4 years ago by nemo1618
I looked into getting a pager recently; my plan was to disable my household internet completely for some number of hours per day (by plugging the router into a Christmas tree timer!), keeping the pager around for when my team needs to reach me in an emergency.
I was surprised to find that, as the article mentions, there's basically only one place to buy new pagers -- and they're quite expensive. After thinking about it some more, I realized that what I really wanted was a separate phone number that my team could send SMS messages to. And I didn't even need to build my own pager-like device out of a RasPi or something; I could just buy a cheap flip phone. Total cost for phone and 1000 SMS messages is <$100.
4 years ago by dqv
I wish someone would make a low powered cellular pager using an e-ink display, but then I realize only 3 people would use it. Pagers seem to be designed to actually wake you up if you get paged. I think the beeping hardware is different from the speaker hardware in cell phones. The vibration in phones nowadays seems weak.
The issues other people are describing with insecurity and lack of ack could also be resolved. The backend server that accepts messages could even support WCTP for backwards compatibility.
4 years ago by GekkePrutser
I would use something like that.
I'm thinking of building a Pager with the pygo2 once it finally hits the market: https://pycom.io/product/pygo2/
It's got LTE-M which is perfect for this, and LoRa and SigFox as backup. A year's service is about $40
Unfortunately it's not untracked like the old pagers were but in return it should do confirmations and even replies somehow. I'll have to add a beeper/vibration motor and a stronger battery perhaps but I think it'll work.
4 years ago by sneak
The other problem with a cellular pager is that it permits the network operator to know the device's approximate location whenever it is powered on.
4 years ago by kingsuper20
>Total cost for phone and 1000 SMS messages is <$100.
That's a good plan. Tracfone is roughly $10 a month for a smartphone, but what I wish existed was (a) a really cheap device and plan that was SMS-only and (b) people would only use SMS.
I'm damn sick of Fidelity leaving messages for no doubt wondrous investment advice and robocalls for appliance and car warranty programs. That's 99% of the voice calls that I get.
4 years ago by cheezymoogle
Here's a solution for $60/year, plus the cost of whatever budget Android device you want or have on hand:
A year of unlimited talk/text from Liberty Wireless (a T-Mobile MVNO) costs $60.^1 Then, use call barring/do not disturb to disable incoming calls and USSD codes^2 to turn off call forwarding. You now have a phone number that effectively only supports SMS.
I'd also recommend going with this plan if you are addicted to the Internet and just want a phone, but don't want to pay through the nose for something like the Punkt^3.
As far as only using SMS, sending/forwarding emails through SMS is doable (for now), so if your people's comms can be converted to email, you can use SMS for those as well.
Unfortunately, the naive solution of sending outgoing mail requires MMS (and therefore data), but you can send SMS to a Google Voice number, for example, which can be set up to forward a copy of the message to an email, which can then be used for triggering control events locally. YMMV.
---
1 - https://www.ebay.com/itm/174582899616
2 - https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/self-service...
4 years ago by mcny
Assuming you are in the US or want a US number, I recommend Google Voice and turn on spam protection.
While the SMS integration is going away soon, you will still be able to use (I think) SMS from within the app and while the terms of service disallow automation, my understanding is that is mostly only for outgoing texts (they don't want Google Voice users spamming the world) rather than incoming (I don't see why Google Voice would be against you doing whatever you want with the texts you receive).
I suspect the reason why carriers allow these spam calls and texts is they make money from all calls and texts and have no incentive to fix things.
4 years ago by peterburkimsher
"While the SMS integration is going away soon" - thank you for the warning!
https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/03/09/google-voice-wont-f...
I use SMS-via-email very frequently, and was rather worried. Thankfully that will stay.
SMS forwarding to a local number's SMS hasn't been possible for me anyway, because my local number is not in the US. At one point I had a setup with Google Calendar forwarding my emails to SMS, but that got shut down in 2019 (to my dismay).
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/11/19/google-removes-sms-notific...
4 years ago by alexjplant
Couldn't you just get a router running some type of *nix (pfSense, DD-WRT, etc) and accomplish this via cron? Maybe perform a dig on whatever API endpoints you still want to talk to (PagerDuty, Slack) then have a set of ACLs that only allows traffic to those on the WAN interface during your "blackout" period?
