Pagers kill a dozen, injure thousands... Huh? Pagers?
If you know what a pager is, you're OLD. Or are a Hezbollah terrorist. According to the Washington Post (paywalled), Wall Street Journal, CNN, and just about every outlet, about a dozen people were killed and thousands reportedly injured.
See, kid, back in the stone age we didn't have supercomputers in our pockets acting as telephones, we only had telephones. They were a permanent part of a room. If you weren't home, nobody could call you. But if you were a physician, people need to call you. So they had "pagers", also called "beepers," that alerted you to call the office.
They're not supposed to blow up. This is James Bond stuff. Since the Israelis can listen in to every cell phone call in the area, Hezbollah needed a secure way to communicate, so used pagers. But who loaded them with explosives? How? Pagers weren't big, the explosive must be high tech.
What was 007's tech guy's name?
exploding pagers: actual cyber war?
I remember vague stories heard in the 90s about "viruses" that would take over your computer, then spin your hard drive so fast that it broke.
Then there was the history of stuxnet and the Iran uranium centrifuges.
Just now I saw this story about pagers (of Hezbollah members) exploding https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7xnelvpepo
I suspect a virus that does something to batteries, rather than traditional explosives.
if my suspicion is true... are we looking at a future where high-density batteries are too dangerous for regular people?
(Score: 5, Informative) by fraxinus-tree on Thursday September 19, @07:57AM (2 children)
While abused or low quality li-ion cells are capable of bursting in flames, the available cctv footage is nothing like. This is a high explosive without any doubt. Pictures of deformed but pretty much unburnt batteries also circulate.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @12:45PM
I'm willing to bet the Icom radios packed an even bigger punch, I think their kill number was over double for something like 20% of the exploding device count.
Apparently, this was supposed to be the opening move in an all-out attack, but the intel was at risk of leaking so they utilized the assets before they could be neutralized. Or, maybe the all-out attack is coming today.
Nevermind the body count, the psychological impact has to be devastating. They already scared them out of using cell phones, now this.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by cykros on Sunday September 22, @12:24PM
PETN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentaerythritol_tetranitrate) is what I've been hearing. A matter of anywhere between 1-6 grams depending on the device in question.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Mykl on Thursday September 19, @09:04AM (9 children)
[China madly taking notes...]
(Score: 1, Troll) by quietus on Thursday September 19, @12:21PM (8 children)
And ISIS. And ... about every bespectacled individual who has some beef with modern society. It's really not that hard to start an anonymous website reselling phones (good price!) you tampered with.
Like everything with the mass-murdering zealots of the Netanyahu regime: how fricking hard-boiled stupid can you be.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @12:46PM (6 children)
I'm waiting for the reading list where "fiction" authors described similar attacks in the past - perhaps as far back as the 1960s or earlier.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @12:48PM
Journalist reminds me with their headline: The Trojan Horse.
Old tricks, new wrappings.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Touché) by quietus on Thursday September 19, @02:46PM
Touché (no Tom Clancy?). You don't have to look to literature alone, though: there's Kingsman: The Secret Service [wikipedia.org] of 10 years ago.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday September 20, @10:19AM (3 children)
There was a (rather bad) science fiction book that came out maybe ten years ago that had a similar plot idea only it was neural implants that were made to explode in selected members of the population.
On a very large scale. A good bit of the book was then devoted to the problem of how you get rid of several million tons of rotting flesh.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 20, @02:12PM (2 children)
Been done before... Flame pits. You still need one working body per every 20 or so corpses per day.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Friday September 20, @02:21PM (1 child)
In this one they killed something like half the world's population at the same time. Can't remember all the details because I switched to skimming and then stopped reading what read like a 13-year-old's attempt to cross dystopian science fiction with James Bond.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 20, @04:15PM
Sounds like somebody saw Avenger's Endgame...
Yeah, if the half are kinda equally spread that shouldn't be much of a problem at all, if they're all in one hemisphere that's a harder mess to clean up.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 22, @02:11AM
Hezbollah level stupid apparently.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday September 19, @09:57AM (3 children)
It is alleged in the linked story that the boobytrapped devices were to be part of a first strike by Israel, but had to be detonated prematurely.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AnonTechie on Thursday September 19, @10:33AM (2 children)
This provides a more detailed account of the story:
How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers [nytimes.com]
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by choose another one on Thursday September 19, @11:22AM (1 child)
article seems very short with little detail - maybe the meat is behind paywall?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19, @01:50PM
Maybe... [archive.ph]
(Score: 1, Redundant) by VLM on Thursday September 19, @12:01PM (12 children)
A lot of strange mythmaking going on in the media about this story.
Pagers are infinitely easier to monitor than cellphones, its amateur level to run a POCSAG decoder for some decades. Monitoring phones is harder, although its pretty easy if you have total control of the phone company providing service, then its pretty easy LOL.
Regardless, sending numeric codes or whatever isn't that much more secure over pagers than over phones.
Possibly they had the idea of flying under the radar, security thru obscurity, but its pretty obvious whats going on if everyone has a pager during endless police roundups and it was obvious enough for the bad guys in this story to do a supply chain attack and stick explosives into modified pagers.
