Using a Pager in the 21st Century

One issue he doesn't talk about is that the sender can never for sure know that the pager received the message.

At one point I was interested to know if there were versions of the paging technology (for some critical application?) that tried to solve this by issuing multiple redundant messages over some amount of time, and the pager ignoring the redundant ones after the 1st one had been received?

Also would be interesting to hear how the many companies "divided up" cities, etc. to create a network.

I remember there used to be some convoluted way of dialing into a pager service and keying the numbers/text that you wanted to be shown on the recipient's screen, but have long forgotten it.

A very important note: Pages are plaintext, they are not encrypted. Anyone with a radio can receive and decode all pages sent within reception range of that radio.

(which is evident when you read the article, but not called out explicitly)

This is a big deal for any use which involves private/sensitive/confidential data, as it can inform eavesdroppers about current issues, internal tools/architecture, personnel status, etc.

For example, do you want to know when a major cloud company is having an internal outage? Listen for pages which follow their internal notification format. Or maybe you want to know if a critical patient at a hospital is having troubles - listen for pages to their doctor. Does the military command center use pagers (I hope not) - that could be interesting too...

If your employer is using pagers, raise this issue to their security team (and share this great page showing how easy it is to eavesdrop). At the least, the pager messages should be as vague/simple as possible while still being useful. At the best...don't use pagers.

Pagers are already a poor choice - messages are delivered "with best effort" but there's no guaranteed sending, no receipt, no retries. If you're out of range (or signal blocked), the message is lost, and it's up to the sender to implement their own ack & retry system.

(I carried a pager for work for almost 15yrs)

> In the 90th

What does that mean?

The only time I've had to use a pager was to support a static data server for an investment bank (partly written by me) which was used by London, Tokyo, HK and NY. Being woken up in the middle of the night I could take (grumpily) but logging on to the bank's systems from home was a thing of Byzantine horror. Anyway, we re-wrote the scripts to page someone who would be at the desk in the appropriate timezone, and all they normally had to do was the classic "turn it off and on again" reboot of the server, or phone one of us in London in extremis.

I use a pager. AMA

I would like to use a pager-like device as a grocery shopping list. But a pager isn't quite what I'm looking for (I think).

Basically, I need a small device that can fit in a pocket, with a long battery life, a simple display, and a few buttons. Bonus points if it's cheap and easily hackable.

What are the options?

This article is great. I use a pager for work, as it’s the only device allowed in some sensitive areas. When it get paged while I’m out and about I get the strangest looks, like I’m some sort of time traveler.