4 years ago by throwawayboise
Does this really seem easier than a simple timer?
4 years ago by sigg3
"When you have root, everything is a cron job."
BSOH proverb
4 years ago by xmprt
Probably not easier, but it is free and much more configurable.
4 years ago by nemo1618
This is peak Hacker News right here lmao
4 years ago by nemo1618
To elaborate on my snark, this doesn't work because:
- Whitelisting my messaging app means I'd still get pinged for non-emergency messages
- Enforcing the block at the software level makes it too easy for me to disable it when the temptation arises. My current setup forces me to walk upstairs, flip the switch, then wait multiple minutes for the router to boot.
It would also take a lot more effort to set up, and time is money!
4 years ago by jasonpeacock
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)
4 years ago by dmd
My employer (a large healthcare company) has been shown over and over that they're broadcasting PHI in the clear over pagers, and that this is bad, and their response every time has been "the paging company assures us it is secure". Evidence doesn't matter, only the word 'secure' in their contract with the paging company does, so it's "not their fault".
4 years ago by 77pt77
Worse. If you show that it's trivially insecure, you are now the suspect/perpetrator.
Never break these illusions. Keep your mouth shut.
4 years ago by WrtCdEvrydy
Even as the dedicated security contact whose job is it to test this shit, you will be looked at as a dickhead for pointing that we just spent 30k on something we can't use.
4 years ago by somedangedname
I once asked a med student why pagers continued to see use in a medical setting over mobile phones.
The response: doctors could use a phone to receive urgent notifications but the lower delivery guarantee for messages meant that they wouldn't be covered by their hospital's malpractice insurance for cases arising from late or non receipt of messages.
Not sure if true but could be a strong incentive to ignore security complaints.
4 years ago by tyingq
>Pagers are already a poor choice - messages are delivered "with best effort" but there's no guaranteed sending, no receipt, no retries.
They were pretty good towards the end of their reign when 2-way pagers came out. We were able to easily implement something where the system would keep paging you until you responded with an "I've got it" ack or a "Hand it off to the secondary" response, both of them an easy pick-list item.
4 years ago by mattowen_uk
When did we all become so paranoid?
Pagers used to be used by millions of people, in thousands of companies. 99.999% of the messages sent would have been utterly mundane. Stuff like 'call the office' or 'go to place x'.
Just like our chat platforms of today, the data just isn't that interesting.
Pagers were good for the era they were invented for, and at scale ended up being almost free to operate for the companies that used them.
Encrypting stuff requires CPU grunt that pagers simply did not have, especially when the driver was to have as long battery life as possible.
If anything, I miss that simpler era when we didn't have to assume that everybody in the chain was a bad actor trying steal our information.
4 years ago by klyrs
> When did we all become so paranoid?
One industry that makes extensive use of pagers is health care. Frequently, personal and identifying information (PII) is transmitted over pages. By all rights, this is a violation of privacy laws (e.g. HIPAA).
Why does a desire for privacy constitute paranoia?
Pagers aren't only a technology of yesteryear -- they're still in use by millions of hospital staff. Despite the availability of cheap & easy strong crypto today, the technology is still stuck in the past. I'd wonder why, but upgrading infrastructure is expensive and it will probably take a class-action suit to make continued privacy violations more expensive than upgrades.
4 years ago by mikecsh
>> I'd wonder why
I'm a doctor, and whilst I despise carrying a pager it does have some benefits over more modern alternatives in some scenarios.
Mobile (cell) reception in hospitals is generally very poor and wifi connectivity is also generally poor. Trying to rely on either of those to deliver critical communication (e.g. bleeps to the crash team to respond to a cardiac arrest) is more unreliable than the hospital blasting a simple radio signal that any pagers within a few mile radius will always receive and decode appropriately.
For less critical communications (e.g. where you might bleep someone to contact them to a refer a patient to their specialty) there is a (slow) move towards messaging apps or email. These solutions do not yet have the immediacy and reliability of a simple pager for critical applications.
4 years ago by undefined
4 years ago by Spooky23
We didnāt assume because of ignorance. Innocence lost.
Plenty of people were listening - thereās an archive from 9/11/01 that was released with many of the pages in lower Manhattan that day.
