> Symas LMDB is an extraordinarily fast, memory-efficient database we developed for the OpenLDAP Project. With memory-mapped files, LMDB has the read performance of a pure in-memory database while retaining the persistence of standard disk-based databases.
> Bottom line, with only 32KB of object code, LMDB may seem tiny. But it’s the right 32KB. Compact and efficient are two sides of a coin; that’s part of what makes LMDB so powerful.
I vaguely recall playing Fable on the Xbox and being satisfied, though not blown away by it. It was certainly one of the most fleshed-out house-buying/marriage-allowing games I recall playing (not the first, though) and probably paved the way for more complete systems.
I love Peter Molyneux and he's built amazing things, but he is certainly a hype factory.
I absolutely loved that game on Xbox. It's the only reason I own an original Xbox.
It came out when I was just branching out into the world without my family around, and seeing a game where my choices changed my appearance was kind blowing to me.
I still love this game, though the replayability was definitely overhyped. It's pretty much the same every time.
Yeah, I got the Xbox for Halo 2, but Fable was an absolute top highlight as well. Those two games and Morrowind made up the vast vast majority of my hours on that console. Great times :)
I remember the house buying as being very basic. You could buy a house, fill it with items, sell the house, steal all the items from it, and buy it back for less, as many times as you like. I also remember being rather frustrated I couldn’t pull the sword out of the stone by becoming max good, to I gave up and became max evil, much to the disappointment of my character’s wife.
I maxed out the fireball spell, then targeted it at the stone walls of a building to let the splash damage murder the residents without alerting the guards or accumulating evil points. Great way to open new properties on the rental market.
I like the ideas behind Powershell, but the DX has always felt ugly and clunky compared to standard shell. Unix/Posix are full of great tools, but they are all extremely painful for newbies and take years to master. There's got to be a middle ground where we can have the power and approachability of SQL with the beautiful elegance of standard Unix pipes.
Dune seems to take a step in that direction which is great.
I guess they are taking a victory lap around yesterday's major embarrassment. I never thought that you could dismantle a terrorist organization so surgically by just booby-trapping comms devices.
This will certainly be made into a blockbuster movie in ten years.
I'll re-iterate my previous comment on this matter: this is an impressive supply-chain hack with absolutely oversized results, and you gotta hand it to them for pulling it off.
I think this will go down as being significantly more impressive than Stuxnet.
It doesn’t look very surgical to me given the civilian casualties and general disregard of what can happen to innocent people. If anything this looks more like a state-sponsored terrorist attack than covert ops with collateral damage.
Actual combat and conventional attacks on a guerilla force embedded in an urban civilian population is far more catastrophic and less surgical than the risk of being inside the ~0.5m lethal radius of these pagers.
It's a horrific attack with awful innocent deaths at the same time that any conventional attack that achieved the same impact on Hezbollah would have been even worse for those around them.
I'm not so sure. It certainly shook Hezbollah and no doubt some of the dead or seriously injured held sufficiently important jobs within the organization to cause problems.
On the other hand you now have a few thousand people who suffered unpleasant but not debilitating injuries who are now sadder, wiser, and very very pissed off. My impression is that many of those attacked could have been middle managers or mid-ranking officers. They're now veterans of a traumatizing national event, which will probably increase Hezbollah's standing among the general populace.
(The notion of Hezbollah as a mob of ak-47 wielding foot soldiers is a stereotype from movies and TV that seems to have taken root among many HN readers.)
I see it a bit differently, or at least I see a different possibility. Most of the injured were pager-owning Hezbollah members who were already pissed off in a way that has religious & ideological foundations unlikely to be changed regardless of events. The general populace might go either way, angry at the attack and/or angry at the Hezbollah members for attacking a much more powerful enemy and bringing the violence into their community.
I don't want to go on a pdf hunt for the one perfect paper now, but years of social science and historical reading inclines me to believe that external attacks almost always unify rather than divide a population.
Consider how Gaza has been pounded mercilessly for most of a year now, with the burden falling mainly on civilians, but they're not turning on Hamas.
Good point, but I'm also not sure it will cause a significant shift in positive support beyond anything already seen. Other commenters here have said 50,000+ rockets/missiles have been launch by Israel so far in this conflict. Those are much more damaging so I'm not sure support will increase base on this.
I'm not saying it could have been worse. I'm saying it has been worse and usually is worse.
Otherwise:
1) UN Resolution: Done
2) Camp-David (or other such): Hezbollah has repeatedly refused to engage in any negotiations.
3) Something New: Okay, but until a never-before-seen peace genius comes up with that, and given the ineffectiveness of #1 and #2, we're left with the status quo where less bad options are the awful best to be hoped for.
Well, not exactly. The recent actions of Hezbollah are connected to Palestinian cause. If Israeli-Palestinian conflict is resolved, what does it leave to Hezbollah? It may not collapse, but Palestine becomes a major political factor. That’s the reason I mentioned Camp-David and „something new“. If statehood of Palestine is secured and adequate solution for refugees is offered, it will be the key to resolution of many conflicts in that region.
>it will be the key to resolution of many conflicts in that region.
If you're broadening the discussion to the wider context, how do you reconcile this opinion with the origins and current stated goals of Hezbollah and other groups involved in these many conflicts?
Hezbollah is fundamentally against the existence of Israel: "It's destination is manifested in our motto, 'Death to Israel'." --Hezbollah secretary general Nasrallah circa 2022
I don't know why you keep mentioning Camp David if you are thinking in terms of Palestinian statehood. Hamas has the destruction of Israel baked into its founding charter. In fact that charter specifically calls out the Camp David agreement from 1978 as treacherous and outright rejects any negotiated peace, especially of the "Camp David" variety: "These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters." (Chapter 13 of the Hamas Covenant)
> how do you reconcile this opinion with the origins and current stated goals
They are not set in stone.
> Hamas has the destruction of Israel baked into its founding charter.
Hamas is not Palestine.
I understand what are you talking about, but let me remind you that there were precedents in history of a political reconciliation with terrorist organizations (namely FARC). It requires a lot of goodwill and a lot of work. Israel does practically nothing in that regard, actually moving in the direction that leads to more radicalization.
It is targeted, by definition. Every pager was owned by a Hezbollah member or was about to be. Same with the walkies.
That there was collateral damage is unfortunate, but Israel was definitely not indiscriminately targeting civilians, which is what would make it terrorism.
This was a surgical strike that happened to have some unfortunate collateral damage. Well within the accepted rules of war.
It was not unfortunate collateral damage in the sense of unknown unknown. Civilian casualties must have been anticipated and nothing has been done to prevent them. It is not „accepted“ rules of war, but normalized disregard of human life.
Once again: watch any of the videos. The vast majority of them involve anyone standing around the operative walking away just fine. This was a targeted attack.
Some civilians got hurt, but the intent was not to harm them, and that is the point.
While it seems few bystanders suffered physical injuries, it's naive imho to think that this won't cause enormously elevated fear among the population at large. 'Koolaid' is still synonymous with mass cult poisoning in the US even though that incident happened ~50 years ago in a different country. Everyone in Lebanon is having nightmares about random electronic devices turning out to be bombs, even though they know that's logically not the case. Just like people in New York feel differently about seeing airliners than they did before 9-11.
Sure, that's true. They would have much worse trauma if these were air-dropped bomb or rocket. As strikes go, this was very surgical; but you're right, war is awful.
What makes you think that I did not watch them? And why do you think a few videos circulating online are representative of a few thousands explosions?
> Some civilians got hurt, but the intent was not to harm them
What makes „some“ any different than a hundred or a million? How can you be certain of the intent if civilian casualties were/should have been anticipated?
Didn’t mean to imply you hadn’t watched them at all; was simply trying to use them as evidence.
> What makes „some“ any different than a hundred or a million? How can you be certain of the intent if civilian casualties were/should have been anticipated?
The point I’m trying to make is that there was a very small amount of explosive in each device. They could have added more material had they wanted to do more damage.
There were many ways to make this far more damaging, and they could simply have shot rockets or bombs from the air.
