Using a Pager in the 21st Century
dmitryelj.medium.com
dmitryelj.medium.com
I was surprised to find that, as the article mentions, there's basically only one place to buy new pagers -- and they're quite expensive. After thinking about it some more, I realized that what I really wanted was a separate phone number that my team could send SMS messages to. And I didn't even need to build my own pager-like device out of a RasPi or something; I could just buy a cheap flip phone. Total cost for phone and 1000 SMS messages is <$100.
The issues other people are describing with insecurity and lack of ack could also be resolved. The backend server that accepts messages could even support WCTP for backwards compatibility.
I'm thinking of building a Pager with the pygo2 once it finally hits the market: https://pycom.io/product/pygo2/
It's got LTE-M which is perfect for this, and LoRa and SigFox as backup. A year's service is about $40
Unfortunately it's not untracked like the old pagers were but in return it should do confirmations and even replies somehow. I'll have to add a beeper/vibration motor and a stronger battery perhaps but I think it'll work.
BSOH proverb
- Whitelisting my messaging app means I'd still get pinged for non-emergency messages
- Enforcing the block at the software level makes it too easy for me to disable it when the temptation arises. My current setup forces me to walk upstairs, flip the switch, then wait multiple minutes for the router to boot.
It would also take a lot more effort to set up, and time is money!
That's a good plan. Tracfone is roughly $10 a month for a smartphone, but what I wish existed was (a) a really cheap device and plan that was SMS-only and (b) people would only use SMS.
I'm damn sick of Fidelity leaving messages for no doubt wondrous investment advice and robocalls for appliance and car warranty programs. That's 99% of the voice calls that I get.
While the SMS integration is going away soon, you will still be able to use (I think) SMS from within the app and while the terms of service disallow automation, my understanding is that is mostly only for outgoing texts (they don't want Google Voice users spamming the world) rather than incoming (I don't see why Google Voice would be against you doing whatever you want with the texts you receive).
I suspect the reason why carriers allow these spam calls and texts is they make money from all calls and texts and have no incentive to fix things.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/03/09/google-voice-wont-f...
I use SMS-via-email very frequently, and was rather worried. Thankfully that will stay.
SMS forwarding to a local number's SMS hasn't been possible for me anyway, because my local number is not in the US. At one point I had a setup with Google Calendar forwarding my emails to SMS, but that got shut down in 2019 (to my dismay).
https://www.ghacks.net/2018/11/19/google-removes-sms-notific...
A year of unlimited talk/text from Liberty Wireless (a T-Mobile MVNO) costs $60.^1 Then, use call barring/do not disturb to disable incoming calls and USSD codes^2 to turn off call forwarding. You now have a phone number that effectively only supports SMS.
I'd also recommend going with this plan if you are addicted to the Internet and just want a phone, but don't want to pay through the nose for something like the Punkt^3.
As far as only using SMS, sending/forwarding emails through SMS is doable (for now), so if your people's comms can be converted to email, you can use SMS for those as well.
Unfortunately, the naive solution of sending outgoing mail requires MMS (and therefore data), but you can send SMS to a Google Voice number, for example, which can be set up to forward a copy of the message to an email, which can then be used for triggering control events locally. YMMV.
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1 - https://www.ebay.com/itm/174582899616
2 - https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/self-service...
(which is evident when you read the article, but not called out explicitly)
This is a big deal for any use which involves private/sensitive/confidential data, as it can inform eavesdroppers about current issues, internal tools/architecture, personnel status, etc.
For example, do you want to know when a major cloud company is having an internal outage? Listen for pages which follow their internal notification format. Or maybe you want to know if a critical patient at a hospital is having troubles - listen for pages to their doctor. Does the military command center use pagers (I hope not) - that could be interesting too...
If your employer is using pagers, raise this issue to their security team (and share this great page showing how easy it is to eavesdrop). At the least, the pager messages should be as vague/simple as possible while still being useful. At the best...don't use pagers.
Pagers are already a poor choice - messages are delivered "with best effort" but there's no guaranteed sending, no receipt, no retries. If you're out of range (or signal blocked), the message is lost, and it's up to the sender to implement their own ack & retry system.
