Full-stack web developer, specializing in engineering a solid User Experience. Available as an individual contributor, team lead, or fractional CTO. No ego. Can bring my own offshore team if necessary.
Track record of taking projects from 0 -> MVP -> PMF.
Expert-level Ruby, JavaScript, PHP. Confident with Python too.
Also a certified Lego Serious Play facilitator and can help your team find their strengths and align on strategic goals.
Specialties:
- Context Engineering
- User Experience Engineering
- Technical writing and documentation
- Vectorization and Elasticsearch Tuning
- RESTful API design and implementation
- React SPAs
- Web Scraping
- Cleaning up brownfield legacy code
- US/Offshore project planning and management
It's frustrating that the triggering event was spam calls to FCC staff members and their family. If only spam calls to us plebs could trigger such fines.
Maybe a dumb question, but I wonder if this was a software attack or IL was able to modify the physical pagers that are issued during Hezbollah onboarding. If this was a pure software attack, are only pagers susceptible? Or are we unknowingly carrying around bombs in our pocket, waiting for the counterattack?
If the description of "exploding" and "tearing [a] bag to shreds" are accurate then it has to be a physical modification of the pagers, lithium ion batteries don't explode with a lot of force when they go up.
It is indeed not the kind of explosion I would expect to see from lithium ion. (Those usually are a lot more flame-y at least the ones I have seen so far.). But I'm not an expert.
NB: that's probably backwards. Batteries contain a lot of energy, they just don't release it particularly quickly.
Most explosives have relatively low energy density, however the energy they have is released far faster than with conventional fuels. By unit mass, TNT (or other comparable explosives such as C4, RDX, etc.) have about 1/10th the energy as liquid petroleum fuels (petrol, diesel, kerosene).
Though again most battery technologies also have fairly low energy densities. But those are probably roughly comparable with most mainstream explosives.
TNT has an energy density of 4.184 MJ/kg.
A LiON battery: 0.36–0.875 MJ/kg.
Motorola pagers (a widely used type) seem to typically take a 3.5V 500mAh battery, which if I'm doing my conversions correctly (mAh * V * 3.6) works out to about 23 kilojoule. That would be the energy equivalent of ~5g TNT. A light charge, but one you wouldn't want going off on your hip.
(Note: I've corrected an off-by-an-order-of-1,000 error above, earlier read 23 MJ / 180g TNT. As I said, I'm not entirely certain of my calculations, which are using the Wikipedia energy densities noted and GNU Units.)
Again, batteries won't explode as footage of the presumed Israeli attack on Hezbolla members shows. But they do contain appreciable energy. It would more likely burn rapidly at worst case.
> Motorola pagers (a widely used type) seem to typically take a 3.5V 500mAh battery, which if I'm doing my conversions correctly (mAh * V * 3.6) works out to about 23 MJ.
Batteries should really quote energy, not charge, for this reason. The voltage is not a constant.
But something’s wrong with your math. Even assuming a constant 3.5V, that’s 1.75Wh, and 1Wh is 3600J, so that’s 6300J.
Not sure if you've seen any of the videos that have circulated, but the created explosions was bigger than just getting a bruise on the waist from it. Seems it'd be enough to stand next to someone with one of those pagers to get hurt by it.
Probably because they have been stalking for a while, and this escalation is a precursor to further action. Destroying lines of communication is usually done before military action.
I think the "clever show" was the point. The physical damage may not actually justify the investment here. You need the resultant paranoia and suspicion from Hezbollah or it wasn't worth putting resources into.
Assuming a lithium battery and control over the firmware+power draw, couldn't you theoretically make the battery output more charge than safe, leading to at least overheating and maybe more?
I also find it unlikely this was just a remote attack rather than supply chain, but with little to no details we can only assume for now.
Not really. This is about the worst your can do with a lithium battery in practice https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo and that's a proper short in something way bigger than a pager. They don't explode like these were reported to.
If you put yourself in the position of Hezbollah's IT chief, you get a different picture than this question assumes.
Let's assume you're somewhat competent and aware of supply chain vulnerabilities.