This was a targeted attack, focused on the specific users of these devices, who are Hezbollah militants. Bystanders were not intended to be harmed, which makes this, by definition, a discriminate and surgical attack on Hezbollah militants.
1. Those pagers were purchased by Hezbollah, for Hezbollah. They were distributed by Hezbollah, to Hezbollah. I have extremely little doubt that Israel had intel telling them this, and that these weren’t used by hospitals by doctors and nurses.
2. Of course you can’t guarantee this, but the expectation is that operatives have these devices on them, as it is how they communicate with the rest of Hezbollah. That is a reasonable assumption in the fog of war.
3. Of course you can’t guarantee that. You minimize casualties by making the impact smaller but still meaningful; by using less explosive, but still enough to accomplish the goal.
There are no guarantees in war. Ops fail sometimes. You try to predict collateral damage, which Israel clearly did, by targeting specific devices used by and distributed by Hezbollah, and by using a relatively small amount of explosive.
Both of those things indicate that care was put into minimizing collateral damage. Even if they minimized the amount of explosive to avoid detection, that still accomplished the secondary effect of minimizing damage.
> Those pagers were purchased by Hezbollah, for Hezbollah. They were distributed by Hezbollah, to Hezbollah. I have extremely little doubt that Israel had intel telling them this, and that these weren’t used by hospitals by doctors and nurses.
Hezbollah actually runs hospitals and employs doctors and nurses in them, so, "they were purchased by Hezbollah, for Hezbollah" is not, even if one assumes it is true, even remote support for "these weren't used by doctors and nurses".
In addition to being a political party, and having an armed wing, Hezbollah operates a fairly extensive set of social services.
Except Hezbollah combatants are not exclusively "who was hit", and your entire argument that this was reasonably narrowly targeted on legitimate targets and not an indiscriminate attack rested on literally not understanding what Hezbollah is.
"Who was hit" specifically refers to who was the target; who owned those pagers.
I did not misunderstand what Hezbollah was, please. I spent years working intel. I'm well aware that terrorist groups often provide social services to the civilians they claim to protect. In large part, it's how terrorist groups often maintain power.
This attack did not target doctors or nurses. It targeted Hezbollah operatives. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, and Israel is at war with them. Social services run by Hezbollah were not the target, but if a doctor or nurse happens to be a Hezbollah operative, then they were targeted.
Again: the goal was Hezbollah operatives. If you were a doctor or nurse and unaffiliated with Hezbollah, you were not targeted.
> I did not misunderstand what Hezbollah was, please. I spent years working intel.
So you used juxtaposition of concepts you new were unrelated to create a false impression knowingly, rather than because you failed to understand the nature of the situation, and we are to take the deliberately dishonest propaganda technique as superior to genuine ignorance?
That's a lot of words to say "I discovered one spot in which you misspoke, and that means you must be a deliberate warmongering asshole"
But no matter how many words you use to say that, it will remain untrue.
I did not intend to create a false impression, imply any kind of propaganda, be dishonest, or anything else. Your implication is, frankly, insulting.
My contention is very simple: they targeted Hezbollah operatives, very clearly, and given this particular vulnerability could not really have targeted them any more specifically. These were devices that were owned by and used by Hezbollah operatives, regardless of their role in the organization. Civilians did not use these devices, and the intent was not to harm any civilians.
The end. I'm done playing your games, as I believe I have stated my position very clearly, and at this point you are intentionally missing the point solely to argue some misguided other point about moral relativism.
> 1. Those pagers were purchased by Hezbollah, for Hezbollah. They were distributed by Hezbollah, to Hezbollah. I have extremely little doubt that Israel had intel telling them this, and that these weren’t used by hospitals by doctors and nurses.
Do you have any hard evidence of that? It is absolutely plausible scenario that Hezbollah distributed some of the devices to non-members as part of civil defense plan. In case of the war they may want to have a reliable and authoritative communication channel to civilians.
> Of course you can’t guarantee this, but the expectation is that operatives have these devices on them, as it is how they communicate with the rest of Hezbollah. That is a reasonable assumption in the fog of war.
No, it is not reasonable assumption, on the contrary, and we have seen that. It does look like most of the victims weren’t on duty, so it is reasonable to assume that they won‘t be carrying the device all the time.
> 3. Of course you can’t guarantee that. You minimize casualties by making the impact smaller but still meaningful; by using less explosive, but still enough to accomplish the goal.
Minimize != avoid. They knew that the explosion may harm the wrong person, because they did not take the measures to prevent that (chosen method made it impossible). This is indiscriminate attack by definition.
I think you have either intentionally or unintentionally missed my point, and you're talking past me now. War never has any guarantees. You do the best you can, and you do the best the intel suggests, and you minimize and avoid civilian casualties as best you can.
Israel exploited an opportunity here to strike Hezbollah's communications network and leadership surgically; they did just that. No, there are never any guarantees there will be no collateral damage.
I'm done explaining that, as I think I have been very clear.
You have been very clear in repeating the same argument again and again. I and few other commenters here think it is flawed, because you just assert rather than demonstrate sufficient care about preventing civilian casualties. It is obvious that Israel did target Hezbollah operatives. It is not obvious - and you did not prove that — they were not indiscriminate when triggering the explosions.
By targeting Hezbollah operatives, and by including a small amount of explosive rather than a large amount, triggering the explosions was intended to harm the Hezbollah operatives.
Is your contention that they should have individually confirmed each device was in each owner's pocket before triggering the explosions? That would be both impossible and unreasonable to expect.
(And thank you for engaging in good faith, rather than resorting to ad hominem nonense)
> Is your contention that they should have individually confirmed each device was in each owner's pocket before triggering the explosions? That would be both impossible and unreasonable to expect.
Yes, that would be impossible. This is the exact reason why it shouldn’t have happened. Israel must seek diplomatic solutions to these hostilities instead of testing ethical boundaries of warfare. I have reasons to believe they exist, even if it may seem a long way.
Israel is at war with Hezbollah. I'm all for diplomatic solutions, but that requires both sides to desire one, and Hezbollah has shown no desire. Neither has Israel, but again: Israel is at war.
By this logic the war can be stopped only by victory. As we know from history diplomacy can work. Israel has an advantage in this war, so they could have started exploring diplomatic solution instead of continuing escalation. Hezbollah has made it clear that their recent strikes are related to operation in Gaza (and it often happens that they use Palestinian cause for strikes). This could be the direction in which Israel should have start looking long ago.
Israel did not start this war with Hezbollah. It is not incumbent on Israel to begin diplomatic talks. Israel is at war.
As the attacker, it is incumbent upon Hezbollah to signal diplomacy.
By the same token, it is incumbent on Russia to signal that they would like to engage diplomatically, not Ukraine. It is entirely clear that Ukraine is willing to engage diplomatically, if and only if Russia retreats and surrenders, as they were the aggressor.
Anyway, I think we’ve both said our piece here, and I understand your position.
I think you need to look at the nature of the attack, the targeted, the design of the weapon, and the intended outcome. These devices were not designed specifically to be lethal (although some were). They were designed to send a message by maiming the targets and to create a distrust of needed comm tech by not just Hezbolah, but by Hamas and the Iranians too. I’m sure the designers of the attack realized that some would be lethal and that some non-targets would be affected. All that went in to the calculation. They decided the strategic and tactical payoff was worth the collateral damage. Welcome to warfare.
> They were designed to send a message by maiming the targets and to create a distrust of needed comm tech
The „distrust“ cannot be seriously considered an objective, only if for short term. Next time they will add extra checks of incoming equipment, add random distribution and rotation of devices and problem will be solved.
> The „distrust“ cannot be seriously considered an objective, only if for short term. Next time they will add extra checks of incoming equipment, add random distribution and rotation of devices and problem will be solved.
That's not true; for one thing, their communications infrastructure is now completely gone. Organizing is made much more difficult. Moreover, there is no guarantee that this wasn't Israel intending to force Hezbollah to use cellular means or other means of communication that Israel has already tapped/broken, giving Israel yet another advantage.
Also, they don't know if there are other devices that are compromised, so the next days will either be tossing all battery-powered equipment they own or inspecting it all, causing disruption to their plans for battle, which means this was a massive win.
