Hezbollah pager explosions kill several people in Lebanon

Has anyone actually found and documented one of these bugs?

People have used all sorts of abbreviations for the SI prefixes and SI units for as long as I can remember. I want to ask—are people not taught this in school? I had multiple introductions and revisions of the SI units and SI prefixes in secondary school, pre-university, and university, and every time, a wrong prefix or a wrong symbol was penalised by half a mark per question. I had classmates who mixed them up regularly and lost something like seven marks each time. They learnt very quickly not to, as those seven marks could make one or two grades' difference.

As someone who champions sole use of the SI units, this annoys me to no end.

I've seen things like 'kgs', 'gm', 'gms', 'mtr', 'mt', 'K' instead of 'k' (note capitals) for 'kilo-', mixing 'm' and 'M' (which are supposed to mean 'milli-' and 'mega-' respectively), usage of 'u' instead of 'μ' for 'micro-' (the one exception I will concede is 'mc' in the medical field, because people apparently confused 'μ' and 'm' which results in a 1000× over/underdose), and don't bother with the degree symbol (Alt+numpad 0176 on Windows, Option-Shift-8 on macOS) for °C, or use °K for kelvins (there is no degree, as it is an absolute scale and not relative to anything else, unlike the Celsius/centigrade and Fahrenheit scales), and so many other typographical errors.

Well, pagers are not military products. And second, except for ordnance, you don't need any license to manufacture any product.

For products that can have dual-use capabilities, you need an export license that is given per customer (at least in the EU) where some due diligence is performed. If the company is a reseller in Lebanon and there are no export bans for that country, they can be sold/bought without an issue.

The fact that somewhere in transit they were modified, the manufacturer or seller cannot be held liable for it.

> Israel not only pushed them into the middle of a war that is not their war, without their consent or knowledge;

Weren’t they already selling pagers to Hezbollah? It seems like they were already in the war as a supplier of goods to a terrorist organization.

I wonder if this is why Israel made this move because the manufacturer was already breaking international sanction by supplying Hezbollah so they have little recourse.

If I was the CEO of Gold Apollo, I’d be investigating why my franchisee was selling stuff to Hezbollah in the first place.

But it’s beepers and only 5,000. How expensive is this at the end of the day? It’s probably the last time a company lends then brand name for a small amount.

This stunt is great for Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions folks though. Here in the US, many states require fealty to Israel in the form of promising you won’t boycott them if you want to do business with that state’s government. Now there’s an easy out: no one is boycotting Israel, they’re just avoiding the liability of Mossad intercepting and tampering with a shipment.

They will fold. It’s Israel and Germany and France will push the EU to memory hole this.

This is the right answer.

Been a while since I did fmeca work but it used to mean different tolerances for the parts.

A type of people that uses pagers all day is Physicians. Hospital staff.

"military grade means 'from the lowest bidder', but can tolerate being a dropped a few times"

She purportedly got a PhD in London, UK. Now I do not speak English that well but to me this sentence "This cooperation entails scaling up a business from Asia to new markets e.g. developing countries" does not look correct. Is it...?

Anything before 2021 is not this company at least according to the Hungarian corporate registry.

Also, https://web.archive.org/web/20211210194900/https://www.bacco... this is interesting, it's 2021 Dec and yet, it has AI on the front page.

Its not just Hungary. There's a famous high street in London with a series of sweet shops (about 2 dozen) that are a very obvious front for a money laundering scheme. Allegedly the taliban or some other afghan crime ring).

I don't know why the authorities are ignoring them but it's probably such a big can of worms that everyones afraid to open it.

But can the manufacturer sue? Isn’t the normal way that the customer sues, because their stuff was damaged? Can the manufacturer sue me if I buy their stuff, modify it to be deadly, and sell it again?

(I don’t mean “can the sue me” but “do they have any chance of winning” of course)

Please keep the conversation somewhat technology related. Seething about Israel making a dunk on Hisbollah is more suited for Reddit or similar.

Its called war. Traditionally militaries have always despised spies but the results speak for themselves. No standard operation could ever have been so discriminatory or so effectively minimised the risk of collateral damage. Nor could they have disabled so many enemy soldiers so cheaply and most importantly of all, without putting a single troop at risk.