(I carried a pager for work for almost 15yrs)
They were pretty good towards the end of their reign when 2-way pagers came out. We were able to easily implement something where the system would keep paging you until you responded with an "I've got it" ack or a "Hand it off to the secondary" response, both of them an easy pick-list item.
Pagers used to be used by millions of people, in thousands of companies. 99.999% of the messages sent would have been utterly mundane. Stuff like 'call the office' or 'go to place x'.
Just like our chat platforms of today, the data just isn't that interesting.
Pagers were good for the era they were invented for, and at scale ended up being almost free to operate for the companies that used them.
Encrypting stuff requires CPU grunt that pagers simply did not have, especially when the driver was to have as long battery life as possible.
If anything, I miss that simpler era when we didn't have to assume that everybody in the chain was a bad actor trying steal our information.
Plenty of people were listening - there’s an archive from 9/11/01 that was released with many of the pages in lower Manhattan that day.
Police routinely monitored this stuff, and it’s reputed that PIs, ambulance chasing attorneys, etc did the same. Was it relevant/meaningful to when my mom was going to pick me up from work at the mall was a page? Probably not.
One industry that makes extensive use of pagers is health care. Frequently, personal and identifying information (PII) is transmitted over pages. By all rights, this is a violation of privacy laws (e.g. HIPAA).
Why does a desire for privacy constitute paranoia?
Pagers aren't only a technology of yesteryear -- they're still in use by millions of hospital staff. Despite the availability of cheap & easy strong crypto today, the technology is still stuck in the past. I'd wonder why, but upgrading infrastructure is expensive and it will probably take a class-action suit to make continued privacy violations more expensive than upgrades.
I'm a doctor, and whilst I despise carrying a pager it does have some benefits over more modern alternatives in some scenarios.
Mobile (cell) reception in hospitals is generally very poor and wifi connectivity is also generally poor. Trying to rely on either of those to deliver critical communication (e.g. bleeps to the crash team to respond to a cardiac arrest) is more unreliable than the hospital blasting a simple radio signal that any pagers within a few mile radius will always receive and decode appropriately.
For less critical communications (e.g. where you might bleep someone to contact them to a refer a patient to their specialty) there is a (slow) move towards messaging apps or email. These solutions do not yet have the immediacy and reliability of a simple pager for critical applications.
I see other commenters mentioning some PHI is being shared via pagers and I am unclear what that may be ?
1. Sending the number of a telephone extension you want the recipient of the bleep to call. For example, if I need a cardiology opinion, I will bleep the cardiologist with a telephone extension and wait for them to (hopefully) call back while I am still but he phone and before it is called by anyone else. This data is not sensitive. These are the types of bleeps which are being replaced slowly by asynchronous communication via apps
2. Emergency bleeps which are designed to alert a specific group of people on the arrest team to respond to an emergency. These usually work quite differently. Instead of 1:1 they are 1:many and usually carry a different alert tone, followed by a (generally poor quality) audio alert of the operator saying something like "paediatric cardiac arrest inbound to ED, ETA, 5 minutes". Again these carry no sensitive data.
https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/id/security/news/vulnerabil...
basically, they broadcast patient name, initial diagnosis etc
Maybe countries like the UK and Canada are more strict about personal health information and have kept personal info out of pagers? I know working in healthcare systems in Canada I would get in trouble even if I used a medical software to look myself up in it.
However being a 911 dispatcher for the EMS system here I can say that our radios are not encrypted and can be listened to online by anyone. We mention addresses, chief complaints, and anything else that may be relevant for the paramedics. Patient names would not be given over radios nor would other private info like if the building has an access code. Anything that is private like that is indicated to the paramedics by saying something like "call for access code". Then they call the landline and get the info that way.
In my opinion though, knowing addresses and medical conditions going on can still be a bit sensitive in nature. The police here recently switched to encrypted radios. It was nice sometimes to listen to the scanner, but at the same time it's understandable why it's less than ideal having open radios.