> Let’s not normalize it by such talks.
Hate to break it to you, but war is normal. People have been fighting wars since we've existed on this Earth. It's not fun to talk about, but war is war.
I look forward to one day having real peace on Earth, but we're definitely not there yet.
Do you have an example of a weapon of war that is more surgical? I think this is the typical Israel criticism that is devoid of any realistic basic to be honest.
Please spend some time reading this whole thread to understand better my arguments. Your question is based on flawed logic and does not require an answer in context of what’s going on.
And very possibly in violation of the Geneva Convention's prohibition of "indiscriminate" attacks:
Rule 12. Indiscriminate attacks are those:
(a) which are not directed at a specific military objective;
(b) which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or
(c) which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by international humanitarian law; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.
(a) Disrupt Hezbollah’s communications network and take out operatives.
(b) The pagers were specifically distributed to Hezbollah operatives, not civilians. It targeted, by definition, the owners of those pagers, supporting the military objective.
(c) It was limited, by definition. This contained tiny amount of explosives, focused very much on targeting the owner of the device, not “civilians or civilian objects without distinction” (from military objectives).
A 30g explosive going off in a device that is owned by a militant? Yes, that is limited, by definition.
Once again, people in that grocery store who were standing near the militant mostly walked away - you can see that on nearly every video that has been released.
A non-targeted attack would have been a rocket hitting the grocery store. This was, by definition, a targeted attack. Even if a person had stood there and shot the militant directly, and there had been a civilian that caught a stray bullet, this would still have been a targeted attack.
As it is, eight Hezbollah militants have died, and the one civilian injury was a Hezbollah militant’s daughter; killing a child was clearly not the intent.
It's not a victory lap; this operation by itself is one of the largest and most intricate operations Israeli intelligence has ever executed, and would have been planned months in advance. Repeating from elsewhere on the thread: the reporting is that this is happening now because Hezbollah was on the verge of discovering the operation. I think it's likely both sets of devices came from the same manufacturer or distributor.
I agree -- "victory lap" is just a figure of speech. Yesterday's results were probably far outsized impact on their own, and today's are (apologies for another figure of speech) "icing on the cake".
I would imagine that they've been feeding these booby-trapped devices to the supply chain for at least a few months and showing that multiple devices are potentially bombs is just an even more powerful psychological victory. What devices can they even trust now? Will they need to go back to sneakernet?
No, definitely not a victory lap. Having completely blown cover on the explosive new feature they added to the pagers, the timer was ticking on Hezbollah checking all their other gadgets for similar extras. It was "use it or lose it".
Do we know the percentage of the total devices used by Hezbollah that got attacked? I guess even if all of them were destroyed, it hardly does any dismantling. But I would expect this operation to open a window of possibility to do some other actions.
Independent estimates peg Hezbollah membership in Lebanon to a wide range, 20k to 50k. Reporting says the pager shipment was 5000 units and so far ~3000 known targets. Figure some devices broke, hadn't been activated yet, didn't trigger correctly, etc. Figure not every member needed or had a pager, call it 50% to be safe but it might be reasonable to think only the equivalent of a team leader would have one. Either way this is a significant fraction of their contact capabilities.
1) The victims of yesterday's attack were overwhelmingly terrorist soldiers and mid-level management which fits the definition of surgical. If the results of this operation are as good as suggested by all the early reports, they just carved a major hole in the upper ranks of the organization (not even including the major damage they've caused over the last six months with surgical strikes on leaders).
2) We don't have confirmation that's it's them (but it likely is), and we know far more than that: we know that it incapacitated thousands of members of a designated terrorist organization with minimal impact outside of them.
1) The victims of yesterday's attack were overwhelmingly terrorist soldiers and mid-level management which fits the definition of surgical. If the results of this operation are as good as suggested by all the early reports, they just carved a major hole in the upper ranks of the organization (not even including the major damage they've caused over the last six months with surgical strikes on leaders).*
2) We don't have confirmation that's it's them (but it likely is), and we know far more than that: we know that it incapacitated thousands of members of a designated terrorist organization with minimal impact outside of them.*
"We know for sure this was super-surgical and ONLY killed the 'bad guy club', and since they are in the 'bad guy club' it was done by good guys clearly. Also we don't actually know if it was the 'good guy club', but we know without a doubt they are surgical." -- as if the Hannibal Directive, ethnic cleansing, and colonization are all so super-surgical and precise. Preposterous.
*3) Well, that's just your opinion, man.*
Well it sure seems like the International Criminal Court, UN, and other world bodies are starting to open their eyes.
This isn't the 50's anymore -- media is not controllable in the same way. israels crimes against all of humanity are coming to light.
That's like, a matter of historical record man. With 'allies' like these, who needs enemies?
There is absolutely no way you can argue 'anti-bds' laws are not in violation of the first amendment and be serious. Especially given that for many government jobs you MUST sign them to get hired.
A foreign government that flatly refuses to registrer it's influence organization under FARA has taken away one of the most important rights of all Americans, whether they realize it or not.
starting? they've been cheering for hamas from day 1, and now I'm sure they'll have some motions to pass about a Hezbollah minion having the rights to keep his balls...
Well I don't agree on (1) or (2). I think they are at least attempting to degrade the capabilities of Hezbollah, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the US and others. I don't really want to get into the depths of Arab/Israel conflicts as I don't think anyone really has a good solution to that, certainly not me.
However, I do find anti-BDS laws very hard to justify. It seems that many conflate antizionism with antisemitism, probably because some of the most vocal people are actually just dogwhistling against Jews in general. However, there is a large contingent of people, especially in the West, who are opposed to Israel's battlefield tactics and the current conflict, while simultaneously believing that Israel has a right to exist and defend themselves. Those people might reasonably decide that they want to boycott Israel or Israeli products to make their views heard (hit them in the pocketbook), but are prohibited from expressing themselves by these laws.
Are they unconstitutional in the US? One would imagine that if the Citizens United case says that money is speech, that would equally apply to people who want to boycott Israel. After all, we already tolerate much worse forms of antisemtic speech here. Why would we not also tolerate people voting with their money?
For sure, yesterday's was a terrorist attack, since it indiscriminately hit civilians (multiple children, healthcare workers, etc.)
That said, before more people jump on the rethoric of declaring a specific entity terrorist:
The decision is usually made by your state's authorities, and depending on where you live, Hezbollah might not be considered a terrorist organization, or its military wing might be considered terrorist, but not Hezbollah as a whole (like in the EU).
Since we've seen medics among the victims, it's pretty clear that this was not surgically targeting a the military wing, and thus few people would dare claim that this was targeted against terrorists.
Now that the pandoras box of mass booby trapping electronic devices has been opened, who is to say we won't see tit for tat retaliations with other supply chain attacks?
Will every teddy bear now need to be scanned for explosives before entering the country?
Mostly terrorists are dead and this killed far less civilians than the alternative ways of waging war (ground invasion or bombing campaign). This is the level of surgical operation that everyone was calling for since Hezbollah declared war on Israel on October 8th, and now that Israel is delivering that level of precision there's still some people complaining, it's unbelievable how naive some people are.
Please do teach us all how to wage a war on a jihadist organization, with zero civilian casualties. How would you do that?
Apparently, extreme targeting by micro explosive devices is not enough. No matter what Israel would do, it will always be held at an enormously higher standard than other countries.
Why did Hezbollah start firing rockets into Israel in the first place? it was totally unprovoked. Now they are reaping what they sowed.
History puts pretty much everyone in the world living on land that was taken from someone else at some point in time. And if we all did our best to move to where our parents/GPs/GGPs came from we'd again face the issue of that land having been taken previously.
This line of thinking is turtles all the way down and in no way a helpful path towards getting two peoples who believe in opposing views to stop killing each other.
The thing is, 'at some point in time' happens to be 'right now, today' in places like the West Bank. 'This sort of thing has always happened in history' is an incredibly poor argument to deflect responsibility for ongoing oppression. Jewish critics of Zionism have repeatedly pointed out how these very arguments have been employed against Jews in the not-so-distant past. Why would anyone reasonly expect Palestinians to be any less committed to their own collective existence?