So nasty but effective. I think Israel should at least get some credit for minimising the risk of innocent bystanders getting injured. They could have made a bigger bomb.

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There must be some other ostensible purpose for a brand than "to make money". People who would buy the hypothetical Disney phone would have other reasons than "to give Disney money". Nobody has that as a goal when buying stuff.

I guess with QR-Code Menus, Smartphones replacing their tech almost everywhere, Starlink etc. they where happy to take any revenue.

Even if brands have died, companies admitting it is somewhat novel.

I feel like it’s reasonable to expect a brand to be aware if some organization, even Mossad, placed explosives in 5000 of their items.

It means this company is incompetent and should not be trusted. It’s one thing to have malware injected into software (pretty bad) and another to have physical explosives put into your product.

Why would you say that? Many everyday products are produced under license or franchise with the brand having minimal involvement in the entire process. Even if apollo had done qc in the factory it would be easy to trick them.

I suspect from a company perspective, it is all just different degree of relying on a supply chain. Any company that outsource production that goes directly to customers are relying on reputation and contracts, and the assumption that they can apologize to customers and change supplier when/if something goes wrong. I seem to hear that a common practice is to do random sampling in order to do quality control, but in terms of supply chain attacks it wouldn't do much good if the attacker is a state actor with the ability to create non-tampered version.

I think thats already happening in major ways due to online shopping where reviews mean more than brand for some imported goods. Brand names for consumer goods on my Amazon search results are often completely made up and often temporary.

What is the point of building a reputation if you can’t sell it later? /s

It sounds more like "tay" (as pronounced in English).

https://forvo.com/word/t/#fr

And it would hardly make sense to make a name for US market based on how it sounds in French.

A man in the middle redirecting to a fake web page could be enough to create an opportunity. I assume that in some countries hacking the internet could be still possible.

Or a terrorist could sell phones on the street for months, use them as sleeping devices, and wait until a big holiday or the super-bowl to spread chaos massively with minimum risk for him/her. So now we everybody need a way to be able to scan our devices and detect that risk ASAP. The Mossad still don't understand the mess that had created for every westerner by opening this door.

Just one quibble: Made in China doesn't automatically mean junk. Case in point: The iPhone. When it comes to Chinese manufacturing, they cater to all price points in the marketplace.

Is the target the relevant piece or is it actual impact? If you have a single military target who is known to use X brand phone, is it war to kill 5,000 people to get this one target? Is it not instilling terror on the people who use those devices?

It is this rationalization that enables powers to bomb civilians and ethnic groups under the guise of targeting military targets who stand no chance if they segregate themselves from the populace due to the power dynamics. And then the cycle only continues as each side adds fuel to the fire.

I mostly agree with you, but I also agree with a parent comment that part of that gray area depends on who's side you're on. For instance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings

That was a Marine barracks that was part of a "military peacekeeping operation". Granted, 128 non-military Americans were injured, but all of the dead people were military. The U.S. politicians labelled it terrorism.

Overall I agree. However, the difficulty that I see is when someone attacks a, sometimes nominally, military target in a situation or method where it will unreasonably injure or kill civilians. Or even when the military target is mostly an excuse to target civilians.

I think it can also get less clear when the target is an enemy's infrastructure, industry, or political infrastructure.

Who decides what is a civilian vs military target?

Fire bombing Dresden or Tokyo - terrorism, or war?

Nighttime Bombing a factory that produces ball bearings - terrorism, or war?

Fort Hood?

>On November 5, 2009, a mass shooting took place at Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos), near Killeen, Texas.[1] Nidal Hasan, a U.S. Army major and psychiatrist, fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others.[2][3] It was the deadliest mass shooting on an American military base and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since the September 11 attacks until it was surpassed by the San Bernardino attack in 2015.[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Fort_Hood_shooting

>These people should always wear military uniform and live in a separate neighborhood

That is on the table, yes. Otherwise, while they mingle with civilians, it's clear that the civilians are in danger. If I'm one of them, and I'm intent on persuing this action, moving to military quarters is going to come to mind.