Before MultiSync monitors but after high(er) resolution video cards, it was quite possible to send a video mode that would push an already overheated already almost burned out monitor over the edge. I'm not sure how intentional it was; "lets put up a 'you are powned' screen when someone gets infected and their video card supports 1024x768 so we'll send that" but their monitor does not support that refresh rate and burns out. Its just more fun to blame the "hackers" if a virus does it versus blame the victim if they do something moronic when configuring Lotus 1-2-3 to display business graphs, the monitor is just as dead either way.
Generally, "well made" "clean/not overheated" "not worn/abused into almost failing" monitors will not fail, at least immediately, if fed bad signals, but its kind of like RS-232 which per the spec is bulletproof and per the "lets save a couple pennies" businessmen who make/made cheap stuff, I assure you RS-232 is not bulletproof and can easily burn parts out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Thursday September 19, @12:08PM (6 children)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Thursday September 19, @12:18PM (4 children)
Hmm that's a good point, someone should warn the good guys that small GPS trackers are small, so something marketed as one-way probably isn't in the 2020s.
The battery only lasts half as long as it should because a smaller one was installed with the tracker could be explained away as "used/old goods".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 19, @12:46PM (3 children)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday September 19, @01:25PM
Its actually worse than that, they should x-ray everything at the dental office or whatever because its WAY to easy to insert a tracker or wireless mic or who knows what.
Another failure mode is not having technical infosec people in the decision making process. They're one-way, ideally, if not physically hacked. Well... you do know they all have a trackable serial number and even a semi-trained cop can write down the serial number? Or there's all kinds of crypto analysis schemes oriented around traffic analysis, the guy who pages a bunch of people as a "staff meeting" every Monday morning and then they all page him back hub and spoke style, you don't need to break their "advanced crypto" or even hack their devices to figure out that guy at the hub of the hub and spoke of traffic is the big boss.
Something to think about WRT the bombing campaign... We know our media is captured and providing propaganda for the other side. And the side being attacked is at least semi-competent at military/infosec stuff. This is basically an anti-civilian terror campaign, isn't it? Like a "nits make lice" justification that any random civilian who gets blown up must be a terrorist for the opfor, at least according to the propaganda? Meanwhile use the propaganda to try and turn the civilians against the opfor using the classic "look what the bad guys made us good guys do to you, our opponents must be really bad guys so you should hate them because of what we did to you" Some analogies to the USA civilian casualties of the war on drugs.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday September 19, @02:39PM (1 child)
Why? Booby trapping these is a war crime. And depending on how the messaging is being handled just intercepting the messages might not get them anything.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday September 19, @06:01PM
Keep in mind that they went to pagers in the first place because they were being targeted through their cell phones. That meant that they had a foe who had already demonstrated an interest in targeting them through their electronics. Explosives is unexpected, but they should have looked for electronics capable of surveillance or revealing location.
On it being a war crime [westpoint.edu].
[...]
Another possible source of illegality is the targeting. If the exploding devices were known ahead of time to be mostly in the hands of civilians, including civilian workers for Hezbollah, then that would be another crime.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @12:49PM
That, and an important figure in Hezbollah was taken out by a Mossad bomb in his cell phone not too long before they decided to stop using the phones and switch to "more secure" devices.
Supply chain attack writ large.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Rich on Thursday September 19, @12:42PM (1 child)
There's a lot of stuff that can burn out when someone has control over the firmware. I once had to replace a ULN2003 in a Disk II, probably because I left on the phases for the stepper when tinkering.
Now, from the same origin of hardware comes this story: https://www.folklore.org/What_Hath_Woz_Wrought.html [folklore.org] where Andy Hertzfeld sets a Silentype printer on fire. Now imagine an adversary's secret service is able to pwn the firmware of the receipt printers of one or more nationwide supermarket chains and set two thirds of a nation's food supply on fire at midnight.
I happen to have a few Seiko receipt printer mechanisms around, but I'm not going to sacrifice one to prove the point - but has anyone ever cared about firmware security of something as lowly as stupid receipt printers???
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by VLM on Thursday September 19, @01:37PM
See that's an engineering penny pinching thing. Nobody likes to pay for GeckoDrive (tm) drivers for CNC machines, but you could strike the stepper motor with lightning and honestly I think the Gecko would survive. Ironically they're "expensive" compared to cheap stepper drivers but incredibly cheap compared to CNC machinist labor hours, or lost revenue from shutdown time.
The idea of burning out a stepper driver by stepping "too much" is going a bit too far with penny pinching. But as you mention it, some places will do it to save a few pennies here and there.
Could have avoided that using TWO 555 instead of one. Or a really funny way to do it is drive a thermistor in parallel with the printhead and when the thermistor self heating gets "too hot" the change in resistance due to the heat messes with the transistor bias voltage shutting it off until the thermistor cools and likely the thermistor could be badgered into heating up faster than the printhead and cooling slower than the printhead, making it somewhat intrinsically safe. Although some idiot would probably install the printer in a restaurant walk in freezer because they're insane and thus set the printer on fire anyway. I am way too lazy to schematic it out, but I am guessing they could have gotten away with as little as a thermistor and two resistors, maybe only one additional resistor if they were sneaky... Theres many ways they could have done it. Maybe as cheap as bolting one thermistor onto the shared driver transistor heatsink so they're all at the same temp... But that would have cost like ten cents so just let the print head burn to save a few pennies LOL.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 20, @04:10AM (1 child)
What I had heard is that they used pagers because unlike phones they cannot be located. Phones all the time advertise their location to the phone network. Pagers are just receivers.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20, @08:25AM
Don't pagers listen to a subcarrier on local high-power commercial FM stations?