I'm not aware of wide scale mass displacement happening to Palestinians in the West Bank. A few thousand people are displaced each year, and it does look like a lot of these are unjustly kicked out of their homes, but it’s out of 3,000,000 Palestinians there and I do not otherwise see anything that looks like a mass forced relocation. I'm sure there are "thin end of the wedge" arguments that could be made here but that's poor soil on which to plant a war. Is there an alternative view that better supports a belief of Israel trying to take it all away from Palestinians?
I'm sure there are "thin end of the wedge" arguments that could be made here but that's poor soil on which to plant a war.
No one (in this thread) said anything about "plant[ing] a war". But (restricted to this particular issue), if there was one side looking for "soil on which to plan a war" -- it would have to be all of those currently involved in or supporting the expansion of the settlements (in any form, to any degree), of course.
Is there an alternative view that better supports a belief of Israel trying to take it all away from Palestinians?
Perhaps not literally all of it, but there are many indications that a plan is underway to annex at least very large chunks of (if not all of) the West Bank.
NYT: Israeli Official Describes Secret Government Bid to Cement Control of West Bank - https://archive.md/DQ1N3
As of 2019, 42 percent want to annex all or some of the West Bank, 28 are opposed, and 30 percent prefer to keep their heads in the sand, according to Haaretz:
A 2019 Haaretz poll investigated support for annexation among Israelis. According to the survey, 30% did not know, 28% of Israelis opposed any annexation and 15% supported annexing Area C alone. 27% wanted to annex the entire West Bank including 16% who opposed granting political rights to Palestinians and 11% who favored granting political rights.
So even back then -- a rough plurality in favor of some degree of large-scale annexation (if we ignore the 30 percent who claim not to have an opinion), and of those, some 2/3 in favor of full annexation.
On war, I intended that more in reference to Hezbollah's actions this past year, ostensibly on behalf of the West Bank issue, but more likely the catspaw of Iran's proxyism.
>settlement expansion
Yes, that is a huge problem for any attempt at long term two-state solutions to be considered. It would be less of a problem if Israel at least did not deny permits etc. to Palestinian settlers to Area C. Security vetting really shouldn't rule out 99% of applicants. In this respect especially Israel appears to have been less diligent about the land-use aspect of the Oslo Accords.
For annexation, I don't think we can go by Smotrich's word. He's only finance minister through political back-room dealing. Likewise the Likud's 2017 non-binding resolution appears to be more political theatre than policy. But yes, still troubling.
So again, I don't see this sufficient to support violent resistance. Support for annexation appears to be on the rise during this period, probably or at least in part as a result.
Everyone seems ready and willing to play into near the worst expectations of their perceived enemies in fear they'll suffer the consequence of that expectation even if it doesn't come true. That's the cycle that needs to break.
So again, I don't see this sufficient to support violent resistance.
That's a question of perspective.
The best course of action for all concerned would be for Israel not to continually take actions which seem specifically designed to drive an entire population into a state of permanent despair, against which non-violent actions seem to have very little to no effect.
I really don't think the fact that it's happening in relatively slow motion makes a big difference. One could argue that the ~2m living in Gaza are the ones who have experienced mass forced displacement, and while I am not in sympathy with many of Hamas' actions, I do think they can make a valid argument for attacking IDF bases and similar strategic infrastructure.
I honestly don't know one way or another, but I'm guessing many/most people displaced in this way probably resettle somewhere else in the west bank, perhaps from Area C to Area A. I know that's not much better but either way at roughly 1/10th of 1% this isn't slow motion displacement. Growth in each governorate of the west bank, even in Area C, of Palestinians has been about 2% or higher for a while. Without making a massive project out of back-envelop estimates, Israel would have to increase this behavior by a factor of 20x just to keep pace with population growth but make no proportional progress. That amounts to Israel's behavior being crappy by not really one of taking the land. But not (what I believe to be) a reasonable justification for an escalation to lethal military attacks.
That's an impressive supply-chain hack. Spend years showing how insecure modern telecom devices are and scare your enemy into going old-school, receive-only. Set up a shell company to sell pagers to your enemy's shell company. Give them devices implanted with a small explosive charge pointed inward, knowing they will be worn around the waist most of the time.
Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time. You've just injured and identified most of your enemies, incapacitated them, completely broken their communication network and effectively given you weeks of disarray to do whatever you want to further disrupt them.
You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy. This is a Stuxnet-level hack that we'll probably never fully understand.
> You have to hand it to them -- it's a clever strategy with minimal casualties outside of your enemy
I agree it’s clever, but there are reports now of thousands wounded. Feels like a lot of collateral risk, if these people who were targeted were out and about (grocery shopping, bank, etc.)
I have no doubt that innocent civilians have been injured. But it's also worth noting that there are thousands of Hezbollah members, so the number alone doesn't necessarily tell us much about the number of civilians injured. (Similar to the casualty figures that come out of Gaza.)
I hate the idea of any innocent civilian being injured. But it might also be instructive to consider the alternative: if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed—not to mention the Israeli civilians on the other side, whose lives also matter.
> if Israel wanted to achieve similar results via a conventional war against Hezbollah, it seems virtually guaranteed that far more innocent people would have been injured and killed
"It's OK that Israel causes excessive amounts of civilian casualties, because in the alternative scenario Israel would also cause excessive amounts of civilian casualties"
I don't find it very persuasive to simply assume that the casualties are "excessive." Whether they are actually excessive is really the whole issue. As of right now, there is no strong evidence that I'm aware of that the injuries from today's attack are "excessive" much less those of a different purely hypothetical attack.
And even then: to judge whether casualties are excessive requires an understanding of the goal to be achieved, which is almost completely absent from this discussion.
I think the problem many people have is that Israel's goals entirely revolve around killing people.
That is: If your goal is to murder someone, and you accidentally kill an innocent bystander in committing that murder, the number of civilians killed is infinitely too high. The number of acceptable total deaths is 0.
I understand this is idealistic. But it's the judgement many will choose to make. For the record, no I don't only think it's bad when Israel murders people.
I don’t understand. It seems clear enough to me that Israel’s goal is to prevent Hezbollah from continuing to launch rockets at Israeli towns in the north. Killing is a means to that end. One may disagree with that choice of means, but I don’t see how you can claim that “Israel’s goals entirely revolve around killing people.”
That being said, you might think that killing is never an appropriate means of achieving anything. If so, fair enough. But I think that’s a tough position to maintain when you are actively under attack.
I think Israel consists of quite different people with different goals.
Some of them have the goal, to own all of the land, because they believe it is their religious duty - and some of them are indeed part of the government.
And some of them just want to live in peace.
And on the other side it seems quite similar to me. Probably with a higher percentage of ruthless killers, but desperation tend to make people ruthless.
It really isn't a simple conflict that can be solved with more killing, unless we are talking about genocidal levels of killings.
> It seems clear enough to me that Israel’s goal is to prevent Hezbollah from continuing to launch rockets at Israeli towns in the north. Killing is a means to that end. One may disagree with that choice of means, but I don’t see how you can claim that “Israel’s goals entirely revolve around killing people.”
Well, let me start with the necessary disclaimer: First, I'm not an expert on geopolitics or Israel or the ME. That's probably obvious. It could be that my coarse understanding is just completely wrong, but I think it's a broadly correct picture which is lacking lots of detail.
I also don't know much about the conflict with Hezbollah specifically, but what I see from Israel tells me that the prevention of rocket smay not be their top goal. I also believe that even if it is, killing is a means that I disagree with!
The rhetoric I hear about Hamas (not Hezbollah, so it may be different there, but I suspect it's not substantially so) from the Netanyahu administration is about murder. Protecting Israelis is a means to an end; the end goal is to kill every single member of Hamas (and, reading between the lines, the expulsion of all Palestinians). It's widely reported that many Israelis openly feel Netanyahu is not making meaningful efforts to recover hostages, and I've also understood that significant lapses in Israeli security were what made the Oct 7 attack last year possible. Meanwhile, some of the things Netanyahu says about Hamas and Palestine sounds genocidal, frankly.