Imagine one of those pagers, hip height, at a shop queue or bus stop. Or you're on a bike in traffic next to one of them.

Everything about this sucks. It absolutely is indiscriminate. It's different than droning a guy at his house and accepting his wife as collateral damange. This is 3,000+ maiming explosive devices scattered all about with no way of mitigating the collateral damange.

They didn't indiscriminately set off thousands of bombs in supermarkets and homes. That's not at all an accurate description of what happened. That would be terrorism.

They gave a terrorist organization the ability to give its most important operatives a bomb to wear. And then they detonated that bomb. That's not terrorism. It's about as targeted of an attack as you can imagine. Blowing up terrorists is objectively a good thing.

> these are both terror tactics, you're setting up a false dichotomy

Eh, there is utility to this attack beyond terror. Israel just simultaneously took out Hezbollah’s communications and definitively outed its senior members. Also, strategic bombing à la WWII wasn’t psychological—it was intended to wipe out the civilian population that worked in the war factories.

States engage in what you call terror tactics all the time, for legitimate military and illegitimate reasons. The clusterfuck with the Middle East is the sheer number of non-state actors. In Gaza, that’s complicated. But in Lebanon, it’s not—-the Lebanese state is widely recognised. Hezbollah is not a state, but it’s also not purely a political party.

What do you mean? You fire out the "detonate" command on the frequency used by Hezbollah - only pagers connected to that network blow.

It's statistically probable you'll overwhelmingly damage terrorists. Sadly collateral damage is inevitable in war, and this is far more precise than even a laser guided bomb.

Carpet bombing is a large area bombardment done in a progressive manner to inflict damage in every part of a selected area of land. (From Wikipedia).

In what way does the pagers attack resemble covering an entire area with a carpet of bombs?

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surely more surgical than what these guys were doing, which is repeatedly shoot missiles at densely populated areas, for months.

In comparison to bombing to smithereens the entire block, and having hundreds/thousands of people die under the rubble, some of them over the course of days - yes.

Do you know that 100 is more than 1? Some people get confused by simple arithmetic.

Stuffing explosives into civilian appliances is the definition of indiscriminate.

If doing this isn't already banned by the Geneva Conventions, it is only because it wasn't practical to do. But then again, very little that has happened in this region during the last 80 years has been following any international law.

> It's downvoted because it's the definition of proportional.

Two wrongs don't make a right... are we really at that level of brain activity on HN of all places ? this is schoolyard level

You can have proportional terrorism, proportional war crimes, proportional crimes against humanity. Proportionality doesn't tell you much, it certainly doesn't tell you anything about it being indiscriminate or not

> Certainly not "indiscriminate".

Cool, go tell that to the two kids who died: https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0918/1470609-hezbollah-israel/

Also feel free to read the actual texts defining these things, detonating explosives in supermarkets is indiscriminate by nature, there is just no way around it if you're in good faith : https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/customary-ihl/v1/rule12

Both sides are clearly operating out of the boundaries we defined for conventional wars, is it really that hard to accept ? They're not even trying to hide it really... such a strange allergic reaction to these basic facts

Am I misinformed, or was 3,000? They are the most senior 3,000? When you send out 3,000 explosive into the general population, how do you mitigate the collateral damage? I truly don't know the answers here. I'm under the impression that they all detonated simultaneously, so I'm keen to infer that there was very little thought given to civilians unlucky enough to be in the vicinity.

Man. Blasting off fingers and genitals is really something...

I know that this is rhetorical, but I'm sure an analysis of which country is least likely to leave you exposed to the issues mentioned above could be done. I suppose it also depends on who "you" are, and the threat of communications compromise vs drawing the ire of whoever Israel decides to attack through you. I'm sure there are plenty of countries that would rather be bugged by the Chinese or Iranians than be complicit in a way that opens them to actual armed conflict.

This is another danger of letting Israel swing its sword around without any sort of real condemnation from the US/West: the rationale for geopolitical multi-polarity increases in legitimacy. Pax Americana ends because allying with us doesn't save you from being used as a tool for ends like this. If speculation is correct that Taiwan is involved... Woof.

> Who do you want to be able to spy on you

I buy chinese IP cameras. China cannot block my bank account / employment / communications.