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday September 20, @07:38PM
Pagers don't transmit, they're receivers only with no reason or capability to transmit. There's no way to track you through a pager.
A Russian operative has infiltrated the highest level of our government. Where's Joe McCarthy when we need him?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday September 19, @12:15PM (2 children)
More weird disinfo. Take an electrical blasting cap from the 1800s up to today. Desolder the pagers vibration motor. Solder in the blasting cap. With the full and complete cooperation of the paging service provider market those pagers that were originally equipped with a vibration motor feature as only having beep functions. The fully cooperating with the bad guys service provider allows beep alerts to be sent ... until the "special" vibration feature is sent.
Trying to market something like an electric blasting cap as being "high tech" in 2020s mass media is weird.
They MIGHT have gone as far as using some sort of single chip microcontroller to detect "ringtones"-like support that some pagers supported. So in that part of the world they probably don't send out many hurricane or volcano warnings so the single chip microcontroller sniffs until it sees a hurricane warning come thru then it triggers the cap.
Reports of the pagers going off seem similar to the scare movie we had in the military along the lines of "here's how to use blasting caps but don't F around with them or you'll be sorry", it had a more military movie title of course, but that's the basic idea of the movie. You'll lose most of a hand but probably not die unless you're really unlucky level of "bang". Heres some stuff that goes bang, but wink wink nudge nudge don't do anything stupid while playing around with them, does lead to some injuries in the military, but it was probably safer than giving us humvees to drive around or even pocket knives to whittle with when we're bored which led to some minor lacerations. Even things like "diesel" immersion heaters were dangerous, you'd have bored GIs trying to make them generate the biggest bang or make them act like a potato cannot which was VERY funny until one would split open or someone gets hit by flying parts. ("diesel" in quotes because they're quite safe when fueled with diesel so naturally when looking for a good time we used gas, camp fuel/white gas, charcoal starter, all kinds of "fun")
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @12:51PM
>Trying to market something like an electric blasting cap as being "high tech" in 2020s mass media is weird.
Yeah, we've got politicians like that... anything to get their base outraged and afraid.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19, @01:32PM
There's one piece of history / prior art that I haven't seen mentioned yet-- IEDs (improvised explosive devices), from what I've seen basically a burner cell phone with the ringer wires attached to a bomb/fuse/blasting-cap. Call the phone, boom!
Not sure who invented the IED...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday September 19, @12:34PM (57 children)
Mossad has shown itself willing and able to use these kinds of tactics before. The most notable example is StuxNet, which by all appearances was aimed at wrecking Iranian uranium centrifuges.
And, frankly, if the target is a terrorist group that has embedded itself in a civilian population, this kind of attack seems far less of a problem for the rest of that civilian population than, say, anything the IDF would be able to do. Just comparing the civilian casualties from this vs what's going on in Gaza makes that very clear.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @12:52PM (56 children)
The psych component cannot be overstated. They're driving their enemy's confidence in communication systems back to 1800s level tech.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by loonycyborg on Thursday September 19, @01:23PM (52 children)
Still it's terrorism, which is pretty much always an act of desperation. Like Israelites know themselves that they won't stay there for long and attempt to take out as many Arabs as they can while they still can.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @01:51PM (51 children)
Targeting combatants isn't terrorism.
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(Score: 3, Touché) by loonycyborg on Thursday September 19, @01:58PM (27 children)
Some children had died during that attack. It was entirely untargeted. There's no way to know where booby-trapped pagers end up anyway. It's even more random than shahid suicide bombings.
(Score: 4, Touché) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @04:06PM (26 children)
None of which were targeted. i.e. collateral damage...
The beepers and radios were bought and issued by combatants for combat and combat support so the vary act of carrying and operating said equipment means losing your protected status even if you're a civilian. It's why you won't hear any legalese regarding the ambulance workers and paramedics who carried beepers and radios: They lost their protected status.
And again, there's also an "allotment" for acceptable collateral damage when targeting such legitimate targets. i.e. There's no hard figures on the "how much" is acceptable but considering this attack starts with 4000 combatants/combat-support being targeted, you're going to need to count dead children by the tens of thousands before you can even start a real conversation about the legitimacy of the attack.
A suicide bombings can be a legitimate attack provided the bomber is targeting combatants and is uniformed. e.g. Japanese Kamikaze attacks were legal.
What makes suicide bombings war crimes is that the bombers are targeting civilians and they're not uniformed. Well, that's also getting into the whole non-state armed groups issue which is actually relevant to both Hezbollah and Hamas but isn't to this particular discussion so I'll just leave a link here: https://guide-humanitarian-law.org/content/article/3/non-state-armed-groups/ [guide-humanitarian-law.org]
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(Score: 1, Troll) by loonycyborg on Thursday September 19, @05:54PM (25 children)
It's entirely impossible to ensure that it's actually true. When someone buys devices it's unpredictable what will they do with them unless they agree to particular course of action in a contract. And it's impossible that they explicitly bought devices from their enemy promising to that enemy to only use them for combat. Since there cannot be such contractual agreement then any ambulance workers also don't lose protected status assuming they had it. But it's a moot point since no way Israel military would care about such stuff if Arabs are involved.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Thursday September 19, @07:57PM (6 children)
True. However, to be "retained personnel" (religious figures, medical workers etc) you must not carry arms other than for self protection, and many medics and all priests, padres and other religious figures in uniform on the battlefield even forego that. If captured they keep their retained personnel status and are only there to carry out their ministrations to other prisoners. In the past Hezbollah has not respected this part of the GC and has been guilty of intentionally killing both. I don't know, but I imagine, that the Israelis might not always have also not observed this requirement of the GC.
