Comment by tptacek
Comment by tptacek 3 days ago
Presumably Lebanese DevOps on-call isn't sharing pagers from a shipment to Hezbollah from Iran.
Comment by tptacek 3 days ago
Presumably Lebanese DevOps on-call isn't sharing pagers from a shipment to Hezbollah from Iran.
People who work in schools in Lebanon carry smartphones like everybody else. Pagers are obsolete. Some doctors may carry them because they work when the cell network is down, but they don't all re-up from Iran all at once. Hezbollah carries pagers because they're one-way devices that are hard to track, which is not a problem a Lebanese school teacher has with his Chinese Android phone.
What makes you think pagers are obsolete? When I worked at a big-three cloud provider (2016) we used them and it was a great fit for on-call requirements. I regularly find I don't have cell service when in large buildings, out in the woods, or even just random spots in US cities. The pager didn't have those issues, and helped us build highly available services. Does Fly use something different for on-call alerts?
A quick search shows the US Government/Army [1] and hospitals use them [2] [3] [4]. I'm not familiar with Lebanese wireless networks, but pagers are certainly still used for these use-cases in the US.
"Residents reported that they used one-way pagers for work-related communication more often than smartphones" (2018)
[1] https://gov.spok.com/contracts-and-agreements/
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10407125/
People still use pagers for specialty purposes, like being on call in disaster zones, or serving as a parallel armed forces in a country with a hostile neighbor who has infiltrated your cell phone network.
I've said this like 5 times on this thread and feel bad for continuing to repeat myself, but: Hezbollah operates its own telecommunications network. The Hezbollah pagers probably do not work on the normal Lebanese telecoms systems. This in addition to the fact that Hezbollah procures pagers for its service members; it does not go to the Cricket Wireless store at the corner of Mousa al Sadr and Kouds and pick them up retail a couple at a time.
Lebanon has incredibly unreliable cell service. Anyone who needs to receive messages in a timely and reliable fashion would have no choice to have a pager or similar device. That would include many people in schools and most people in a hospital.
> they don't all re-up from Iran all at the same time
Who says anyone does? Hezbollah has 40k fighters, and we have reports of 2000 people being injured, so clearly Hezbollah, military or civilian, didn't "all re-up from Iran all at once", the numbers are more than an order of magnitude off for you to conclude as much.
If the US government was sanctioned to the extent Hezbollah was, someone like an elementary school principal would most likely have to ask a higher-up to provide them with something like a pager, which would likely have been smuggled together with others.
Hezbollah is essentially a government entity in much of Lebanon, they totally would. Hezbollah runs schools, hospitals - it's easily the largest social services provider in large swathes of Lebanon. That's why it enjoys so much support, in many ways it was a much more competent alternative to the failed Lebanese government.