Swiss sounds reliable, but a Swiss communications company was also bought and compromised by the CIA since the 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

> US/EU/Israel

A bit of a false bundle there.

The two groups are more like US+Europe+China on one hand and 'misc' on the other. Most people get by without depending on the technology from the 'misc' group at all.

This kind of incident will hurt the Israeli tech sector individually, not some imagined US/EU/Israel tech grouping.

>> Unless you can spin up your own fab (hint: you can't) you're dependent on a hegemon. US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.

It's much easier to spin up your fab tech more so now -- than ever before.

"US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets."

I really hope you are wrong about the conclusion.

We’re all buying Chinese tech one way or the other.

I am not aware of chinese or iranian devices exploding and killing people. Spying is not worse than spying and killing. I do not get how do you get the conclusion that US/EU/Israel is as good as it gets if you are a random citizen not from any of these mentioned countries.

Yeah but if you’re dealing with hardware with any kind of Israeli involvement, do you really want to open every single customer unit to make sure one of the capacitors hasn’t been swapped for C4? I think that’s what the poster was indicating. At first I thought yesterday’s action was deviously impressive. Now I’m starting to think it’s actually shortsighted and bizarre. It’s a declaration of war on Lebanon, and obviously a declaration of a war they think they can win, but no good can come of this action.

Exactly. Our concept of sovereign states has become outdated by advances in technology. Up until maybe 1990 even second-tier countries could make just about anything indigenously. It might be a little worse and a little more expensive, but still good enough. Today only China and the USA are fully sovereign in terms of having the capability to build the full spectrum of electronic, communications, and military equipment. (We might outsource some of that to save money but the latent capability and capital reserves are there.) Even with nuclear weapons, India, Russia, UK, and France are only partially sovereign. Other countries can barely even pretend anymore, and their freedom of action will continue to evaporate barring some drastic realignment of the geopolitical order.

> Unless you can spin up your own fab

Huh, which fabs does Israel have?

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There's a big difference between spinning up your own fab and unscrewing the back of the pager to see if there's a bomb in it.

> US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.

I imagine China is just as good in pretty much every way.

China is the one major power that doesn't seem to engage in extraterritorial assassinations, so by default I'm more inclined to at least trust that the Chinese state won't ever decide to activate a kill switch against me.

> US/EU/Israel isn't perfect, but pretty much as good as it gets.

EU maybe, but US/Israel are as good as it gets? PRISM? Literally China/Russia are more trustworthy.

No wonder the U.S is so worried about Huawei.

And the US CIA ran the "Swiss" firm Crypto AG, which sold cable-encryption (as in telegraphic / telex coms) equipment with pre-installed back-doors:

<https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG>

There are many points on this grey line, and we often fail to recognise those in the middle. For example, between your two points is a very significant type of action that this one may well fall under: an attack on a military target that you are fully aware will result in significant collateral damage.

Many people fail to see this because they have an intact moral core. Conducting a military operation that has a fully predictable rate of civilian casualties is morally equivalent to targeting those civilians.

Israel has utilized a rate of expected civilian to militant casualties in Gaza at the rate of 100:1 [1].

[1] https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

What on earth would be more targeted than compromising pagers that only Hezbollah military is using?

At some point the criticism really gets absurd. There probably was collateral damage, yes. This is what you have to account for if you start wars against another nation. Repeatedly.

Opposite of targeted are the missiles that hit northern Israel.

In terms of collateral damage it seems much better than even the most precise missiles, though.

2000+ bombs hurting 2000 fighters and one child? I'd argue that almost no war is without collateral damage, but this one action might be uniquely low in the amount of collateral damage done.

> This is anecdotal and misleading

I saw 5 videos and in every case only the person carrying the pager was hurt. Even people less than a foot away weren't harmed. Look at the video on the front page of nytimes.com right now to see what it's like. Highly targeted at Hizbullah soldiers, no bystanders hurt. The exact opposite of "indiscriminate".

You're working yourself up into some righteous anger about this, which is fine, that's your choice. But at least recognise that that's what you're doing. You need a certain narrative to be true so you're twisting facts to suit that.