As for 'civilian personnel', if they were important enough to operations to be given a pager or a radio, then they are not civilian personnel in the true sense of the term.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Thursday September 19, @08:01PM (4 children)
The point is a person doesn't actually become a combatant solely because they somehow got ahold of a booby trapped device made as part of this black op.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Thursday September 19, @08:09PM (3 children)
That would be for a subsequent court do decide.
The exact role of the person would have to be ascertained. However, the purchaser of the pagers and comms equipment was Hezbollah. "On 22 July 2013, the European Union declared the military wings of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization; effectively blacklisting the entity". They have also be given the same terrorist status by many Western nations. The decision to be made by the court would not be a simple one.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Thursday September 19, @09:20PM (2 children)
That doesn't mean that all Hezbollah's purchases, like for example cookies or toilet paper or smartphones, is automatically military equipment.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 19, @11:13PM (1 child)
So, you're suggesting that we should booby trap toilet paper?
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 20, @08:37AM
Well, I suppose one could apply a liberal amount of pure capsaicin oil to the paper...for more YouTube ratings, make sure no water is around.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @10:23PM
Technically a military doctor issued comms by a military hospital retains their protected status as long as they follow international medical ethics like providing equal treatment to all patients purely on medical grounds. They could even be issued firearms for personal protection when providing medical treatment under some interpretations though that's a bit disputed... Regardless, the problem for Jihadist organizations like Hezbollah is that their charters, which their members swear by, violate the very same medical ethics that afford doctors their protected status under international laws. e.g. If a Muslim and a non-Muslim need to be triaged, a Jihadists is obliged to prioritize the Muslim patient on religious grounds.
Of course, it's not like western armies are some angelic beacon of medical virtue. We just hack around the chain of command by also having medical officers pledge variation of Hippocratic oath and place them in military hospitals where non medical personal only admit soldiers so doctors aren't never conflicted about such issues... Well, it sounds bad but considering the military also trains doctors and they end up leaving and practice as civilians, it's still moral arrangement as the utilitarian medical ethics go I suppose. Now, prison doctors on the other hand... That's where the real problems begin...
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(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @08:21PM (16 children)
Equipment procured with military money is by definition military procurement and the act of shipping, carrying and/or operating it removes your protected status. It comes up a lot in maritime law regarding military shipping containers since there's special neutral carriers protections there to the effect that you can capture the shipments but must release neutral carriers and legitimate cargo instead of taking them as prisoners of war. However, there's no equivalent protections for land transport: If you're carrying, you're a legitimate target.
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(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Thursday September 19, @09:08PM (15 children)
Those devices aren't military equipment but rather ordnance used in the act. How they were procured is entirely irrelevant for personnel status because acquisition was done under deception and thus that deal is null and void and has no legal consequences.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @10:55PM (14 children)
"Your honor, how can my client be charged with trying to buy 10kg of cocaine when what he was really offered was 10kg of cocaine, a listening device and an arrest order? What's more, how isn't it entrapment to make drugs available for purchase without telling my client they're police officers and he'll be sent to prison? Obviously if my client knew he'll get caught he wouldn't have bought the drugs from the police!"
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(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Thursday September 19, @11:08PM (13 children)
But makers of those devices aren't police officers. They're terrorists just like militant elements of Hezbollah.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @11:50PM (12 children)
"But Your Honor the seller is clearly a criminal so the exchange of money for drugs was obviously illegal meaning my client never actually bought the drugs so how can he be charged with buying drugs?"
Anyhow, for what little the labeling is worth, Israel isn't designated as a terrorist organization by any UN member as of yet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_groups [wikipedia.org]
Which is actually probably just an oversight at least on Iran's part since they're fine designating the United States Armed Forces as a terrorist organization...
But yeah. Just a label.
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(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Friday September 20, @12:22AM (11 children)
I didn't say Israel did it and they didn't take responsibility for it. But definition of terror isn't based on which organization perpetrated it, rather on actions' nature. And I believe booby trapped devices are terror because it results in large amount of collateral damage and insufficient precision and whole op is designed to induce above-mentioned terror rather than to achieve any material wargoal.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Friday September 20, @01:16AM (10 children)
Well, lets do a few checks following Notable definitions of terrorism [wikipedia.org]:
Not innocent. Not random. Not to spread fear since the objective is to decapitate a military organization.
Combatants were targeted.
Not innocent. Not to intimidate but to gain military objectives.
Decapitation is a military objective.
Same.
Same.
Finally, for your rational:
The amount of collateral damage was minuscule and the precision was unmatched: 4000 mid-level enemy combatants and support staff were targeted and removed from the field of engagement successfully while only less than a dozen deaths total (civilian and combatant combined) were reported so far.
Overall, it likely was the lowest lethality, highest precision decapitation attack ever conducted and whomever came up with it should be receiving a humanitarian award considering the amount of collateral damage that would have been necessary to achieve similar results with any other form of attack.
