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The forgotten war on beepers

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Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#331

Post by CraigJPerry »

cubefox wrote: post #326
robertlagrant wrote: post #323

> The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, many of whose parents were once prohibited from bringing pagers to school. I think we're too soon to know if this is a moral panic. It's a mental health worry for teenagers on TikTok etc. We don't know if it's justified or not.

Jonathan Haidt has a new book, The Anxious Generation, where he presents evidence that smartphones and social networking really do cause a decline in teenager mental health.

He did a pretty terrible job defending the hypothesis on Conversations with Tyler recently

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-a...

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#333

Post by drhuseynov »

cdchn wrote: post #280
Izkata wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or even lower-powered? https://www.amazon.com/Token2-miniOTP-2-NFC-programmable-Two... I remember my dad worked at a bank in the 90s and had one shaped like this to enter one of the buildings: https://www.amazon.com/HyperOTP-Time-Based-6-Digit-Services-...

Yeah RSA made these for a looong time. But if you don't have a phone to program it you'd need a camera or some way to manually enter the data.

FIDO2 Security keys should be considered good "hardware tokens" now , more phishing-resistant than TOTP

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#334

Post by CaptainZapp »

guenthert wrote: post #329
dhosek wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This interview on Fresh Air goes into why pagers have continued to be used in hospitals (tl;dr: cell-phone communication gives a faster turnaround, but the lower barrier to communication means that people will go to the on-call person more often than they would with the beeper where they’re more likely to find their own solution). https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...

Well, that article also mentioned the 'other service', i.e. FM, which more readily penetrates buildings and underground facilities and covers wider areas. And if there is a disaster, there's always the danger that remaining cells in the affected area are overcrowded.

Plus SMS, which was used instead of a pager, is not guaranteed to be delivered while this is not the case with beepers.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#335

Post by op00to »

fein wrote: post #246
chimeracoder wrote: post #178

Earlier 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.

There’s not much to do knowing that a patient pooped and needs to get cleaned up in room 604.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#336

Post by lxgr »

karma_pharmer wrote: post #318
lxgr wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iridium still offers it, I believe — 100% global coverage!

Note that the not-insanely-priced Iridium paging service requires you to transmit before you can receive. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40072714

No, see also my answer to your comment. SBD and Iridium paging are two different services.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#337

Post by lxgr »

karma_pharmer wrote: post #317
lxgr wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the original Iridium paging service really is (was?) one way. You had to manually update your paging location by dialing some number or by using a web interface when moving significantly, or link an Iridium phone to your pager, which would then automatically update the paging area (MDA) every time you made a call. What you mean is probably Iridium SBD, but that’s a different, bidirectional service (also used for…

Yes, Iridium SBD requires transmitting before you can receive. I did not know about Global Data Burst; I think that's what you're referring to. Holy cow it's expensive though, although I guess it has to be since you're using a lot more bandwidth*footprint. Like $6.00 per message per delivery area expensive. And they're kinda vague on how big a "delivery area" is. https://apollosat.com/featured/iridium-gdb-pager/

No, I’m referring to the Iridium pager, which is just its own service and has been around longer than SBD, I believe. Messages were (are?) free to send on top of a monthly flat subscription rate per pager.

GDB seems to be a successor to that, though.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#338

Post by dosman33 »

While I do remember a vague connection between beepers and drug dealers in the 90's (probably from movies), I don't ever remember people just assuming you were a drug dealer just because you had a beeper in middle and high school. I don't believe I started carrying one until after high school though, so maby I missed out on all the fun.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#339

Post by hateful »

dosman33 wrote: post #338

While I do remember a vague connection between beepers and drug dealers in the 90's (probably from movies), I don't ever remember people just assuming you were a drug dealer just because you had a beeper in middle and high school. I don't believe I started carrying one until after high school though, so maby I missed out on all the fun.

I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a famous case at the time (don't remember the names) where a woman shot someone at his front door and the news was saying she was a drug dealer because she had a beeper.

But I had a beeper, and all my friends had beepers, and it seemed very strange to me.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#340

Post by cyberax »

gambiting wrote: post #305
cyberax wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but YOU are wrong. Go on, do the experiment I mentioned. Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty. It's just a method of cutting down on the cost of the trial. Wrongful convictions certainly exist, but they are not even close to the main reason for the prison population.

>>Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty. So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial, then the DA comes around and says "look you can go to trial and maybe get few years in prison, or you can plead guilty and we'll count your time in jail as time served so you can go home tomorrow" 1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare? 2) If you wer…

> So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial

At least in West Coast states, you are almost guaranteed to get a low bail or no bail at all. You'll likely be denied bail only if you are accused of something heinous, so your sentence will be longer than the time in pre-trial. Or if you have a history of skipping bail.

So your scenario is highly unlikely, at least on the West Coast.

> 1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?

They certainly can happen and do happen, but they are rare. I dislike plea deals in general, and they certainly need to be reformed.

My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial discretion or plea deals.

> Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.

If you are interested in criminal justice in the US, you should start communicating with prisoners. Your state department of justice will have a program that allows you to exchange letters with prisoners. Do it, it helps people to stay connected with the outside world.

I did that. I now think that prisoners definitely belong in jail, and that trying to reduce the jail population by just ignoring crimes is folly. However, we absolutely must _improve_ the jail conditions. A LOT.

And very few organizations are lobbying in this direction. Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is destructive, and it's not helping.

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