The forgotten war on beepers | Hacker News Reader

The forgotten war on beepers

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In the 90's, I was a project manager for a software consulting company. I carried a beeper onsite so my superiors could reach me when needed (e.g. to discuss growing the account). During a lunch meeting one day, two of my bosses at the consulting company suggested that I upgrade to a cell phone, like they had done. I said I was reluctant to do that, because I valued my independence and didn't want to be on a short leash. They both immediately agreed that since they now carried cell phones, their wives called them too often for annoying requests, like stopping to get milk on the way home. I was a bit shocked, because I was talking about them, not my wife, but I didn't say anything more. (I got a cell phone shortly after anyway.)

There were several years where having BOTH was desirable. Cell service was expensive, and battery life was short, so many folks carried a beeper that was always on, and a phone they turned on if they needed to make a call and had no land line option.

I've never understood the "it's a leash" thing. Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.

> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.

Oh, so you've never had the "why didn't you pick up/ call back/ answer my text/ etc" conversation with your partner? Lucky...

Not at our house. We decided early on that the phone was for the owner not everybody else. One of my sons even leaves it in a drawer, takes it out once a day to check.

That’s pretty cool. Your son has a better relationship to technology than a lot of adults. Probably reflects some good parenting, nice work.

“we” — you mean that you decided for your family, removing agency from other humans

I’m having a hard time understanding how allowing each person to use their phone as they please is removing their agency.

If you can't decide what is better for your kid, maybe you shouldn't be a parent.

I'm finding that the most stridently-held views on parenting tend to come from non-parents

Everybody else seems to accept that it's an endless series of tweaks, adjustments and highly context-specific compromises

> I'm finding that the most stridently-held views on parenting tend to come from non-parents

In this case is it the children ?

Sure, we have that discussion and I answer and we set clear boundaries.

> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.

Do you though? Because people on the other end will often demand you respond to them if you have your mobile phone with you. This is why people consider it a leash.

Fuck 'em.

Several of us are not the top dog in our hierarchies and can suffer consequences for telling our superiors to fuck off

Grow a back bone. You can paraphrase "fuck off" in a nice but firm way, which is called setting a boundary. And if you dont' set them yourself, others will set them for you.

How do they know if you have the phone if you don’t pick up?

Because they see you're active on WhatsApp or telegram :)

I switched off the blue tickmarks in WhatsApp and even that really triggered people.

Can't you just read messages from the Notification Center if you want to avoid it showing up as "read"?

But then anyone else that can see my phone screen can read them :)

You mean the message contents, or that you received a notification at all? On both ios and android you should be able to configure the notification so the contents are not shown, so it shows that there's a notification from whatsapp but not the message itself.

> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them.

You are right. However, a ringing phone in the mid-to-late 20th century created a ton of tension and was a movie trope. People felt obligated to respond to what they assumed was a human being on the other end.

Obviously, this obligation to respond has been diluted with robodialers and mixed messaging methods.

True. Conversations were dropped as soon as a phone rang. Mind you, this was also because most people didn't even have a caller ID display or answering machine so if you didn't answer you had no idea who had called. The curiosity factor was strong. These days I don't answer when I don't recognise the number.

The expectation of actually catching someone was much lower than these days though. Because of course not being at home meant not being reachable.

There's was also this unwritten rule about not calling people too late, which doesn't really happen anymore in my circles since people can now see whether you're active (eg on WhatsApp) and switch their phone on DnD when they sleep anyway.

Every communication channel fills with spam. Unless there's a direct disincentive like the cost of a Fedex overnight envelope, or strong moderation marketers/spammers will eventually comprise the majority of volume. Sometimes it's the "content" "creators" themselves who fill the channel with native advertising and clickbait.

> and battery life was short

In the mid-'90s and 2000s phone batteries lasted longer than they do today, assuming the regular usage of the day.

Pretty sure they're talking a few years earlier than mid-90s. Think brick-like phones, not phones that fit in your pockets.

Maybe, it's not out of the question that some would do that but I've never had the feeling it was common or desirable even then. GP referenced the '90s hence my guess.