Again, could be wrong about all that. Every word on the subject is biased in one way or another. Additionally, I know very little of the situation with Hezbollah, so I'm extrapolating: The prioritization of murder over safety that I see in the war with Hamas demonstrates to me that Israel is not making choices in the utmost interest of safety, generally, if the murder of its enemies is on the table.
Of course, I'll also reiterate that even if all of the above is wrong, their means are unacceptable to me: I don't believe one of the most powerful nations on the planet needs to murder its impoverished neighbors to keep itself safe. It's much easier than diplomatic and nonlethal approaches, yes; but I don't think it's necessary.
Thanks for the thorough explanation. I think there are two things worth adding to your picture that distinguish Hezbollah from Hamas.
The first is that about 60,000 Israelis are currently displaced because they lived in a zone that Hezbollah is targeting with rocket attacks. (Which, FWIW, appear to intentionally target civilians.) Many of them have been living in hotels for nearly a year. Just yesterday, the Israeli cabinet updated its official war goals to include allowing residents to return to their homes in the north. What I hear is that this is now an issue roughly on par with returning the hostages from Gaza in terms of its salience within Israel.
The second is that Hezbollah is far more powerful than Hamas ever was. Unlike Hamas, I think Israel must recognize that elimination of Hezbollah is not a realistic aim.
At some point you have to ignore these perspectives because they are wrong. Look into the founding of Hezbollah. It isn't a secret, their stated goals is to expulse Jews. It cannot get much more plain as that.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. Israel is one of the most powerful nations on Earth, Hezbollah is not even close. I don't think genocide is an appropriate response to the hatred of a much, much weaker enemy.
Hezbollah is a militia and has more manpower and equipment than the Lebanese army. They get high tech supplies from allies like Iran and they have more military power than a lot of the surrounding countries, who also fear them for that reason.
They aren't a civilian force and they are a serious military threat, especially with the backing of Iran.
Sorry, I meant that I don't believe they are, but I believe they would if it became opportune. And I'm not aware of any indication otherwise; it can be assumed they would choose against it, but I don't make that assumption.
The right number? Zero. An acceptable number to help stop Hezbollah from routinely firing rockets at your northern towns and villages? That’s a harder question. Unfortunately, the hard question is the one that’s relevant.
Why isn't it better to cause fewer civilian casualties &/or those of lesser severity than a shooting fight or missile attack?[1] Given the situation has already degenerated to its current state where fighting is the status quo and all options lead to innocent casualties then minimizing those is the horrible "OK" option. Not okay in the sense of desirable, not okay in the sense that things should never have degenerate to this level to begin with, only okay as the less horrible option.
[1] Videos show the explosions highly limited in their ability to cause injuries as bad as a bullet to anyone ever a foot or two away from the explosions, much less than I would expect from anything more conventional.
Israel isn't causing any civilian casualties in South Lebanon. Hezbollah declaring war on Israel by firing rockets onto civilian areas since the 8th of October caused them.
my family was evacuated due to incessant rocket fire in the golan heights, hezzbollah has been firing indiscriminately since 10/8 do you have any alternative?
I agree that the framing is tendentious (though not necessarily false). But I don't think much actually hinges on that. The point is still worth considering even if it's just a "war" rather than "war on terrorists." The linked article is a study on wars in general, not just wars "on terror."
I doubt that's what GP meant, and I don't think one has to think either of those things to not buy into the "war on terrorism" rhetoric that is used to excuse all sorts of atrocities.
Kind of an odd thing to say in a conversation with a bunch of other people who clearly care what is right and wrong.
> 400 years ago you'd have owned slaves and not think twice about it.
An oversimplification, to say the least! This is only even a little bit true if we limit ourselves to the small number of nations with chattel slavery (but why would we do that?), and actually not even true of Americans, many of whom were opposed to slavery even 400 years ago.
It seems like you're making a big, unjustified leap from: "people don't always do the right thing" to "right and wrong don't matter and are not worth discussing."
Edit:
OK, I'll unpack: your points about Foxconn and modern-day slavery don't seem to establish anything other than that people don't always act according to their moral judgments. But that doesn't demonstrate that right or wrong don't matter and are not worth being discussed. (Or, in your words: "Who cares what is right or wrong?") For one thing, moral judgments could have attenuated, but still significant, effect on peoples' behavior. Or, it could be worth discussing for reasons other than its effect on peoples behavior.
I hoped it would be understood that the quotation marks aren't intended to be interpreted as literally quoting your statements but, rather, are just a way of referring to two different propositions, the first of which is the one actually supported by the evidence that you cite and the latter of which seems to be the one you're espousing.
If I've misunderstood your argument here, please feel free to explain how. I certainly don't intend to straw-man anything. But if you'd rather do something else with your brief precious time on earth besides arguing with a stranger on the internet, I respect that decision!
Hezbollah is of course not a country (though they're a proxy for Iran), but they occupy parts of Lebanon, so you can't attack them without attacking Lebanon.
I wonder if people are unaware that Hezbollah and Israel have been shooting rockets at each other for months. There are roughly 1000 deaths in the conflict and hundreds of thousands of civilians evacuated. If we’re talking about harms to civilians, this incident is probably small compared to the war overall.
These are Hezbollah pagers and Hezbollah only exists to terrorize Israel and it is their sole purpose. Of course there is still a danger of collateral risk, but I don't think it can get much more targeted.
"Hezbollah only exists to terrorise Israel and it is their sole purpose." This is a very curious take, what makes you think a group of hundreds of thousands of people, investing so much time, efforts and resources, exposing themselves and their loved ones to fatal risks just to terrorise Israel?
> According to Hezbollah's Deputy-General, Naim Qassem, the struggle against Israel is a core belief of Hezbollah and the central rationale of Hezbollah's existence.
I tend to believe their own statement on this matter. Where do you see wiggle room for another argument? Or even to find the argument "curious"? What is curious about it?
Only on HN, “This is curious. Why would people do an irrational thing similar to the irrational things that people have done for the entirety of human existence?”
Looks like Lebanese civilians have indeed been injured/maimed; but it appears cool to some since it is an "impressive supply-chain hack", so let's leave it at that and not call it terrorism.
You could've labeled it terrorism had Lebanon and Israel weren't at war with each other over the past 12 months, and had the people carrying those devices were random uninvolved civilians.
If you were to consider the fact that Hezbollah has been shelling Israeli cities and civilians on a daily basis for the past 12 months (killing many, also children, and driving hundreds of thousands of people out of their homes), with the UN peacekeeping force failing to keep Hezbollah north of the Litani river - then perhaps you would understand that this is likely as close as you can get to a "precision strike" on an enemy you're at war with.
This may in-fact be the most precise military strike on an enemy paramilitary group in the history of modern warfare.
You either have a very unrealistic idea of what a war actually looks like (0% civilians casualties or injuries), or an agenda.
The unfortunate thing is that regardless of politics, this will be seen as further escalation that ratchets up the risk of greater regional conflict. All wars eventually end, its just a question of how long, and how much death (both militarily and civilian) will be endured by everyone in the region. I hope there are diplomatic possibilities to de-escalate, but it seems those windows are closing.
Fair enough, and thanks for being open about this. With this in mind, all I can say is that your original comment is based on 100% emotion and 0% analysis and rationality.
I certainly agree that war, as experienced by humans on all sides of a conflict, is a form of terror.
That's a simple emotional argument that everybody can relate to.
It doesn't touch on the realities of war, especially a war that was forced on one side by another (which is the case here, with Hezbollah willingly deciding to shell and bomb Israel on a daily basis for the past 12 months, despite Israel not waging any war on Lebanon).
Terrorism definition is independent of whether there is ongoing war or not, lets not divert the subject with simple whataboutism.
We all know what happened, on both sides, including deaths of tens of thousands of civilians including thousands of palestinian children who did fuck nothing to anybody, just were born at bad place at bad time.