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(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Friday September 20, @01:38AM (9 children)
Honestly I don't believe those numbers. What is the source? Hezbollah? Nobody else can really know. Most likely only some paltry of randoms were killed because Mossad or whatever other clowns that are actually responsible are only good at pretending to be busy. And this will cause only further escalation because it will merely make Hezbollah angrier resulting in larger scale warfare perhaps dragging in some other Arab countries.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday September 20, @04:11AM (5 children)
You could use that same argument in any war. There are times when action, however distasteful or undesirable it might be, is necessary. This is not a spur of the moment reaction. It has taken several years for the fake company to be set up and to win the contract for the provision of pages (and possibly radio equipment too?).
You have to remember that Hezbollah has already driven thousands of Israelis from their homes. It is not as if Hezbollah are just sitting on the sidelines but not participating. That does NOT mean that I support every Israeli action but, in this instance, I think that their action is both limited, effective and justified. From The Atlantic on 19 Sep 2024 [theatlantic.com]:
I think that the Israeli forces have been too heavy handed in their treatment of Gaza, but I can understand their perception of the threat that they face from the Arab world. It can be difficult when one has neighbours who have sworn to remove your people from the face of the earth. I can also understand why various Arab nations and groups feel aggrieved with the current situation too.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Friday September 20, @11:06AM (4 children)
I think state of Israel as it exists today shouldn't exist at all. Originally it was just a territory arbitrarily transferred by Great Britain for Ashkenazi migrants to settle on and govern as a fief of their own. Currently living there people weren't consulted. And it's unlikely that creation of this state as it is would win a referendum among people. So only sane choice is to rollback it all. The only way to actually solve this conflict in Israel's interest is to exterminate almost all Arabs so they'd become a minority like american natives. Because they will never accept of someone just settling over them.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 20, @12:23PM (3 children)
Well, if you actually look at your history, things started out with Jews actually purchasing homes from Palestinians. Money paid, home transferred, everything legal just as it is done all around the world. The first shots in the war against the Jews (or against Israel, choose your term as you see fit) were fired by Arab/Muslim/Palestinians who had suddenly realized that there were a lot of Jews within the area. The goal was to prevent Jews from reaching 'critical mass' and having a political voice. However right or wrong you consider the UK's actions, the first Jewish settlers were doing things as right as possible.
I'll repeat, one more time. There aren't any good guys in the conflict, but, most definitely, the Arabs started the open hostilities. Today, the Persians fund the hostilities, while Muslims of every flavor gleefully take Iran's money, and keeps the war against the Jews going.
More, that war is not limited to Israel and Palestine. Jews in several mideast countries have disappeared since WW2. Many Jews have been killed off, while many more have emigrated to Israel, or to western countries. Jews are unwanted in Islam, so the ethnic cleansing goes on.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Friday September 20, @12:51PM (2 children)
Jews and Arabs are both semitic peoples. Actual middle eastern Jews are culturally closer to Arabs than to Europeans. Many of them could have just stopped calling themselves Jews and start calling themselves Arabs because of Jewish ancestry suddenly becoming contentious due to UK's actions. You can't take at face value any stories on who "started" it for obvious reasons. But as condition of ending it disproportional political power of foreign minority of Ashkenazi should be eliminated.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 20, @04:56PM (1 child)
Islam recognizes Muslims, Jews, and Christians, all others are dirt. So, if Jews threw off their Jewish identity, but didn't convert to Islam, they would be dirt, to be wiped off the face of the earth. Not much change from what they "enjoy" at present. Better to pay the jizya tax, than to be outright killed, I guess. Unless, of course, we suddenly endorse forced conversions to Islam.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Friday September 20, @06:58PM
Many if not most people are now very secular minded. Middle east isn't much different in this regard. Religion isn't as relevant as you'd think anymore. So someone with Jewish ancestry becoming a non-believer Arab nationalist isn't impossible. And people changing religion for practical reasons isn't new. For sure, many changed to Christianity under similar circumstances too.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday September 20, @08:04AM (2 children)
AP were quoting Lebanon's Health Ministry I believe it was? Last I checked it was around a dozen deaths for the beepers and another two dozens for the radios. People are still going in and of ICUs so the numbers will rise.
Hezbollah firing rockets on Israel daily and Israel mass evacuating tens of thousands of its citizens to the south was already sufficient cause for a full scale war in Lebanon. What kept the situation from escalating was various US assurances and time tables that have long since been breached. The US and Israel are frustrated since it's obviously going to be a bloody pointless war since there's nothing to gain from fighting a terror group in a failed state that you can't really finish off since there's always going more poor dumb people to refill its ranks. However, it doesn't change the fact that Israel is under attack and has to at least move the conflict to its enemy's territory by pushing into Lebanon to capture the hill tops and begin a wide and long campaign of retaliatory bombardments across the entirety of Lebanon against rocket fire targeting its inland.
It's dumb and bloody but that's what you get when neighboring failed economies regardless of where you are in the world.
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(Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday September 20, @08:15AM
And, if anything, the Lebanese Health Ministry are either being truthful or will be exaggerating the numbers under pressure from Hezbollah. I don't think it has happened yet but I would not be surprised if there is a significant jump in the number of women and children who are claimed to have been injured or killed as a result of this action.
It is a standard technique for getting world opinion on to your side.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Friday September 20, @10:51AM
So this data tells about no more than 50 total casualties and their relation to Hezbollah unknown.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 22, @05:17AM
The ensuring doesn't have to be perfect in order to be compatible with these laws.