A late '80s Micro TAC, especially with the fat battery, still easily qualified for my previous description. You'd have to go to the early '80s brick phones to get just 1h of talk time from a charge but then again realistically very few people actually talked that much on the mobile in those days when even the networks would have severely limited you. The real sticking point is more that turning off the phone to cut standby time wouldn't have really saved anything for talking time within a day, until you had the time to recharge.

I think the worst thing was the memory effect, where instead of conserving battery you'd actively try to drain it when you had the time so you could charge it from 0.

Or, rather than worry about draining it to 0 before charging every day like you would a few years later once you wanted your phone to be on all day, you could only turn it on to return beeper messages, thus allowing many days of use before getting to 0 and recharging. That's the time period original commenter was talking about, and why it's different to the mid 90s / early 00s.

It wasn't many years that this made sense, but during the early 90s (and I think some of the 80s but not so sure) it was quite common to pair beeper for incoming with phone for outgoing. (At least in the UK, but I don't see why it would've been different somewhere like USA either.)

One of the earliest labor principle is "if you can do it, you'll be forced to do it". Sometimes adding your capability will result in more burden to you instead of less. This is why sometimes it's a good idea to hide the fact that you're good with computer to your family; lest you become their tech support.

I really liked that the phone was mine, work didn't call me. The pager was for work, and they had to use that to get me to come in for issues. Nice clean separation.

I have actually enjoyed having both at previous jobs. If you’re oncall and you use your phone to receive oncall pages, you can’t turn it off or turn off notifications or even silence it. Having a separate physical device you can receive pages on keeps you less tied to your phone.

If I end up in this situation again I might try and get a cheap burner phone and only install the pager app on it.

...and some early cell phones couldn't even receive incoming calls so you still had to have a pager. Even after this was fixed it took a few years for incoming calls to work reliably when you were outside your home area.

I had the same thought process in the 90s, and it is the reason why I still don't have a smartphone :)

Isn't it difficult to exist in modern society without one?

Getting a mainstream email account is now impossible without one!

How far we’ve fallen since the days when usernames were opaque numbers and anonymity was prized.

I’m aware that Google and some others require phone number verification for account creation these days, but do they actually require a smartphone?

Also you really don’t need a Google account to live correctly, especially if you don’t even own a smartphone.

Honestly if you were able to live without a phone until now, living without Gmail (or what you call a mainstream email) is pretty easy.

There are still plenty of email providers left and right that will allows you to subscribe without a phone number. You’ll probably have to pay though. What may be harder in this precise use case is getting a domain name (which is not mandatory but really helpful if you want to be able to switch providers easily) but I’m pretty sure you can still register domains with a landline number.

I've been maintaining my own mail server for almost 20 years. The thing though, I found that sometimes I end up needing to use one of the bigger email providers like gmail, apple mail, etc because otherwise my mail is classified as spam.

only if you don't have everything you need already

Only because people like you keep repeating that lie.

What I'm doing is asking a question, as denoted by the "?" glyph at the end of my comment.

The NUMBER 1 most annoying thing about not having a phone in the modern day is ticketing services / events. The second is Uber/Lyft/etc (though less of an issue in cities with public transit).

Can't you print the tickets?

Even here in Denmark that's still an option.

Here in Germany, the "Deutschlandticket", a country-wide public transportation ticket, is currently valid only via smartphone or "Chipkarte" (smart card). Unfortunately that smart card isn't available everywhere and won't be before early next year. It seems rather like a policy snafu then intended though [1].

[1] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Deutschlandtick...

It is intended. The goal by all governments is to "encourage" smartphone usage. That ticket situation is both carrot and stick.

I’ve been seeing more and more events that only have digital tickets. They say it almost like it’s a point of pride… all the paper they’re saving, or something.

Thanksfully in many cities in the world regular taxis do still operate. In my city they aren't necessarily more expensive than Uber. It depends of the kind of route and time of the day/night. Sometimes you pay more, sometimes you pay less.

Probably depends on how digitized things are where they live and how much of that they interact with.

Where I live, going without a phone would be incredibly tedious, as it handles bus and train tickets, tracking for hourly busses, no ATMs within walking distance and it's basically standard for local events to do "sign in" by having you scan a QR code and so on.

Not having a phone would mean budgeting much more time for going anywhere and having to carry change for the bus.

But if you have a car, you get to bypass most of that, no need to worry about tickets or tracking, ATMs don't need to be very local either. Then if you don't really care about attending local events, you get to avoid everything.