What would be enough kill ratio israeli : palestinian civilian, or even better israeli civilian : palestinian kid/baby that would satiate Israeli government to stop the war? Very conservative estimates put deaths of direct US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to around 500k, meaning its 500:3 ratio and factual defeat of US army to withdraw and cut losses. So thats the threshold of civilized western world? Israel already surpassed that long time ago.
They can't and won't win with Hamas and they know it, its exactly same situation as Taliban, ISIS etc. Regroup, strike back, stronger, smarter, better equipped, more motivated. Spiral of death can go on and on till there is nobody standing on neither side.
If I had to choose where the next nuclear detonation happens it would be for me 50:50 Ukraine : Israel, and this is how you get there.
> It’s a mistake not to acknowledge civilian casualties, and not to feel sorrow and even anger.
I agree with you 100%, it's important to acknowledge civilian casualties. Many uninvolved Lebanese people don't want a war with Israel, and they don't deserve any of this. I truly feel very sorry for those people and I wish they would never have had to go through this.
But at the same time, we can't let emotions alone dictate everything.
There's a murderous paramilitary death cult operating from within the Lebanese territory that uses Lebanon for all its territory and resources to kill as many Jewish people (and non-Jews, as demonstrated recently with the missile attack that killed 10 Druze children in a football game) as possible and erase Israel. They don't care about your feelings, or who their victims are. They'll gladly kidnap and murder civilians, children, elderly - as long as they are an Israeli. It's truly tragic, but there really aren't too many ways out of this.
do you realize that nurses in hospital, civil servants workers are among people carrying this device? That not all, not even majority of Hizbollah personnel have no military responsibility whatsoever?
There's absolutely no reason for uninvolved, random and peaceful civilians to be carrying a classified wartime-ready pager issued by a paramilitary terrorist organization. If you were carrying the device you're either Hezbollah, or cooperating with them - which makes you a legitimate military target.
Israel has given Lebanon and Hezbollah enough ultimatums to stop the aggressions. This is what happens when diplomacy fails.
But we already have videos of people standing in very close proximity to the devices being detonated - and not getting hurt. In-fact, many of the people carrying the device in their pockets ended up not sustaining life-threatening injuries.
I'm not saying civilians weren't hurt by this. But I'm also saying that no war has 0% civilian casualties. Those two countries are at war with each other.
This war is about Hezbollah and Hamas shelling civilians in Israel. Like hundreds of rockets per night. If, to stop that, it may harm a few civilians who are waiting next to Hezbollah members,
…you would let people keep shelling civilians by hundreds and hundreds of rockets?
How do you choose your actions, do you always support the guys who cause the maximum deaths? How does it work, “indiscriminate damage” is as soon as a person is inconvenienced while they were holding Hezbollah’s grocery bags? Shouldn’t they … distance themselves?
Pun unintended. But it’s a very good question. Shouldn’t they distance themselves from active murderers?
This won't do anything meaningful to reduce civilian deaths. Less than 0.1% of Lebanon injured, and 10x that number now even more enraged. Not meaningfully repeatable either, won't create significant attrition
The massive disruption of Hezbollah's communication network may cripple them enough to shorten the duration of the conflict, and possibly help turn public sentiment from Lebonese civilians into pressure to find a way to end things. The civilians are the people who on average do not feel strongly enough to fight, and may have large number pissed that a group-- even if they believe in its cause-- has brought violence to their communities through a surprise attack against a more powerful enemy. More than half of the Lebonese population believe there is no military solution to the overall dispute: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/shadow-h...
> …you would let people keep shelling civilians by hundreds and hundreds of rockets?
I said no such thing though do find it interesting that any questioning of the methods used by one party is interpreted as blanket acceptance of all methods used by the other.
> Pun unintended. But it’s a very good question. Shouldn’t they distance themselves from active murderers?
How could they possibly know? I’ve never been in line for a sandwich and thought to ask if the person in front of me might spontaneously explode.
If they were truly indiscriminate and and indifferent to collateral damage, there are far easier and more effective ways to kill a few dozen people in Lebanon.
The whole complex and contrived attack speaks of tying to minimize collateral damage.
All available evidence suggests there's nothing "classified" or "wartime ready" about these - they were your basic, cheap, totally unencrypted POCSAG/Flex pager. The same as any other pager carried by doctors and all the other people who use them - aside from the hidden explosives, of course.
I doubt that was the case for these specifically hacked and weaponized devices. The operation appears to be ingenious and precisely layered in design. It very specifically targeted a group of people who were first convinced to ditch their mobile devices because they were hackable by Israel. Then the target group was provided the weaponized devices. They were bulk triggered at a specific moment of time. The weaponized device (while certainly lethal in some cases) was seemingly designed to maim and minimize damage beyond the person holding the device. And… perhaps most importantly, they were expected to be kept in a front pocket increasing the likelihood of physically emasculating the target group. It’s the ultimate “you don’t want to fuck with us”.
Violence has been probably the biggest driver of innovation for us as a species. I would categorize thousands of weapons as "cool" viewed dispassionately. Aircraft carriers, Fighter Jets, Cruise missiles. They are all definitely cool when viewed from afar.
Which they would probably agree to. Purists do not care for practical matters such arbitrating what would be the best course of action in order to have the less casualties because for them the only acceptable number of casualties is zero because any war and casualty is immoral.
I have sympathy for this kind of reasoning because it's been mine for a long time. There is something important for the preservation of the self in refusing all kinds of wrong in the world. The problem is that by refusing to engage with the world, they can affect nothing (and probably accept that, everybody should just stop being immoral, that's easy in their mind)
> Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time.
You likely don’t even need to hack anything if you coordinate based on time. A built in clock would eliminate the need for any external signal and work in a, no pun intended, dead zone.
If the pager itself is hacked, the software could also pretend to receive a page a moment before detonation to maximize the chance the device is held with the receiver in the open.
if you physically control the pager I don't even think it's called hacking anymore. you can change the hardware and software willy nilly. put an extra SIM that you control in there, and call it. put a radio receiver. a timer. heck, a dog whistle audio detector, you blow it and they blow up. infinite possibilities.
Pagers don't have SIMs, they are simply programmed with a "Cap Code" which is basically the address of the pager.
Pagers can be programmed with multiple cap codes, and can function differently based on which cap code address receives a message. For instance, a single cap code could be programmed to just vibrate the pager, vs an audible alert.
Pagers are sent out via very high power distributed transmitters as one way transmissions simulcasted transmissions.
I mean they probably did hack to some degree the default software/hardware in the pager to get it to do something nonstandard. I doubt they have access to the full source code and build stack of the OG pager, so even just modifying the software running on it to do something different is indeed a hack.
That doesn't follow. You could have a timer that causes the pager to vibrate as if it had received a message or an alarm had rung. That would make the attack simpler, in that one wouldn't also have to compromise (or risk leaving traces in) the phone system to activate thousands of pagers.
Pagers just simply have an address (called a Cap Code) to receive messages. It's like a mailbox number. A pager can be programmed with usually up to 4 Cap Codes at a time.
If I was speculating on what happened, I would bet that the pager had 3 Cap Code addresses programmed, the mailbox cap code the owner of the pager expected to have for receiving messages, a cap code that was the same programmed in all the pagers to that functioned normally to received messages, and then the 3rd cap code programmed in all the pagers that when receiving a specific message triggered the explosive.
The folks responsible simply sent a message to the 2nd cap code to get all the pagers to go off, presumably to get the targets to get the pagers out and look at them, and then immediately the trigger message next to the 3rd cap code to detonate the explosive.
I'd imagine a backup timer, with the ability to trigger early if required for strategic or tactical purposes.
I almost surprised this wasn't coordinated with (or saved for) an incursion into Libanon. That seems to be something Israel wants to do, and this would be a great way to disrupt the defense at the most critical moment.
A timer is too risky. The was done months in advance - what if the war was over?
I think this was meant for intelligence gathering - now that they know who the important operatives are, you go backwards using video and see where they went and who they talked to.
Seems easier to install a transmitter and GPS in the supposedly receive-only device. Then it could actually track people and show where they had been. It could store up readings and only transmit while the device was in motion at around walking speed, with signal strength above Y. That means the person was probably outdoors and moving, thus probably ot being swept by bug detectors. Well maybe not any more, now that everyone is thinking that way ;).