Or their actions are predictable.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @02:12PM (21 children)
This is a tough one to call... Hiroshima and Nagasaki definitely targeted more, and a higher ratio of, non-combatants than the pager attack, but the pagers were far from perfect sniper shots. To argue the other side, the cities themselves were running war material factories, so arguably a lot of those "civilians" were rear-area combatants too, but how would the US respond if a suburb where many Nellis AFB drone pilots go home to sleep were attacked in the middle of the night?
War is messy, and I'm guessing that our local library's checkout system-down this week is more collateral damage from one of the two-three major ongoing conflicts throwing cyber-attacks around at the moment. Not being able to use the self-service library checkout kiosk isn't quite the same as having your child's face blown off by an exploding pager, but it's collateral damage nonetheless.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @07:58PM (18 children)
Snipers aren't deployed in the range. They're deployed in urban warfare where 1:2-10 combatants to collaterals ratio is expected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualty_ratio [wikipedia.org]
The current reported death toll (combatant, support and civilian casualties) is ~12 with only a couple of identified civilians so far. Statistically ass-pulling, for every civilian casualty caught in the vicinity of a detonation, I'm guessing there's gonna be an extra Hezbollah member or two sharing a free limb amputation reservation with their buddies that isn't going back to active duty. And seeing how beepers aren't handed out to grunts but to mid-level command and support, we're probably looking at one of the most successful decapitation attacks in recorded history. On top of all that, seeing how Israel isn't following up with a ground assault just yet, there's probably a shit ton of intel hoovering going on around the hospitalization records and phone calls that will lead to a targeted bombing campaign that should limit the real civilian casualties even further. Though, of course, like in Gaza, the media will just contort the story to whatever they want to promote so it will be a good decade or two before military historians will actually start covering all of this with any semblance of accuracy.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @08:48PM (17 children)
>it will be a good decade or two before military historians will actually start covering all of this with any semblance of accuracy.
I agree that it will be many years before the politically colored commentary and stats spins die down and give way to more fact oriented story telling.
I am not so sure that military historians will ever get a handle on the unbiased facts. History is written by the victors, it's hard to get enough facts to eliminate bias during the events, harder years later.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @11:16PM (16 children)
No such thing as unbiased facts outside some instrument measurements. Closest you get is averaging out the different stories against various physical facts to rule out the obvious lies. Fortunately, in this petabyte storage social media ladened age, future AIs will hit the sweet spot between facts and fiction where the meatbags formerly inhabiting the globe were still an open book for all machines to see and laugh at.
Aha, the golden years of fleshy comedy... May the idiocy never cease.
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @11:45PM (12 children)
> various physical facts to rule out the obvious lies
Agreed, to an extent. For counterpoint illustration, watch "Denial" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4645330/ [imdb.com]
Facts can be cherry picked to support a particular view, even "obvious lies" - which in some cases the various sides of the story's storytellers consider each other to be obviously lying. As a "neutral" third party, you can sometimes tell which one(s) are clearly delusional, but sometimes the picture isn't so clear.
It's not unusual for both sides of a conflict to be racist, genocidal hate mongers...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday September 20, @12:39AM (11 children)
Mongering hate seems to be a prerequisite for nation building as far as my limited reading of history is concerned. The trick is not overdosing and getting all genocidal about it...
Regardless, Russia is managing to fuck things up on much less historical tensions and short term resource constraints without serious retconning attempts. So I suspect historians will not need much to take a fairly wide perspective on the period when putting things into context. Well, the glass glazing of much of the region should also help promote neutrality and preservation of historical facts... But no spoilers!
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 20, @12:56AM (10 children)
Russia looks to me like a cautionary tale as to why the US should stop pursuing Reaganomics ASAP.
Having said that, kudos to the Reagan administration (not really the man himself) for their little decade of economic brinkmanship that put a pause on Cold War without shots fired - I was actually impressed with what they pulled off in 1989/90, and the people I met behind the former Iron Curtain in 1990 were very happy (in most respects) with the change in their circumstances.
But, here they go again, Afghanistan wasn't lesson enough, now they insist on continuing the occupation of Ukraine basically against all of NATO's economic engine, and it's spilling into their homeland, not that that ever bothered their leadership before... It's mysterious to me how they continue to keep the peasants in line when so many of them have internet access?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by RamiK on Friday September 20, @01:19AM
Literally everyone in the world are wondering the same thing about Trump voters... Well, those that aren't wondering the same about Harris voters...
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(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday September 22, @05:22AM (8 children)
Russia no more pursues Reagonomics than you do.
I guess, low standards?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 22, @12:58PM (7 children)
I never said, or implied, that Russia pursues Reaganomics.
I very nearly stated: continued pursuit of Reaganomics in the US is leading the US to be more and more economically and politically structured like modern day Russia.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Disagree) by khallow on Sunday September 22, @08:44PM (6 children)
Very well.
I think that's nonsense just the same. First, that Reaganomics was ever more than rhetorical to justify some tax cuts.
My take is that at the time that Reagan took office, there was a serious and growing regulatory/taxation burden on business that he did help to ease. But it just move things modestly to a saner balance with most of the problems remaining in place (such as the enormous regulatory burden from the EPA and other agencies, war on drugs, health care/education dysfunction, entitlement demographic imbalance, and dysfunctional government operations (particularly in the military and research/exploration). Aside from that, not much else happened due to the alleged Reaganomics.