If on top of that, if your job is accomodating, you could conceivably go without a phone entirely. My job would crawl to a near stop if my coworkers had to wait for me to be in front of a laptop/desktop to respond to them.

I resisted having a phone at all until 2013. People were amazed even then.

I ended up getting one for development. It proved useful enough that I used it myself, but I've managed to limit usage to WhatsApp (and SMS), web reading (like HN now) and not much else.

Lots of Web stuff (especially financial stuff) requires 2FA so SMS is now more-or-less required.

People have learnt though that my phone is always on silent, and I mostly don't check it during the day. I don't have email on it, and I don't do social media. I treat it as "my device" not as an "interruption device".

Of course the joy of them is that for every person it's different. You can use it whatever way you prefer.

Mines usually on silent too because certain individuals abuse it and I don't like hearing it ping and boop and beep every 30 seconds. None of this is urgent stuff.

I have notifications disabled on everything except for when my credit cards are used, calls and texts. Even then, I have a whitelist for call notifications and a blacklist for text notifications, and silent hours at night that only my mother can bypass. I am no longer bothered by every nagging app or fake urgency.

I do the same. I hate "notifications" and very few things are so potentially important that I need to be interrupted by them. Effectively zero notifications have any real urgency. Also apps and websites treat notifications like an invitation to spam you. I default deny every request for notifications.

I'd very much like if everyone was forced to use buzzer only. The annoyance of people having to let everyone know they have a phonecall which cannot wait is borderline insulting.

You might love Japanese trains where people have to use silent mode (so called māna mōdo), I've always loved this.

Yes, also understandable as "Manner Mode". It came with my Sharp DOCOMO SH-05G tablet-phone!

My phone stays on silent, and I use it more like a pager and email program. I check it it 4 or 5 times a day, but it serves me and I don't serve it. I imagine if I had kids I'd be a bit different with it and not block anything from them, but otherwise, being able to get my attention a few times a day when I check it should be enough for anyone.

As someone younger who grew up in a time where you would get a cell phone during teenage years, I can't say I empathize with your view of "my device" vs "interruption device".

Although there are likely an overwhelming majority of my peers who do have an interruption device phone, I refuse my phone not be My device, and I explicitly buy phones that I know I can customize (unlock bootloaders, flash roms, or simply just know it has the interop capabilities I need to make it my own). Where this is in opposition with your statement is that I do have social media, mail and even work email on my phone, I just chose to customize it to not be interrupting to work and personal life (though obviously that line is different for everyone).

Of course I'm not saying your way is wrong at all, just sharing my experience.

Not GP but this thread is great. I was among the first in my city school to get a cell phone and text in ~2001, and then the last to get an iPhone in ~2015, and then stop carrying it most of the time in ~2016/in airplane mode and then cease to have a cell phone at all in ~2022. Texting kinda ceased after 2013 when I moved states temporarily and went thru some stuff, never resumed.

I'm notoriously unreachable, perhaps even offensively unreachable, and I'm starting to look for time and money savings to justify getting a new one/repairing the SE if possible. Eg. I'd save $10+/mo in Starbucks refills if I had that app, enough of those cases to cover the bill.

My next phone will be like parent poster's. I had iOS setup with no notifications except Venmo and a priority email alias. Currently I'm using an Unbuntu laptop where I can get to Google Voice that was activated with a Mint Mobile trial on Starbucks wifi. Am homeless, actually been able to secure and hold a couple labor/hospitality jobs like this.

Keep strong!

In my organization all people have work phones, but they are rarely used to call people. When I get a call from coworkers it is usually emergency stuff where it makes sense for them to call me — rarely outside of my work hours. All the rest are emails or chat messages, which I can read when I decide to do so.

I am okay with that.

Although a smartphone related work horror story I heard once, was somebodies boss who communicated the plans for the week for 12 employees in one 40 minute rambling speech message, which may or may not involve crucial need-to-know information at minute 35 and 30 seconds of information that affected you.

Alternatively, we get better at ignoring notifications.

The same way people somewhat adapted to urban noise by better insulation and noise proofing, having a phone in dnd most of the time is I think a must nowadays.

