Links for Friday, September 27
Bought a cell phone lately? Wish you could open it?
Pagers, climate and a long goodbye to the Paris Olympics. Plus music of course, quite a lot of that. Enjoy.
Links
• Does the US have hacked-pager capabilities too? (Ken Klippenstein)
National security reporter Ken Klippenstein found this catch on Fox News recently:
This leaves unanswered the question of whether the U.S. helped. Seems unlikely, but in spook world, you never know.
File under “Swords that cut both ways.”
• Consequences of the Israeli Pager Explosions Attack (Ian Welsh)
The attacks were set up to be particularly nasty. Small ball bearings were embedded in the pagers. First the pager would buzz. The person would grab it, bring it up to their face so they could look at the screen, where they would see an error message.
Then the pager would explode. The most common injuries were maiming (the hand), terrible facial wounds, and eye-injuries. I don’t know what percentage caused permanent vision loss but I saw one interview with a surgeon who said he’d removed more eyes in the last day than he had in a career of over twenty years.
And according to Welsh:
consequence one is going to be a lot of people and organizations a lot less willing to buy Western equipment. …
File under “What can be done by one, can be done by all.”