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

Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

621–630 of 1001 posts

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#621

Post by shmatt »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #537

They must really be in desperate need for more conflict to keep their population at bay. For Netanyahu certainly conflicts come at a convenient time. First he tried to swing himself up to dictator like figure, taking away power from judiciary, tens of thousands of people go to protest. Then October 7 happens. Suddenly a war keeps him in power. Now that that has been going on, and hundreds of thousands are on the stre…

Unfortunately Netanyahu has gained and lost the prime minister position multiple times without wars. He's just somewhat popular. Between his first government in 1995 and today, people forget there were prime ministers Sharon, Olmert, Barak, Lapid, Bennet, just 18 months before 10/07 his opposition was in power. Did they not have any part of ignoring the preperations?

Even if he would have lost his position if 10/07 never happened, history has shown he always ends up back in leadership due to a million+ voters for his own party, and millions of votes for other religious and right wing parties.

People can rightfully hate them all they want, but he has the votes, and Israel doesn't have a limit on the number of times you can be prime minister

This is only half joking but the only "solution" to the Netanyahu problem is to replace the voters

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#622

Post by snird »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #537

They must really be in desperate need for more conflict to keep their population at bay. For Netanyahu certainly conflicts come at a convenient time. First he tried to swing himself up to dictator like figure, taking away power from judiciary, tens of thousands of people go to protest. Then October 7 happens. Suddenly a war keeps him in power. Now that that has been going on, and hundreds of thousands are on the stre…

[flagged]

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#624

Post by luckylion »

VerminOctopus1 wrote: post #259
harimau777 wrote: post #167

This seems like it would have the potential for a lot of collateral damage due to the possibility that modified pagers might enter general distribution. That is to say, how do they insure that a given shipment of pagers are only going to Hezbollah as opposed to some of them going to people like aid workers?

[flagged]

Killing everyone in Gaza would have certainly killed many of their targets. You claim they don't care about collateral damage. So, why haven't they?

Wow there's a lot of anti-semitism on HN lately, absolutely vile.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#625

Post by dyauspitr »

sbeam wrote: post #179

If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it. It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting. I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the devices perviously, or if the ones responsible had similar devices, and managed reverse engineer them and craft a payload to them, that could be sent…

I don’t think there’s anything in a standard pager to cause an explosion large enough to injure ~3000 people. This is almost certainly an explosive added to them at some point.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#626

Post by nashashmi »

mmastrac wrote: post #365

That's an impressive supply-chain hack. Spend years showing how insecure modern telecom devices are and scare your enemy into going old-school, receive-only. Set up a shell company to sell pagers to your enemy's shell company. Give them devices implanted with a small explosive charge pointed inward, knowing they will be worn around the waist most of the time. Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all th…

I dont think you have to hand it to them. I just think that they have to know who the people are. And a code has to be uploaded to the pagers that cause the explosion.

There have been several presentations on this before. It was for old cell phones.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#627

Post by nashashmi »

kranke155 wrote: post #398
mmastrac wrote: post #365

That's an impressive supply-chain hack. Spend years showing how insecure modern telecom devices are and scare your enemy into going old-school, receive-only. Set up a shell company to sell pagers to your enemy's shell company. Give them devices implanted with a small explosive charge pointed inward, knowing they will be worn around the waist most of the time. Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all th…

Someone will eventually spill the beans on how it was done. They always do.

It is a well known hack.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#628

Post by dzonga »

bawolff wrote: post #400

Cant help but be reminded of that james mickens article about the mossad vs not mossad threat model https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf where he joking says that mossad will replace your cellphone with a blick of uranium (as a joke to imply you shouldnt worry about nation state actor type threats when building a stupid web app that nobody cares about, because its impossible)

one of the best things I have read this week. thanks

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#629

Post by ertian »

anovick wrote: post #579
zelphirkalt wrote: post #537

They must really be in desperate need for more conflict to keep their population at bay. For Netanyahu certainly conflicts come at a convenient time. First he tried to swing himself up to dictator like figure, taking away power from judiciary, tens of thousands of people go to protest. Then October 7 happens. Suddenly a war keeps him in power. Now that that has been going on, and hundreds of thousands are on the stre…

[flagged]

Populations tend to unite when confronted with an immediate hostile threat. George Bush's popularity shot from 50% to 90% overnight after 9/11. There's always a sense that "we need to solve this before we get back to our infighting". I mean, that's an argument for why Hamas attacked in the first place (and tends to attack periodically): to keep the Palestinian population united behind them, if only out of fear of Israel.

I doubt the commenter meant it as an antisemitic attack.

Re: Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

#630

Post by anewguy9000 »

sbeam wrote: post #179

If we try to do what we are best at here at HN, let’s focus the discussion on the technical aspects of it. It immediately reminded me of Stuxnet, which also from a technical perspective was quite interesting. I already wonder if this was anything that was planted in the devices perviously, or if the ones responsible had similar devices, and managed reverse engineer them and craft a payload to them, that could be sent…

we could also talk about the technical aspects of the nazi gas chambers, but maybe its only human if first we condemn this for what it is, a war crime. i for one am sick of the normalization of it
Post reply on HN