You still can pay attention when you want, potentially at some regular intervals you set for yourself, and ignore it the rest of the time.

For your appreciation: <http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/incremental-progress>

This is always such a weird flex. There are so many things I use my smartphone for, 99.9% of which is NOT being a short leash for anyone to communicate with me. I can't remember the last time I had a conversation on my phone.

Spotify/Audible/etc in my car. Google maps/Apple maps. When I go camping I have overlanding/camping/blm apps that are constantly updated with openings, etc. Weather apps so I know to put the top of my jeep/car on to not get rained in. Uber/Lyft of which I use multiple times a week. Bank apps. Investment apps. Checking the news/hockey/whatever when I'm out and about. Looking up facts my friends and I argue over while knocking back beers. Checking to see if anyone has stolen/broken into my car. Launching my botvac. Controlling my AC from anywhere. Plex..

Everyone survived without them, sure, but everyone survived without computers for a long time and now they've given us massive convenience.

It's far more a computer in my pocket than a telephone.

Wow, I get exhausted just reading the list of things you can do on your phone, let alone doing it myself :)

Everyone has a boss

To be fair, that is exactly what happens now except most of it is on WhatsApp :)

This interview on Fresh Air goes into why pagers have continued to be used in hospitals (tl;dr: cell-phone communication gives a faster turnaround, but the lower barrier to communication means that people will go to the on-call person more often than they would with the beeper where they’re more likely to find their own solution).

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...

Well, that article also mentioned the 'other service', i.e. FM, which more readily penetrates buildings and underground facilities and covers wider areas. And if there is a disaster, there's always the danger that remaining cells in the affected area are overcrowded.

Plus SMS, which was used instead of a pager, is not guaranteed to be delivered while this is not the case with beepers.

> their wives called them too often for annoying requests, like stopping to get milk on the way home.

Wouldn't it be more annoying to get home, and then have to go out again to get the milk? What they probably meant was that they didn't ever want to go to the store themselves and wanted their spouse to do it.

I remember learning about these in elementary school. We were sitting in assembly in a room called "The Pod". Listening to rules and administrative things. On the list of banned items never to bring to school, along with drugs, guns, and knives, beepers were listed. I wasn't sure what they were, but from the context and too many cartoons, I assumed they were an explosive device that beeped a few times before blowing up!

beepbeepbeep WHAT THE FU BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! Muahahahahaha! Muahahahahaha! Muahahahahaha!

Kids aren't allowed to have beepers because that implies they have jobs.

And the job in question was always assumed to be "drug dealer".

When I was in high school back in the year 2000, I remember teachers getting pissy (rightfully) when someone's cell phone rang during class.

Personally, I was always thinking...you're in class. Who the hell is calling you and expecting you to answer?

In the late 1990s, my dad attended night classes with other adult learners to earn his MBA. Everywhere he went during those years, my dad had a beeper clipped to his belt for an on-call hospital rotation. During his first week of class, my dad's beeper loudly went off during the middle of the lecture. As my dad scrambled out of the lecture hall to call the number on the little screen, the professor accurately guessed: "You're a doctor, aren't you?"

That is funny, in a way that I feel hard to explain. Something about it being a simpler, more innocent time?

I love that too. You definitely don't see as many of them these days. By 2006 they were kind of a punchline (cf the TV series "30 Rock" and their portrayal as a goofy dead-end tech for weirdos, sold by Dennis Duffy).

This might or might not be an interesting digression (apologies if it's the latter!) but many medical professionals still carry beepers or pagers of some kind. Not like "an app on their phone that will ring your phone at you even through Do-Not-Disturb" (I have one of those), but something that is very recognizably an old school beeper. They often have a SIM card in them, and the newer ones sometimes have wifi as well for redundancy.

My wife is a nurse at a cancer treatment center, she coordinates care for extremely sick people who are getting very specialized treatments and she's kind of the front-line person for dealing with them and project managing emergency situations, so she and all the doctors she work with carry them. I thought it was actually pretty cool :)

I asked her about it once, and apparently the hospital system looked at the more modern app-based paging stuff and decided that while it was cheaper, the reliability hit wasn't worth it to them. The physical hardware for these things is outrageously sturdy, they have a lifespan of like a decade, they're extremely easy to replace. Sure, your wifi might be out or your telephony might be down, but that's a problem your app has to deal with too. Apps are easier to provision, but it's an extra layer of stuff that can go wrong (your phone is getting an update or out of battery, you left it in your car because you were playing music with it and forgot to take it out of the console, it got stolen because phones are recognizably valuable) so they just stuck with the old familiar form factor that does one thing, extremely reliably.