Second, there's been no movement [taxfoundation.org] since. The wealthy pay about the same share of their income now as they did in 1988. And the regulatory burden just keeps increasing.
In the Russian situation, it's basically a lawless society moving to a different lawless flavor - from Orwellian totalitarianism to kleptocracy and perhaps on its way back to Orwellian totalitarianism. In the Reaganomics scenario above, what's supposed to support the move to to alleged Russian-like kleptocracy?
If it were me, I would suggest things like society-wide entitlements that encourage a view of the US government and society at large as a giant piggy bank ripe for the breaking.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 22, @09:05PM (5 children)
>basically a lawless society
So, none of that pesky regulatory overburden?
No nosy inspectors keeping, oh say Boar's Head meats from poisoning their consumers?
>to Orwellian totalitarianism.
And who promises to be a dictator on day one? Not that the senile ramblings of a spinless front man mean much, but it is a new political direction for presidential political rhetoric in the US, IMO.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 22, @09:35PM (4 children)
Here, have some polonium tea while you think about the difference between a lawless society and a lawful society that just doesn't give JoeMerchant obsessions much shrift.
I consider you in that category too. Any democratic society has a bunch of budding tyrants who would be real problems should we give them enough power. The solution is don't do that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday September 22, @11:33PM (3 children)
>have some polonium tea
CIA / MI6 / DGSE do much the same but are better at their craft, maintaining plausible deniability.
KGB (or whatever they are called lately) and Mossad act a bit more above board / out high window, because they want to reinforce their authority with a bit of terror / intimidation. The kind of thing you might expect the US to return to with powerful oligarchs and corporations.
>that just doesn't give JoeMerchant obsessions much shrift
Yeah, that's hardly even a good school shooting worth.
>The solution is don't do that.
November is supposed to be close, one option is driving hard in that direction.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday September 22, @11:59PM (2 children)
While somewhat true, what does it have to do with the US's alleged propensity for Russian-style kleptocracy?
Which is true, let us note. Not really much to complain about.
Time to vote third party.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday September 23, @12:37AM (1 child)
>US's alleged propensity for Russian-style kleptocracy?
The men and women behind the curtains will be "getting the job done" when necessary, but you aren't even maintaining a semblance of democratic rule, you can expect the scary stuff to stop bothering with discretion, circumspection, or restraint. In the 1990s our little company went up against a much larger one, and won, and the dark joke was to watch out for guys with baseball bats coming to whack us in the knees in retaliation / as an incentive to back out. In Putin's Russia that's no joke, it's a reality that prevents competition from less powerful players.
>Not really much to complain about.
You been eating a lot of lead laced cinnamon, or is that just leftover damage from your lead in gasoline upbringing?
>Time to vote third party.
Ineffectual as always.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday September 23, @12:37PM
Jokes? Hypothetical Hollywood-style spooks? How about something relevant instead?
Since neither happened, I guess that means you got nothing again.
Narratives about imaginary problems don't help us here. I think there's several things going on that you're missing. But here's the big one. You just don't get how ridiculous regulation is in the US. For a recent example, we have the FDA completely revoking standards for frozen cherry pie [federalregister.gov]:
It's the Biden administration. Why in the world would they reverse regulations meant to protect us from the evils of nonstandard frozen cherry pie? Because those regulations were stupid and mind-bogglingly selective. No other pie was subject to this or similar regulations. This was a freak outlier that targeted only cherry pies and only if they were frozen.
Let's consider the timeline (taken from the above link) of this regulation to get some insight into the problem:
This is the shit I'm talking about. Pointless rules that hang around for more than half a century and take two decades to remove. And we're creating more of this every day - faster than you can read it.
Until it's not. It's already happened once before with the Republicans. It can happen again. And even if we accept that the new party or parties will settled into corruption again, it still leaves the window open for reform. For example, when the Republican party established itself we ended slavery and picked up over the decades universal voting rights for all adult citizens in the US ("universal suffrage" in the lingo). So even though the Republicans settled in as the Evil party (or was it the Stupid party?), they made major, positive change in the process. We wouldn't be better off, if the Whigs were still kicking around.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @11:47PM (2 children)
> future AIs will hit the sweet spot between facts and fiction where the meatbags formerly inhabiting the globe were still an open book for all machines to see and laugh at.
Garbage in, garbage out is my philosophy, and those petabytes are mostly garbage. You'll be able to infer what people were feeling, but facts? Maybe the machines will eventually be able to identify facts, but I bet they'll also be calling pervasive collective hallucinations facts for a long time to come.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @11:54PM (1 child)
Sheesh let the toasters spend a few millisecond musing on the human condition before spoiling the ending like that!
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(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 20, @12:07AM
Why wait: 42. Now, what is actually the question?
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday September 19, @08:00PM (1 child)
International war crimes / conventions were essentially created due to the atrocities of WWII. Pre-WWII things were more or less based on the honor code. Things were different in the old days. Also, you want to look at atrocities against civilians, there's plenty to find when look at the history of the Catholic church as well. Still, it wasn't until things started trending towards globalization of businesses, etc. that we started finding ways to police the entire world.
WWI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce [wikipedia.org]
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @08:51PM
WWI and the subsequent flu epidemic was a lesson in the insignificance of man's efforts compared with nature.