I’m saying even that could be time based to ensure it does not depend on the signal being received. Just pretend you got a message and add a delay of a couple seconds.
It could be, but it would be very risky. These pagers would have been distributed months in advance. How could you possibly know the perfect time to set them off?
And since pagers are already receiving remote messages, it doesn't make sense to do it any other way.
>You've just injured and identified most of your enemies, incapacitated them, completely broken their communication network and effectively given you weeks of disarray to do whatever you want to further disrupt them.
And affected their recruitment. Because of how pagers are worn, a significant number of injuries are going to be genital injuries.
Given, that your primary recruits are young men, that is important.
In that demographic, the young men may actually fear non-lethal genital injuries more than they actually fear death.
We'll see about that. Some of the footage indicates the targets were all just out and about in public. I think it's likely there will be collateral damage. I assume it didn't happen since it's not being reported, but what if one of them was on a plane?
Seeing some video from one of the hospitals, there's a lot of variety to the injuries. It looks like some people were looking at the pager when it exploded (injury to face and hand), some were wearing it on hip, some in pocket, some probably in an across-the-chest fanny pack.
It would seem this attack has managed to kill some, maim many, tag all, terrorize, and disrupt.
The shell company isn't a strict requirement, and I'd wager less likely. Infiltrating the delivery process would be easier and would instead require knowing about the pager purchase and being able to swap the actual package for an alternative package. Theoretically all of this is possible with some data interception to discover the pager order, a team to construct the exploding pagers, a person to deliver the exploding pagers, and a person to intercept the actual pagers (which could be the same person delivering the exploding pagers).
> Hack the backend server, send a coordinated page to all the pagers at the same time.
I worked on these before and I don't think you'd need to hack anything at all to send a page. Its just a broadcast. Especially if you had access to the receiver as they seem to have had, I can't imagine they compromised the actual Hezbollah transmission tower.
Yeah I mean it's basically just like mass-sending a spam text, no? All they need to know is the phone numbers of the pagers. Or even just the number range from which the pager numbers were assigned, and then spam the entire range. Spammers have simple enough software that can do all this; it doesn't seem like a sticking point for Mossad.
It Depends... Sure you could spam the pager system triggering them one by one, but because how pagers work you could trigger them all at the same time.
Pagers are basically just a receiver of a One-to-Many network. A pager will receive all pages being broadcast as they are "listen only" devices. As the pagers don't talk back to the service provider the SP doesn't know which transmitter to use, so the SP will broadcast the pages out across their whole network. The circuity/software of the pager will then filter out only the messages intended for that pager out of all the pages it receives. To reach pagers out of range/switched off the SP would just repeat the page for a period of time.
(note: for message privacy you can add encryption to the message but back in the day that didn't happen, and you could just pull clear text out of the air.)
This "receiver only" style of device allowed pagers to be low power and would run for a very long time on a single AAA battery (or even on a watch battery, because they built a pager into a watch! The Timex Beepwear... Oh I so wanted one as a kid!). But it has the benefit that because they are one-way/"listen only" you can't track them because they are not communicating back to the mothership! It would be like trying to track an AM/FM radio in a car.
If you are adding an "add-on board" to the device, you could tap the receiver of the pager and do your own decoding of the pages. So you could have the add-on board trigger on a "certain message for this pager only" but you could also trigger on "a certain message sent to pager serial 1234567890".
If you knew the phone number assigned to the pager with the serial 1234567890 (because you just so happened to have paid for service for that pager by what ever clandestine means you wanted) you could trigger them all with a single phone call from a public phone or a disposable cell phone to a pager not even associated to the target group of devices.
EDIT: Just a note to say 2 way pagers do exist, this type of pager allows the pager to confirm receipt of a page and even send their own pages to other pagers, but I would suspect that the type of pager being used in this case is the one-way type pager because its reported they were using them because they are harder to track.
I dont think you have to hand it to them. I just think that they have to know who the people are. And a code has to be uploaded to the pagers that cause the explosion.
There have been several presentations on this before. It was for old cell phones.
> Hezbollah does not reveal its armed strength. The Dubai-based Gulf Research Centre estimated in 2006 that Hezbollah's armed wing comprises 1,000 full-time Hezbollah members, along with a further 6,000–10,000 volunteers.[200] According to the Iranian Fars News Agency, Hezbollah has up to 65,000 fighters.[201] In October 2023, Al Jazeera cited Hezbollah expert Nicholas Blanford as estimating that Hezbollah has at least 60,000 fighters, including full-time and reservists, and that it had increased its stockpile of missiles from 14,000 in 2006 to about 150,000.
Israel probably knows from the number of pagers ordered (and probably from spying on their pages' contents, since if you're going to mount this sophisticated a supply-chain attack to plant bombs in a device, you might as well also plant spyware) just how many active members Hezbollah has [or had, since many of them are now inactive members].
Minimal what? They just indiscriminately bombed anyone near anyone with this branded pager. It's really disgusting to see you marveling at mass civilian destruction or terrorism.
Call it whatever you like, I don't care - but what do you do when the other side is out to wipe your country completely and has zero regard for any conventions of war?
Hezbollah has willingly waged a war on Israel 12 months ago. The Lebanese government is complicit in not managing to hold Hezbollah back, and so do the UN peacekeeping forces which have been unable to implement resolution 1701. There have been countless of attempts at diplomacy with Hezbollah and Lebanon during this time, but nothing worked. So what would you do in this case?
Well, I'm asking again, what is your best idea then?
Face it - you'd just sit there and get slaughtered, right? Contemplating your morals and war conventions until every last citizen of your country has been butchered? Waiting for some imaginary court and international peacekeeping forces to come and help you, only to die waiting?
Those were thousands of targeted explosions, by the way. There are videos of bystanders, standing in close proximity to the explosions themselves and not getting hurt. Why are you being so flippant?
Went looking for fountain codes, was not disappointed [1]. It's a shame these have been locked up for so long -- there's a lot of network infrastructure that could be improved by them.
EDIT: looking a bit deeper into this repo, it's really just a wrapper over the raptorq crate with a basic UDP layer on top. Nothing really novel here that I can see over `raptorq` itself.
> There's a lot of network infrastructure that could be improved by them.
One killer feature was multicast streaming of data. The streaming could do an extra 5% of broadcasting packets instead of several round trips and retransmissions.
Now that I think about it, I wish we actually used multicast.
The hard part about multicast is the scaling overhead of coordinating which streams should go where when it's more than "these couple things on these couple networks". Even then, the way it's a dedicated range of IPs instead of parts of public assignments pretty much shut down the idea it could ever be coordinated at scale outside of a few private networks doing it together.
It has found good success in IPTV delivery inside provider's own networks though. Cameras at casinos/hotels/Transit systems and the like too.
Ipv6 works much better with multicast. I learned about it a few years back and it's actually core to the ipv6 protocol. That means all ipv6 routers must support multicast.
There's 2^112 possible global multicast addresses with ipv6 as well (1). Though yeah, you'll still have queuing overloads as well and other issues.
I'm a big IP v6 fan but the multicast improvements are oft overstated. The meat and potatoes changes are about getting rid of broadcasts in a LAN (in a way where a dumb switch will still treat them as broadcast anyways), not about actual routing of multicast between LANs. There is no requirement IPv6 routers must support routing multicast outside of the LAN (a completely different task). There is no public assignment of ff00::/8, it's still a free for all for generic streams. There's nothing that makes routing it across LANs easier to scale and orchestrate (in fact the protocols for this are separate from IP anyways).
Effectively, the only real "improvement" for the routed multicast case is you have more private multicast addresses to pick from.
Yeah, it’s unfortunate multicast outside your own LAN isn’t more well supported. It makes sense as it’d require more orchestration above IP.
Though I’d argue that 112 bits of random addresses makes the need for global registration largely unnecessary. Similarly to the rest of IPv6, the address is intentionally so large that it allows random IP generation with very low collision probability.
