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If it were me I'd get hold of the 1k pagers, modify them, then work out a way to get that shipment of pagers to Hezbollah.

That way your risk in the chain is limited to the swapping shipment step. Doing some sort of factory based modification seems fraught with risks of being uncovered.

Or you could set up a puppet company in Hungary for the purposes of selling pagers to your enemies, install the charges during production, and bide your time.

How many innocent people were hurt physically by this stunt? How many more were given severe mental injuries from seeing someone explode while going about their happy normal lives? Israel isn’t helping their reputation or their standing as an innocent party in a rough neighbourhood.

Sounds from some reports like the pagers were manufactured under licence in Hungary - Orban's hatred of all things Islam is pretty well-documented.

All speculation, of course.

^^ Snap

Israel isn’t helping their reputation or their standing as an innocent party

I think that ship sailed long ago

"AI" is going to have societal changing consequence long before we get to Skynet; arguably that whole line of thinking misses the very real threat that these systems pose right now

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/09/due-to-ai-fakes-the-deep-doubt-era-is-here/

Pagers? Why would anyone still be using a pager

They afford you comms, without necessarily disclosing your location.
They don't rely on pinging a mobile base station.
AIUI.

Apparently there were suspicions that they were previously being targeted based off mobile phone location triangulation - I believe pagers are one way (i.e. they don't communicate back to a mast). Makes you wonder if planting that suspicion itself was part of the whole thing

Yes, to the extent the Environment Agency is planning for the next Thames Barrier.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahya_Ayyash

I wonder if it’s possible that a hardware flaw was exploited via software to make lithium batteries explode. Not sure what the relative energies involved are but causing hardware to self destruct via a software attack is proven tech (stuxnet).

A straightforward detonator has sufficient high explosive in it to spoil your day. You have the container, power source, detonator and the pager itself is the switch. It's all very Q Branch.

Also pagers probably have some spare space in them that clearly went unnoticed.

If you weighed your iPhone and noticed it was 15-20g heavier that published, that would be highly suspicious.

Do you even need a hardware flaw?
If you could inject software that sent the processor into overload could you make the battery explode? [see the “don’t keep your electric bike inside” thread]

If so are we all carrying around potential bombs? An iPhone battery is at least as big as a pager battery.

I, like you, am constantly weighing the electronic devices supplied to me by my friends and associates.

The battery in my phone was this swollen and still didn't explode, I suspect it takes a lot to make them explode.

Reports are that they had ~ 15-20g of military explosive in them.

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"I grew up in a middle class family but I became working class when I was 16 working in McDonalds".

Good article thanks for sharing. TLDR reliance on media as being inherently accurate/true has caused everyone to turn their brains off and the answer to fake media is to turn your brain back on again..

This was an interesting watch on these lines.

https://youtu.be/xoVJKj8lcNQ

I buy mine from randomly selected ebay sellers second hand while wearing sunglasses and my cap pulled down.

No

No, lithium batteries don’t explode, they flare. The images we’ve seen clearly demonstrate that these pagers exploded, so there was definitely some kind of explosive in them.

Walkie Talkies now exploding in second wave of bombs?

What next, Smart appliances?

I'm keeping my 2004 Bosch washing machine running for as long as possible. And adopting a retired sniffer dog from the explosives unit.