This isn't a criticism of the app-based paging systems or anything; they're quite reliable in my experience. I just thought it was a neat additional data point about the considerations that go in to the thought process about provisioning an alarm for your employees when the alarm almost always means either "I have a time-sensitive question about a patient's ongoing medical emergency" or "your patient is about to die".

Hospitals in my area of the US still use POCSAG pagers, totally unencrypted. They do mention patient information, but I guess the obscurity makes it ok.

> Hospitals in my area of the US still use POCSAG pagers, totally unencrypted. They do mention patient information, but I guess the obscurity makes it ok.

Nope, the obscurity doesn't make it okay. If it takes place over the phone lines, it is arguably exempt from encryption requirements under HIPAA (much like a fax).

Otherwise, they're just turning a blind eye and hoping nobody notices (which is surprisingly common when it comes to HIPAA).

The good news (for them, not for patients) is that, even if they get caught, the maximum fine is $2 million per calendar year per category of violation, so if they're flush enough they don't even need to bother being compliant in this area.

It's over the air, not even phone lines. PDW, SDRSharp, and an rtl-sdr dongle is all that's needed. And yes, there is a lot of patient info in that traffic. It's not illegal for the hospital to broadcast this, and it's not illegal to listen in and decode the signals, but it is very much illegal to do anything with the information gathered.

> It's over the air, not even phone lines. PDW, SDRSharp, and an rtl-sdr dongle is all that's needed. And yes, there is a lot of patient info in that traffic. It's not illegal for the hospital to broadcast this, and it's not illegal to listen in and decode the signals, but it is very much illegal to do anything with the information gathered.

I'm not familiar with this particular technology, which is why I didn't make a definitive claim in my previous comment. But I am quite intimately familiar with HIPAA and related regulations, and I am extremely skeptical of the third sentence you wrote.

Maybe it uses particular spectrum that is considered illegal to tamper with, just like analog cell phone signals, and HIPAA (inappropriately IMHO) leans on that to explain away an exemption from encryption?

Probably: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/interception-and-divulg...

There’s not much to do knowing that a patient pooped and needs to get cleaned up in room 604.

I don't think I have any logs of these any more, but when I was listening on the local hospital's pager traffic, I seem to recall messages that were along the lines of [last name][room number][sexually transmitted disease test is complete]. Surprised me at the time too because I used to do work dealing with processing CDA documents into fhir data and I know how crazy HIPAA can be with PHI/PII, but at the same time these legal frameworks often have carveouts or super serious adoption deadlines that keep getting pushed to next year (and then next year, and then next year).

Not even that much. A flipper can do it

Pocsag is not obscure at all. A $10 rtlsdr and you're set.

Good to know.

At least twice, I've accidentally set my iOS devices to the Do Not Disturb focus mode. First time made me miss a job interview calendar reminder, leading to me (1) learn there's no way to disable this 'feature', the 'do not disturb' focus cannot be deleted, and (2) setting the DnD-focus-mode-specific wallpaper to something radically different from normal just so I'd spot it faster next time. It did happen again, but the second time I knew what was up even on the lock screen and turned the focus back to normal before it did any harm.

> Something about it being a simpler, more innocent time?

Unfortunately, we will probably think the same about 2024 in thirty years...

Certainly. Something with AI will make this all seem like the best of times.

As an “enterprise” developer in the 80’s, we all had beepers to go along with our suits and ties. People often thought we must be doctors, but we were just corporate mainframe developers.

Definitely reminds me of “Dr. Beeper” in Caddyshack

A law firm I worked for in the mid-90s started a helpdesk rotation with five or six of us taking shift with a single beeper. The only real complain was from the three women on the team, who had no belts or pockets to hang the device from (skirts and dresses were mandatory for female employees at the time, and women's clothes rarely have pockets or belts).

