. VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications without having to offer up your location to surveillance. All satellite pagers require transmit-before-receive, and of course LTE requires that plus actively cooperating with the towers' triangulation of the receiver. VHF POCSAG over large urban areas is something we never should have let go of…
Yes!! This. I would totally carry a pager if the network still existed. Not all the time, but just sometimes when I'd like to feel free. Ps there is still the iridium paging service which is one way and is not transmit before receive. But they want to get rid of it and stopped selling hardware. It's really hard to find now second hand.
I was carrying a pager as late as 2009 because a customer's data center was two stories underground in one of the older tower blocks in downtown Toronto.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hospitals in my area of the US still use POCSAG pagers, totally unencrypted. They do mention patient information, but I guess the obscurity makes it ok.
> Hospitals in my area of the US still use POCSAG pagers, totally unencrypted. They do mention patient information, but I guess the obscurity makes it ok. Nope, the obscurity doesn't make it okay. If it takes place over the phone lines, it is arguably exempt from encryption requirements under HIPAA (much like a fax). Otherwise, they're just turning a blind eye and hoping nobody notices (which is surprisingly common w…
It's over the air, not even phone lines. PDW, SDRSharp, and an rtl-sdr dongle is all that's needed.
And yes, there is a lot of patient info in that traffic. It's not illegal for the hospital to broadcast this, and it's not illegal to listen in and decode the signals, but it is very much illegal to do anything with the information gathered.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#247haha the scary headline "Beepers Speed Drug Connections" like there's absolutely nothing speedy about a drug connection.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children. Here's another case I encountered a few weeks ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Brown_case – there are so many things wrong with the entire thing, starting with charging an 11-year old as an adult…
> I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, In a lot of cases I think it's a proxy for racism. I think there's also a tendency towards black and white thinking, where people are either good or bad, and they're very willing to bucket people as bad rather than considering shades of gray or that authorities did something wron…
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Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm ok with arresting someone who brings a gun or fentanyl, if that means we get them before they can kill someone.
You think fentanyl is magic killing dust? What are you, one of those moronic cops who thinks they'll die from seeing fentanyl? They only way you're injuring someone with fentanyl is getting them to ingest an unsafe amount of it one way or another. That's not really different from a lot of prescription drugs. Or some OTC ones, like Tylenol. Or lye and many other cleaning agents.
OP is suffering from the moral panic about fentanyl. It's gotten so ridiculous that cops suffer from a collective begin near it is enough to knock them out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0Vzz_P9JBk
If people wonder how possession worked in the middle ages, look no further than this.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hospitals in my area of the US still use POCSAG pagers, totally unencrypted. They do mention patient information, but I guess the obscurity makes it ok. Nope, the obscurity doesn't make it okay. If it takes place over the phone lines, it is arguably exempt from encryption requirements under HIPAA (much like a fax). Otherwise, they're just turning a blind eye and hoping nobody notices (which is surprisingly common w…
It's over the air, not even phone lines. PDW, SDRSharp, and an rtl-sdr dongle is all that's needed. And yes, there is a lot of patient info in that traffic. It's not illegal for the hospital to broadcast this, and it's not illegal to listen in and decode the signals, but it is very much illegal to do anything with the information gathered.
> It's over the air, not even phone lines. PDW, SDRSharp, and an rtl-sdr dongle is all that's needed. And yes, there is a lot of patient info in that traffic. It's not illegal for the hospital to broadcast this, and it's not illegal to listen in and decode the signals, but it is very much illegal to do anything with the information gathered.
I'm not familiar with this particular technology, which is why I didn't make a definitive claim in my previous comment. But I am quite intimately familiar with HIPAA and related regulations, and I am extremely skeptical of the third sentence you wrote.