By the end of WWII we were demonstrating our improved abilities to wipe each other out to a degree that makes global pandemics look trivial by comparison.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 19, @04:55PM
Terrorism isn't about the target, it's about the goal. If the goal is to cause panic and fear among the population, that's terrorism by definition. This was most certainly a terrorist operation.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday September 20, @07:47PM (2 children)
They're driving their enemy's confidence in communication systems back to 1800s level tech.
You're early, the first radio broadcast in history was on Christmas Eve in 1906. Reginald Fessenden, the first voice ever transmitted, was known as the father of radio.
Actually, more like the middle 1900s when the transistor was invented. A beeper would have been bigger than a shoe box with 1940s electronics and batteries.
A Russian operative has infiltrated the highest level of our government. Where's Joe McCarthy when we need him?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday September 20, @08:21PM (1 child)
Just to argue the point: what would have been available 1900s communication tech that Hezbollah can trust to use today?
Passing secret notes on paper is very 1800s... meeting in dark alleys... but telegraph, or Titanic era wireless spark gap transmitters, not so useful for a covert network.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Monday September 23, @12:04AM
Also easy to spoof and sabotage.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @01:47PM (7 children)
Not really a proper name per-say but he was refereed to as Q which stands for Quartermaster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(James_Bond) [wikipedia.org]
We didn't get a lot of John Cleese's Q. I suppose he was just too big for the role? Regardless, Cleese did however lend his voice to an educative piece touching on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-M2hs3sXGo [youtube.com]
Anyhow, I don't think lithium-ion batteries can be made to explode like that so reliably. My guess is that the batteries were switched to something more energetically dense that is usually avoided over safety concerns and an appropriate micro was embedded with a remote detention sequence. That waym even if someone were to open the package and inspect the circuit with a multi-meter there would be nothing to raise any red flags.
It reminds me the EU Battery Passport story from a few months ago: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=24/04/17/2022207 [soylentnews.org]
Considering the timing, I wouldn't be surprised if that regulatory push followed the self-destructive batteries entering into the arms markets.
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(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 19, @03:05PM (6 children)
What I've read suggests that 20 or 30 grams of explosive was packed into the devices, probably in contact with the batteries. Just a small amount of explosive, because there isn't a lot of room in there. You might expect that when the explosive detonated, the battery was also damaged, and lent more energy to the explosion, while causing more of a lasting fire, than explosive force.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @04:45PM (5 children)
A block of C4 is:
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-4_(explosive) [wikipedia.org] )
So, unless my late night eyeballing math is way off, cutting the length of the block by 30 like a Moroccan hash dealer to get some 19g, 1cm x 5.1cm x 3.8cm index-finger worth strips is probably too big to fit what little space remains in a beeper? There's also the issue of the thing being distributed for years so it has to be fairly stable (not much more explosive than c4) and having to go through the odd inspection at least through an xray or whatever...
That actually begs the question of life expectancy. Like, What if the thing was just nearing its end-of-life (battery or whatever) and started failing (spectacularly) so it came down to use-it-or-lose-it...
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(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 19, @08:05PM (2 children)
I've only repeated what I've read, I can't vouch for thee accuracy of it. I certainly wouldn't want the job of stuffing explosives into a pager, gram by gram.
My reading suggests that all of those explosive pagers and walkie-talkies were imported only this year. A single lot of pagers from a single manufacturer was involved. I presume the same to be true of the walkie-talkies. Again, I can't vouch for the accuracy of the claims, I only repeat them here. The sources don't even agree with each other in all their details, but here is one from the Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/18/hezbollah-pagers-what-do-we-know-about-how-the-attack-happened [theguardian.com]
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Thursday September 19, @08:27PM (1 child)
Honestly no who knows for sure is saying but AP puts it between months to a couple of years seeing how long the shell companies were registered and operated: https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-pager-explosion-e9493409a0648b846fdcadffdb02d71e [apnews.com]
Regardless, 4000 terrorists walking around with explosives strapped around for even a year is bound to end up with one of them accidentally triggering the charge so if the timing ends up being "someone just went kaboom 20min ago so we either blow the lot of them now or risk them issuing an order to remove the pagers all over within the next few minutes" seems a plausible scenario to me.
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(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 20, @12:28PM
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-09-20/batteries-of-walkie-talkies-that-exploded-in-lebanon-were-laced-with-petn-lebanese-source [usnews.com]>
In the case of the walkie-talkies, the PETN explosives were inside of the battery packs. The battery packs exploded, not the radios. Some radios were undamaged after the signal went out, with the battery packs exploding instead. That probably doesn't apply to the pagers, the articles specifically talk about the walkie-talkies.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday September 20, @04:24AM (1 child)
The probability of all of them failing at the exact same time is astronomically small.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Friday September 20, @08:14AM
The scenario I have in mind is one or two beepers failing and being sent back to a repair shop where the operation would have been exposed which forced a quick use-or-lose-it judgement call as that would explain the lack of / delay in a follow-up ground assault.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by EEMac on Thursday September 19, @01:57PM (1 child)
There could be some good upsides to this. In the medium term, we may soon see devices with both:
1. Removable/replaceable batteries
2. A "go completely inoperative, unpowered, and stop receiving and sending data" switch
#2 used to be called an "off switch" or a "power button" but those don't mean the same thing anymore.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday September 19, @04:02PM
Obviously, only terrorists need such things. /s
If you carry one of those, you're gonna be on a list... If you even search for one of those, you're gonna be on a list...
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]