A lot of doctors still prefer to carry beepers

More to do with the fact a pager will reach places a phone won't. Operating theatres are often in the basement or the middle of the building where mobile signals don't reach but pager signals do. They're super high power and lower frequency so they penetrate further.

Not entirely:

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...

ah yes, the beeper, more high power than the top end 5g UC flagship phones. because that makes so much sense

> because that makes so much sense

I detect sarcasm, but yes, it does.

The history of phone tech is "can we get more done with less joules?", while a pager is "you have one job".

Even when a pager is implemented on top of normal cellular networks like 3/4/5G, it's still better because there's nothing else on the system to drain the battery.

But it doesn't need to be on those systems at all, it can be an even less 'smart' radio receiver such as POCSAG system, on its own frequency, chosen specifically for getting though concrete etc., and disregarding any concerns about bandwidth because 1.2 kb/s is probably more than it needs.

It actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of pagers operate on lower frequencies (~100 mhz instead of 400 or 700) that can penetrate way deeper than the higher frequencies used by modern phones. Plus the data rate is substantially lower, which acts in the favor of getting reception.

So yeah it makes a ton of sense. These are very different devices operating using different frequencies and protocols.

Pagers are typically unidirectional. So a client's inability to transmit back an ACK deep inside a building is not a constraint. Just crank up the broadcast power on the network side.

it's also due to the fact that the pager can represent a role (on-call cardiologist, for example) and not a specific person

My brother gave me a beeper as a Christmas present in 1996. It was cool, but it got really cool when I bought an 800-number from LDDS Worldcom. The only thing I was charged was (IIRC) 6¢ per minute, and no call setup charge.*

I got paper bills in the mail for $0.34. Friends could page me from a payphone without having to drop a coin.

*(EDIT: I think I misremember a bit. If the call originated from a pay phone, I think I was charged additional for that.)

I had a beeper in high school around the same time, because it came with a voicemail box and was a lot cheaper than a separate phone line. (Around $5/month in 1992 dollars, IIRC.)

It was a way to get messages from friends without my parents and siblings eavesdropping, and despite said siblings monopolizing the home landline.

Forget the beeper. The idea of arresting a child at school for anything (short of maybe violent assault) seems to be madness.

I'm ok with arresting someone who brings a gun or fentanyl, if that means we get them before they can kill someone.

What about shooting a kid for having a water gun?

Edit: fuck me, I was half joking and thought I'd check anyway. What a shit show. Latest case was 5 days ago. https://www.google.com/search?q=American+police+shoot+kid+wi...

Look at the water gun in question though: https://abcnews.go.com/US/traumatizing-family-calls-justice-...

Still sucks that the kid got shot for it, but I can see the confusion, compared to the usual colorful water guns.

That's the thing though, in the civilised world, if you see something like this in the hands of a child, you'd assume it's a toy.

Maybe this is more a reflection of the US being civilized or not, but there are teenage “children” the same size as the kid in this story, using actual guns to commit violent robberies in parts of my city. So it’s not trivial to determine whether an adult-sized human holding a black gun is a threat or not.

This is America; Owning a real gun should not be an acceptable reason to be shot by the police. What the fuck is the point of all the aggressive defense around the second amendment if the second a cop sees a gun they are free to murder people?

Cops are not judge, jury, and executioners, and in fact have zero authority to hand down punishment. Being shot for holding a gun is absurd.

Is it that unreasonable? An adult-sized person was waving a realistic looking gun around and (allegedly) pointing it at houses. Some attempt at deescalation needs to be made, but if that fails, I wouldn’t want the cop to just shrug and leave. I’d expect him to do whatever it takes to remove the gun from this individual.

There’s a huge difference between simply owning a gun vs wandering around in public pointing it at people.

You think fentanyl is magic killing dust? What are you, one of those moronic cops who thinks they'll die from seeing fentanyl?

They only way you're injuring someone with fentanyl is getting them to ingest an unsafe amount of it one way or another. That's not really different from a lot of prescription drugs. Or some OTC ones, like Tylenol. Or lye and many other cleaning agents.

The dose makes the poison. The LD50 for lye is 4,090 (rats) - 6,600 mg/kg (mice). The LD50 for fentanyl is 3.1 mg/kg in rats and 0.03 mg/kg in monkeys. So, very different.

And?