Let's also assume that pagers are not that popular anymore, and you insist on a pager that's completely passive. It can't emit any signals at all, or the Mossad would track it.
So you probably find some supplier of gear to the Iranians and other non-Western countries, and give them your specifications. That supplier is reliable, you think. It probably listens to a signal that Hez and only Hez transmits. It's Security By Obscurity, the choice of naive buyers everywhere.
You certainly don't buy anything off the shelf. Well, we know what's wrong with Security By Obscurity: Mossad only has to decipher one secret.
So what do you call it when the wealthy and corporations exploit their opponent's inability to afford legal representation? A normal Tuesday in Amerika. Yes, the banality of tuesday terrorism.
> So what do you call it when the wealthy and corporations exploit their opponent's inability to afford legal representation?
It's called a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
It's also illegal in most states.
> A normal Tuesday in Amerika.
We already understood your derogatory outlook without it needing to be literal.
Anyways, that's why the founders gave us the First, Fourth, and Fifth amendments. It turns out, they recognized, the "law" is literally the worst mechanism for discovering truth and managing outcomes.
> Yes, the banality of tuesday terrorism.
It's terrorism because it has no logical conclusion nor any ability to positively benefit anyone's life, in particular, the person who would wield it. Your equivocation ignores this.
Drupal 7 is gonna haunt us forever... I was working on it as late as 2021-22, and even then it kept getting extended: https://www.drupal.org/psa-2023-06-07
> On February 23, 2022, we announced that we would be extending the End-of-Life for Drupal 7 until at least November 1, 2023. Today, we are officially announcing that Drupal 7 will reach its end of life on January 5, 2025.
There's also a whole cottage industry of Drupal 7 vendors/consultants who will provide support past end-of-life, or help you migrate to 9.
I think it's a double-whammy because the kinds of organization drawn to something like Drupal (a powerful all-in-one monolith) are inevitably the same orgs who put everything into it and never want to care about maintaining or upgrading it afterward. They're in for a WORLD of hurt if they want to move to 8+... there's no upgrade path, it's just a rewrite.
Genuinely curious; could you be more specific in what you're looking for in an international observer? There is UNRWA, which has been there for a long time. Not sure how effective they've been in reducing civilian casualties. There is also the UNDOF in the Golan Heights.
I was asking a question, so I was looking for an explanation. Honestly, I am not sure what form international observers would take.
Observers in China, perhaps on the US/Mexican border, and wherever oppression against civilian populations occurs would be difficult, often impossible, but seems like it would be worth the effort.
China and the US would never allow foreign troops on their soil, even if they're from the UN. As superpowers and permanent security council members, they're the ones who dictate where UN peacekeepers go.
If you're talking about a non-militarised observer, I'd say that role is supposed to be filled by journalists. But all of these countries go to great lengths to keep journalists away from their atrocities.
SEEKING FREELANCER | REMOTE contract | US Based Startup with office in South Carolina
Healthcare chat startup looking for full time mid-level or senior-level Ruby engineer. Our application stack is a custom Ruby framework, so more than just RoR experience will be a big bonus.
Our product is in the rehab and addiction & recovery space, so personal or professional experience there will be another plus.
Timezone is Americas; our team is distributed from LA to BA.
It's ultimately heating the atmosphere above them. I heard this planed had some trouble with thermal balance recently, things were getting too hot.
In seriousness, heating streets with abundant solar energy harvested nearby would be reasonable. But sunshine in winter months is not as intense, and you'd have to build, as usual, a huge battery to keep the energy for the night. (When this is solved, more problems would get solved along the way than just de-snowing streets.)
Full-stack web developer, specializing in engineering a solid User Experience. Available as an individual contributor, team lead, or fractional CTO. No ego. Can bring my own offshore team if necessary.
Track record of taking projects from 0 -> MVP -> PMF.
Expert-level Ruby, JavaScript, PHP. Confident with Python too.
Also a certified Lego Serious Play facilitator and can help your team find their strengths and align on strategic goals.
Specialties:
GitHub: https://github.com/geetotesLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leegillentine/
Contact: lee(at)fishburd.com