It's kinda hard also to figure out which areas may be doing it and which aren't as the different provinces are kinda run independently.
There are a lot of other issues with them though. There are few companies supplying them so they are actually very expensive. Consequently in our publicly funded health service they are not replaced often and many are in a poor state with batteries held in by tape etc.
The main issues from perspective as a user is the synchronous model of communication that they enforce. Unless something is an emergency, it's an unnecessarily disruptive workflow.
There are usually a limited number of phones on a ward, which are usually very busy lines. Using pagers for routine communication means:
1. Physically move myself to a location with a phone 2. Wait for phone to be free 3. Call a number to send the bleep 4. Wait for a response (bearing in mind the recipient needs to be free, move to a phone, wait for that phone to be free, and call back) 5. Guard the phone from others using it until I receive the call 6. Hope that no one else calls the phone in the meantime
Bearing in mind that everyone is always busy in hospital this is a huge source of frustration and wasted time, hence the move towards secure messaging apps for these scenarios. Unfortunately these are mostly being built as silos rather than interoperable communication networks.
As mentioned above, for actually alerting a group of people to an emergency when you need an immediate response, pagers are still hard to beat.
We have alternative secure voice/data communication, but they tend to either be bulky or have strict storage and carry restrictions.
Would love a small reliable pager system to carry on our person that would simply let us know to check in.
All of the pager architecture in the US seems to have disappeared in the marketplace.
That doesn’t sound like mission-critical levels of reliability.
Grab a $10 rtlsdr and free software and you're set. Back in the 90s you needed serious hardware to do this.
edit: looks like someone bolted AES onto FLEX: https://americanmessaging.net/elite/
Never break these illusions. Keep your mouth shut.
The response: doctors could use a phone to receive urgent notifications but the lower delivery guarantee for messages meant that they wouldn't be covered by their hospital's malpractice insurance for cases arising from late or non receipt of messages.
Not sure if true but could be a strong incentive to ignore security complaints.
At one point I was interested to know if there were versions of the paging technology (for some critical application?) that tried to solve this by issuing multiple redundant messages over some amount of time, and the pager ignoring the redundant ones after the 1st one had been received?
Also would be interesting to hear how the many companies "divided up" cities, etc. to create a network.
I remember there used to be some convoluted way of dialing into a pager service and keying the numbers/text that you wanted to be shown on the recipient's screen, but have long forgotten it.
This is in fact how pagers work.
I used to have a basic pager in the 80's when I was on call for BT / Dialcom
Outside of work, I’ve actually had to page him a few times: my family has season tickets for Northwestern Wildcats football games, and he has the tickets. If I arrive to the game late, I’d need to call or page him to come down and give me the tickets. It’s not a problem when the opponent is a small school that doesn’t travel well, but when a school like Nebraska or Ohio State show up in Evanston, cell service goes to shit (imagine having 47000 people in a suburban neighborhood).
I page him and it works like a charm.
What does that mean?
The only time I've had to use a pager was to support a static data server for an investment bank (partly written by me) which was used by London, Tokyo, HK and NY. Being woken up in the middle of the night I could take (grumpily) but logging on to the bank's systems from home was a thing of Byzantine horror. Anyway, we re-wrote the scripts to page someone who would be at the desk in the appropriate timezone, and all they normally had to do was the classic "turn it off and on again" reboot of the server, or phone one of us in London in extremis.
Basically, I need a small device that can fit in a pocket, with a long battery life, a simple display, and a few buttons. Bonus points if it's cheap and easily hackable.
What are the options?
- Adding items remotely
- Automatic item sorting
- Pre-made lists
Bike thefts though, they are a serious issue that I plan my life around.
January 2019, 32 shootings
January 2020, 50 shootings
January 2021, 104 shootings
It doesn't help that Portland de-funded the gang enforcement team a while ago. It also doesn't help that some are agitating to abolish the police entirely.
Now Portland is making a big deal of getting FBI and state help to deal with this growing problem.
Yes, it's an anecdote, but you can find many similar anecdotes from all around the country.