Global registration is more about "a way to orchestrate who's allowed to send data to the ff00::1234 group" than "I hope we don't accidentally overlap!". It's the same reason we assign IPv6 unicast space to entities even though random generation could work almost all of the time.
Pushing packets in software is generally brutal but multicast/broadcast should be inherently easier. It's less "copy this packet 27 times" and more "instead of receiving 27 packets and sending 27 packets you receive 1 packet and send it 27 times before you remove it from memory". The "hard" part becomes dealing with the queues filling up because you're inherently able to churn out so much more data than you're able to receive vs unicast.
I wonder if it opens up new opportunities erasure coding replacements, e.g. RAID for disks, PARQ2 for data recovery, or as Reed-Solomon replacements for comms?
These sorts of codes are not really the thing you want for RAID-N. They work best with coding groups of thousands of packets or more.
For adding redundant blocks to a read-mostly/only file (e.g. to correct for sector errors) they could be useful indeed. as that's a case where you might have a few dozen correction packets protecting millions. I'd really like to see some FS develop support for file protection because on SSDs I'm seeing a LOT more random sector failures that disk failures.
RS codes are optimal for erasures so you really only want to use something else where there are so many packets in the group that RS code performance would be poor... or where a rateless code would be useful.
For comms it's better since raptorq can generate a large number of symbols. One use would be a TCP replacement. If a file can be transmitted in 100 TCP packets, and there's 10% loss on the link, then the client needs to retry the lost packets in order.
With raptorq, the client needs to receive 102 packets (I believe). And this can be any combination of original 100 packets and the large number of potential recovery packets.
These are cute, but another sign that Unicode is straying from their original mandate which was to represent characters already in use in other systems (and to help bootstrap under-digitized languages to become digital).
Stop adding random emoji. Don't add fictional languages, no matter how cool. Don't do.. this.
By continuing to extend Unicode like this, they risk diluting their core purpose and creating unnecessary complexity. Unicode should remain focused on its original goal and not cater to niche or novel additions.
EDIT: I'm certain there's a proposal submitter out there that contorted the argument beyond the reasonable point that these existed in an old Usborne programming book text as inline images and need to be represented. I'm going to try to hunt it down.
I'm definitely supportive of the original "Symbols for Legacy Computers" effort. We've been able to make great use of it in the llvm-mos toolchain for legacy systems; we can directly encode special characters for these computers directly in the UTF-8 source text of modern C++, then use C++ user-defined string literals to convert them to their original byte codes. It's an aid to hobbyist use and preservation of these systems, and thankfully, there's a relatively small fixed number of them to support, especially relative to the space available in Unicode. It should unlock quite a few of these kinds of projects for exploring and experiencing the history of computing.
There's a lot of discussion about this; practically changing the execution character set isn't trivial, and it's not necessarily even a desirable feature. Even with full -fexec-charset support, it still makes sense to provide compile-time translation from Unicode to target strings. For example, Commodore PETSCII makes vastly more sense as an execution character set than a source character set.
> practically changing the execution character set isn't trivial, and it's not necessarily even a desirable feature
I think it should be unnecessary to convert the character set; the execution shouldn't care about the character set except for ASCII and for whatever you program yourself in what the specific program you are writing is doing. It should not need to be a subset of Unicode, either; you should be able to use any character set that is a superset of ASCII (and where bytes in the ASCII range always mean ASCII characters and bytes not in the ASCII range always mean non-ASCII characters) (UTF-8 has this property and therefore may be used, but it is not the only character encoding with this property).
The C preprocessor is limited in its capabilities, although it would be helpful to add extra steps both before and after the preprocessor runs, which can transform character encodings, but also can be useful for other purposes too. (With GCC, I think this could be done by -no-integrated-cpp and -wrapper; I don't know about doing with Clang.)
(GCC will convert input to UTF-8 during preprocessing, but at least with the version of GCC that I have does not actually care if it is valid UTF-8 (at least for C; maybe not for C++ but I have not tried it), which is fortunate, since this means that you can implement your own character code handling.)
In the case of C++, as described there, you can use user-defined literals. They shouldn't require user-defined literals to be UTF-8 (nor Unicode), although if you can do whatever calculation you want on them at compile-time, then you can treat them as UTF-8 if you want to, but shouldn't be required to do so. (Personally, I do not use C++, though; so I do not actually know all of the details about how it is working, so I may have made a mistake.)
(There are several reasons you might deliberately not want UTF-8. One of them is security issues with the complicated text rendering involved with Unicode. Another might be the way that character widths are working. And there are many other possibilities, too. You might also prefer to put all non-ASCII text in a separate file; the #embed command can be used if you want to embed it into the program anyways, I suppose.)
> Even with full -fexec-charset support, it still makes sense to provide compile-time translation from Unicode to target strings.
Maybe, but I should think that this compile-time translation should be done separately as described above, and to be programmable to not be limited to only Unicode. It should not be required; I think it would be sensible that by default it should just pass through directly without conversion regardless of what the character set is.
> For example, Commodore PETSCII makes vastly more sense as an execution character set than a source character set.
I agree, but that is because Commodore PETSCII is not a superset of ASCII which is encoded as a superset of ASCII. The reason for this has nothing to do with Unicode.
The real question is why don't we just have a <begin SVG> and <end SVG> Unicode tag, and let people go to town with whatever they want in the glyph space. It seems like that's what people really want? What are the down-sides? Sending obscene characters becomes easier. You lose the "meaning", since maybe Apple's version of the unicorn horse-shoe (unicorn-shoe?) has a different SVG encoding than Google's. Security-type denial-of-service-issues, with people rendering Mandelbrot fractal glyphs?
Well, they tried multiple times! Some tried a direct image, some tried a compact hash of images that should be known in advance ("Coded Hashes of Arbitrary Images"), another tried a direct mapping to Wikidata entities ("QID emojis"). They ultimately failed because... yeah, they would have been much more difficult to implement than what we have right now.
This wouldn't have worked for the llvm-mos use case I mentioned; the actual identity is the useful part. I'd expect each of these symbols was associated with a numeric code on a legacy computing platform, and having a Unicode assignment makes it possible to machine-convert text from these systems to and from Unicode.
The thing is that, additional emojis and mere symbols like these are technically much easier to add than under-digitized languages which require much more research. (The initial introduction of emojis wasn't easy, let me clarify.) These characters are just another entry to the code chart and Unicode character database without any additional mechanism to fit. So it should be okay as long as there are not too many characters added in this way.
Reply to EDIT: People who made the proposals are already well known in Unicode and they know what they are proposing. Michael Everson for example is responsible for encoding many other writing systems other than such symbols.
The main reason to add new emoji is that it gets people to update their Unicode standards / phone OSes / etc. Otherwise they won't care enough to get the other less interesting stuff.
Who's "people"? Consumers aren't gonna buy a new phone just to get U+22E5B VOMITING MALE PLATYPUS WITH DESCENDER, and system implementers are free to add the new emoji and ignore everything else in the standard.
In general, I think new emoji is going to be more persuasive to the average person to update than 'bugfixes to VCard deserialisation in the Contacts app' or the other usual release notes.
Oh yes they are going to buy a new phone for that, at least if their friends send it to them and they can't see it. But mostly it just encourages them to install new free OS updates sooner.
Reminder: U+22E5B is an actual Unicode character, namely 𢹛 (which comes from Hanyu Dacidian and I have no further public information available, but anyway). New emoji usually goes into the specific portion of the Plane 1 so U+1Fxxx would have been more believable ;-)
What kind of complexity is actually entailed by adding additional codepoints? Does it require changes to the structure and composition of the encoding, or is it just more stuff that's exactly the same in form as the other stuff?
I agree. Unicode needs to be splitted in two: one serious part focusing on the original mission and real world documented scripts, the other doing whatever it wants with stupid emojis.
These were added precisely because they were in use in older systems, so I don't see what you're complaining about here. The emoji expansion is annoying, but this isn't an instance of that; this is specifically adding characters from legacy computing character sets for compatibility purposes.
WRT representing characters already in use, are the powerline characters, widely used in the wild, standardized yet? They are rather few, and abstract.
https://old.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1b55686/maybe_possible...
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