Police routinely monitored this stuff, and itās reputed that PIs, ambulance chasing attorneys, etc did the same. Was it relevant/meaningful to when my mom was going to pick me up from work at the mall was a page? Probably not.
4 years ago by tinus_hn
It used to be pretty difficult to capture, record and process all that data. Now you can do it yourself for next to nothing. And so can anyone else.
4 years ago by grishka
How much CPU does it require, realistically, to implement an asymmetric + XOR cipher? Each pager would have a key pair provisioned by the provider. The provider would generate a unique key for each message and then use the pager's public key to encrypt that and send it along with the XOR-ed message. I'd bet you could decrypt that on a weak-ass microcontroller.
4 years ago by ac29
Paging never really passed 1980s technology. Sure, its easy enough to en/decrypt short messages now with nearly zero battery use, but it was probably deemed unnecessary at the time.
edit: looks like someone bolted AES onto FLEX: https://americanmessaging.net/elite/
4 years ago by nixgeek
It has been possible to get encrypted pagers in the U.S. for some time now. This clearly doesn't mean everyone adopts it.
4 years ago by supernova87a
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.
4 years ago by markrages
> 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?
This is in fact how pagers work.
4 years ago by croes
"Thatās it. Itās a one-way communication, there is no confirmation sending back, the pager has only the receiver and no transmitter at all." Implies the issue of not knowing if the message is received.
4 years ago by rfdave
One of the last gasp paging technologies was two way paging, which included a slow return channel to confirm message reception.
4 years ago by walshemj
Possibly for older networks - the remining one in the UK does encrypt.
I used to have a basic pager in the 80's when I was on call for BT / Dialcom
4 years ago by samgranieri
My dad is a doctor and has had pagers the entire time, from the bulky brick one you can see Dr. Beeper using in Caddyshack to the ones youād see in this article.
Outside of work, Iāve actually had to page him a few times: my family has season tickets for Northwestern Wildcats football games, and he has the tickets. If I arrive to the game late, Iād need to call or page him to come down and give me the tickets. Itās not a problem when the opponent is a small school that doesnāt travel well, but when a school like Nebraska or Ohio State show up in Evanston, cell service goes to shit (imagine having 47000 people in a suburban neighborhood).
I page him and it works like a charm.
4 years ago by c22
I always thought it'd be cool if someone put a pager chipset into my smart phone so I could configure it to receive a page whenever someone was calling me and only connect to the cellular network if I wanted to take the call.
4 years ago by minimuffins
I honestly thought this was going to be about alternatives to less and more.
4 years ago by zabzonk
> 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.
4 years ago by vageli
It seems a typo for "In the 90s".
4 years ago by undefined
4 years ago by jedimastert
I'm guess they meant to say "90s"
4 years ago by undefined
4 years ago by bminusl
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?
4 years ago by dkersten
If you donāt mind a bit of work, you could look into one of the DIY smart watches on hackaday or whatever. Since you donāt need a watch form factor, that should give you a little extra room in terms of size or components. I found them a little too bulky as a watch for my taste, but they might work as a pager-like device.
4 years ago by bminusl
You reminded me of Watchy[1] (which I completely forgot about). It is a good contender.
4 years ago by swiley
This sounds exactly like an older palm pilot.
They used ram for persistent storage because the battery life was so long (due to a very slow dragon ball CPU and those dot-matrix displays.)
The palm III was probably one of the best hand-held computers ever made, if there were a way to put a modern modem in it to get texts I would probably use that instead of my phone.
4 years ago by madengr
I actually had a pager add-on PCB in my Palm Pilot. Worked great.
4 years ago by zestros
4 years ago by dudul
How about a small notepad made of paper? What would be the benefit of a "pager-like device" over it?
4 years ago by bminusl
> What would be the benefit of a "pager-like device" over it?
- Adding items remotely
- Automatic item sorting
- Pre-made lists
4 years ago by elliekelly
What about a raspberry pi + thermal receipt printer? You could have a way (or several ways) to add items remotely and automatically sort items and then print the list just as youāre about to head into the store. And with thermal receipt tape you could mark off that youāve got the item in your cart with your fingernail.
Daily digest email
Get a daily email with the the top stories from Hacker News. No spam, unsubscribe at any time.