When my wallet was pickpocketed I searched the bins in the nearby metro stations and found 6 wallets with ID cards etc and many phone cases (a stolen phone is much less identifiable without its case). Sadly I never found mine. I live here so I'm used to it but even then they can catch you off-guard.
They used ram for persistent storage because the battery life was so long (due to a very slow dragon ball CPU and those dot-matrix displays.)
The palm III was probably one of the best hand-held computers ever made, if there were a way to put a modern modem in it to get texts I would probably use that instead of my phone.
After unending frustration with Siri and grocery lists, I just went back to paper. It works brilliantly. The "shared list" is my wife texting me things to add to the list, and I immediately take the piece of paper out of my wallet and write stuff on it.
I've been using phones, computers, PDA's, and electronic organizers for grocery lists for decades, and none have worked as well, or been as useful as a piece of folded paper.
But there are some things I would like to improve, see [1].
I believe see also "bullet journal."
It would be fantastic to have something that is basically a half-sized palm pilot (say, 4" tall, 2" wide), eink/memory lcd, and the ability to rotate (not automatically.) There's probably a digital price tag that could work for the screen.
When I was using my Pebbles more often, it was great to be out and never check my phone for anything. Back in the day we could have set responses -- but as the years go on, we lose some functionality. The Rebble project will probably fix this one day.
Just curious :)
One thing I've wondered about is if there is even any pager network coverage where I live. I suspect yes but I don't know of any coverage maps or that sort of thing.
Ex, here are the coverage maps for SPOK who bought out USA Mobility: https://www.spok.com/solutions/paging-services/wide-area-pag...
At the same time, the reason they’re still used is there’s no good modern alternative in a lot of ways (battery life, range).
Troubleshooting paging issues is one thing I do not miss from my time in healthcare I.T.
The pager I had in 2003 has a signal strength indicator just like a cell phone so you know if you are in range.
The pager was also able to let the network know if the message was received. If it didn't, the network would keep retrying until it got an ACK.
You couldnt just use the 'I had no signal' excuse.
There wasn't cross country roaming for pagers though, I don't think.
Pagers hung in for a long time because they had far better coverage than cell phones. I don't know if that's still the case.
At those frequencies you have significantly less bandwidth but pages were expensive so they weren't used for idle chitchat. That made it work with the low bandwidth available.
And there really wasn't that much because with one-way pagers as used in Europe, all messages had to be sent out all over the entire country! Because the network had no way of knowing in which area a pager would be. So all you had was a 2400 bit/s stream for all nationwide users. That's why they made it so expensive.
When it beeps, I hop on the computer and ack via web interface, alternatively I can ack back via sms. The whole point is that I need to be able to look at a system immediately so internet access is a requirement during oncall rotation.
It’s a single purpose device and it works great, I highly recommend it!
I'm commenting about :
> Alas, many pages and links, created 20 years ago, are now not available — a well known “link rot” problem occurs when it’s going about things made 20 years ago.
But then there also were some very cursed Soviet encodings that only had those Cyrillic letters that don't have identically-looking Latin counterparts: https://habr.com/ru/post/547820/
I know it. English is not my native language, nor I reside in an English speaking country.
We still have, like all countries in the world, a latinized phonetic version of our words.
And we also can, even if we don't speak english, learn to understand a few words like "COME TO OFFICE", "FIRE ALERT", etc...
You do know, for example, that traffic towers all over the world speak to pilots, whether their country, in English?
Heck, same way people all over the world, not speaking english, nonetheless learn to use all kinds of non-localized app menus that they have to use (they just memorize and contextualize stuff like "File", "Edit", "Save as" etc).
>And yes, pagers that use other encodings do exist.
Sure, but they're not a necessity (as was implied) to use a pager in a non-english country. We got by without those in the past, even in our "not english speaking" countries...
I feel bad for the all the non-programmers in your country if this is a common attitude. Pretty much every single native English speaker agrees that the Latin alphabet is an inadequate alphabet and that it's unreasonable to force others to learn English, but for some reason programmers act like a bunch of monks defending the Vulgate Bible any time you ask them to make functioning software that supports their own fricken language.