Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The forgotten war on beepers

newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 405 posts

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#341

Post by themaninthedark »

hughesjj wrote: post #154
themaninthedark wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero tolerance policies are a direct response to discrimination claims. If you allow people to have discretion, then it will be used(and abused). Also some of the stories I hear about school in the 70's and 80's make me think that the current claim that "schools were always authoritarian and used to subjugate children to turn them into compliant workers" is probably BS. Probably current administration needs to justif…

> Zero tolerance policies are a direct response to discrimination claims. Source? Because if that's true, that's the wrong implementation of a great policy (anti-discrimination). That's basically saying "well instead of having a policy of reasonable punishment for a given situation, we'd rather be as extreme in our punishment as possible so that we can still hurt kids we hate"

From wiki on Zero Tolerance, specifically talking about harrasment:

>Various institutions have undertaken zero tolerance policies such as in the military, in the workplace, and in schools in an effort to eliminate various kinds of illegal behavior such as harassment. Proponents hope that such policies will underscore the commitment of administrators to prevent such behavior.

It leaves out how when we went into these things, there was outcry over administrators covering up harassment, showing favoritism, etc.

If there is a fight between 2 kids, one kid gets expelled and the other does not, this situation can seem unbalanced.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#342

Post by noodlesUK »

cdchn wrote: post #237
noodlesUK wrote: post #165

I’m sad that radio pagers are going away. They’re a much more reliable way of getting an emergency call out than a multifunction mobile phone. Their battery life is much longer and you won’t put it on do not disturb or silent mode. Being on a separate radio network also means that in a real emergency when mobile signal is degraded, the pagers still work. The other thing that’s convenient is that you can hand them off…

>They’re a much more reliable way of getting an emergency call out than a multifunction mobile phone. More reliable than a landline?

Real landlines are a rarity these days, most stuff is VoIP. In any case, I was talking about getting an emergency call to the person wearing a pager (as in the case of doctors or other on call people), not the reliability of calling 911/999/112/whatever. Any mobile device is going to be more useful than a landline in that situation because the doctor could easily be out at the shops or having lunch. Pagers were invented for that particular scenario.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#343

Post by swozey »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #138
munchler wrote: post #96

In the 90's, I was a project manager for a software consulting company. I carried a beeper onsite so my superiors could reach me when needed (e.g. to discuss growing the account). During a lunch meeting one day, two of my bosses at the consulting company suggested that I upgrade to a cell phone, like they had done. I said I was reluctant to do that, because I valued my independence and didn't want to be on a short le…

I had the same thought process in the 90s, and it is the reason why I still don't have a smartphone :)

This is always such a weird flex. There are so many things I use my smartphone for, 99.9% of which is NOT being a short leash for anyone to communicate with me. I can't remember the last time I had a conversation on my phone.

Spotify/Audible/etc in my car. Google maps/Apple maps. When I go camping I have overlanding/camping/blm apps that are constantly updated with openings, etc. Weather apps so I know to put the top of my jeep/car on to not get rained in. Uber/Lyft of which I use multiple times a week. Bank apps. Investment apps. Checking the news/hockey/whatever when I'm out and about. Looking up facts my friends and I argue over while knocking back beers. Checking to see if anyone has stolen/broken into my car. Launching my botvac. Controlling my AC from anywhere. Plex..

Everyone survived without them, sure, but everyone survived without computers for a long time and now they've given us massive convenience.

It's far more a computer in my pocket than a telephone.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#344

Post by exe34 »

qwerpy wrote: post #171
exe34 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about shooting a kid for having a water gun? Edit: fuck me, I was half joking and thought I'd check anyway. What a shit show. Latest case was 5 days ago. https://www.google.com/search?q=American+police+shoot+kid+wi...

Look at the water gun in question though: https://abcnews.go.com/US/traumatizing-family-calls-justice-... Still sucks that the kid got shot for it, but I can see the confusion, compared to the usual colorful water guns.

That's the thing though, in the civilised world, if you see something like this in the hands of a child, you'd assume it's a toy.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#345

Post by gruez »

1_1xdev1 wrote: post #294
gruez wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you just read messages from the Notification Center if you want to avoid it showing up as "read"?

But then anyone else that can see my phone screen can read them :)

You mean the message contents, or that you received a notification at all? On both ios and android you should be able to configure the notification so the contents are not shown, so it shows that there's a notification from whatsapp but not the message itself.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#346

Post by filleokus »

karma_pharmer wrote: post #106

It 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…

In Sweden the "minicall" network (POCSAG, ≈ 169 Mhz) is still active and in use by some niche industries.

I know of it being used for fairly mundane things like Grafana Alerts (or the equivalent), but in circumstances where you need to reach people in areas where cellphones are forbidden or lack coverage (like security sensitive data centers for example).

Snooping on that frequency band in ≈Stockholm it also seems to be quite actively used for sending machine-to-machine commands in some industries, perhaps not always that stringently authenticated...

Which I guess is a downside though, you need to take proper precautions in the "application layer" since the network is completely open.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#347

Post by worthless-trash »

kanbara wrote: post #307
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at our house. We decided early on that the phone was for the owner not everybody else. One of my sons even leaves it in a drawer, takes it out once a day to check.

“we” — you mean that you decided for your family, removing agency from other humans

If you can't decide what is better for your kid, maybe you shouldn't be a parent.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#348

Post by kotaKat »

ale42 wrote: post #299
karma_pharmer wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing prevents you from sending encrypted payloads over POCSAG.

Sure, you can send whatever you want... but is there any off-the-shelf solution that can display encrypted messages?

There are a bunch of POCSAG paging products that support their own flavors of encryption. Unication has a few that support AES encrypted messaging. You keyload it at the same time as the rest of the pager setup.

https://www.unication.com/alpha-pagers

And here's LRS's implementation of encryption on POCSAG:

https://paging-systems.readme.io/docs/encryption

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#349

Post by kotaKat »

lxgr wrote: post #337
karma_pharmer wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

GDB is just a branding for their own flavor of what they're selling which is Iridium Burst, which also appear to run on the 9602/9603 SBD modules, so... maybe Iridium Burst is just spicier Iridium SBD?

https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#350

Post by hobom »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #331
cubefox wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

FWIW, I thought he did pretty well and came away more convinced of his theses. For most of Tyler's alternative and let's say colorful explanations of the data, Haidt provided different sets of data and explanations that were more convincing. As a libertarian and techno optimist, Tyler seemed pretty biased, for example when he offered as an explanation for the plummeting mental health of teens at the exact time smartphones get introduced a random " maybe everyone's mood just got worse randomly". The only thing Haidt didn't refute that well was Tyler's (imo overconfident) assertion that teens will just use AI to summarize social media to them and spend more time with friends.
Post reply on HN