The only way someone is ingesting that accidentally is if a classmate is attempting to poison them. There are a lot of other poisons that can be ingested in small doses if someone is trying to injure you. Fentanyl is not going to leap out of someone's pocket and fly down your throat. It's not magic killing dust.

Accidental drug dosing happens all the time, with things with much larger effective doses. People mix up drugs. Drugs absolutely fall out of people's pockets on a near constant basis.

OP is suffering from the moral panic about fentanyl. It's gotten so ridiculous that cops suffer from a collective begin near it is enough to knock them out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0Vzz_P9JBk

If people wonder how possession worked in the middle ages, look no further than this.

to be fair, i think carfentanil somehow got conflated with fetanyl early in the drug-scare-hype cycle, and carfentanil is pretty deadly.

i do agree with your point though.

I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children. Here's another case I encountered a few weeks ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Brown_case – there are so many things wrong with the entire thing, starting with charging an 11-year old as an adult(!!!) but what really takes the cake is:

"Presiding Judge Dominick Motto of the Lawrence County, Pennsylvania, Common Pleas Court initially denied decertification and transfer to juvenile court because Jordan would not admit his involvement in the crime."

"We're going to punish you harder because you claim to be innocent" What kind of backward clinically insane shitcunt logic is that?! Especially when we're talking about a 11-year old?!

It's no surprise that the "kids for cash" scandal could have continued for years, because the entire system is rotten. In any half-way decent system giving 3 months detention to a 14-year old for making a MySpace parody page of a teacher should have set off every possible alarm bell, and that it didn't is pretty damning for the entire system. Also: what kind of school brings this matter to a judge in the first place...? This along is pretty crazy.

Because it shows no remorse. The reason for reduced sentences for juvenile offenders is the idea that they ‘didn’t know any better’. That they can learn and grow and NOT be a menace to society soon.

If they still refuse to take any ownership or show any contrition even after being clearly shown something was a major problem (hence the court case), then why reduce the penalty? Who would it be helping, exactly?

Remorse for what? Something he didn't do? There is nothing to be remorseful about. This is the sort of non-logic where you're presumed guilty and/or punished for asserting your innocence. Aside from the obvious absurdness of it, it's also literally unconstitutional as it violates your 5th amendment rights, which is why another judge reversed the decision later on. And considering all of this is about an 11-year old makes it that much worse.

If the court finds you guilty, then by definition within the system you did it.

It doesn't mean you actually did, but it does mean the system says you did.

Which is the point of my comment. It doesn't mean it actually makes sense in real life, but it's why the system does what it does.

And the reason why the system will prosecute kids like adults sometimes - the nominal reason is because they don't think it's worth giving them a pass either due to the severe nature of the crime, or because of the lack of contrition of the accused.

If they're actually innocent, then per the system they should get zero penalty eventually regardless of how they are prosecuted.

We know that being held in an adult jail while awaiting trial is a pretty severe penalty in fact of course, which is why it eventually got thrown out that he got treated that way. Plenty of adults get stuck in jail for years while awaiting trial, then get released and theoretically suffered no penalty either. But we also know that is bullshit. No clear better alternatives (except bail) have shown themselves however.

If the kid had been caught on tape murdering a bunch of other kids and still claimed he was innocent, then no one would be objecting that he be put in an adult jail while awaiting trial though. Since putting someone that violent in a juvenile facility is making it as dangerous as an adult one.

Judges have wide discretion to make these calls, and this judge clearly screwed up.

But that's the how and the why.

No one found him guilty of anything at this point. How can they when deciding in which court he should be judged? That happens before the trail. You're talking complete bollocks utterly disconnected from anything to do with this case.

You might want to actually read my comment. He was arrested pending trial. They have to decide where to put him, pending trial.

If the judge expects to try him as an adult for the reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in an adult jail.

If the judge expects to try him as a juvenile for the reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in a juvenile jail.

Either way, someone does have to make the call. And there are circumstances where the call that was made is appropriate.

Since it's 'detention pending trial', if he gets acquitted or charges dropped then per the system he 'suffered no penalty'. Same as anyone else arrested and put on trial. We know that isn't true though, since anyone in jail is still in jail and jail sucks. If he is found guilty, then he gets transferred.

Clearly it was a bad call on the Judge's part doing what they did, which is why it got reversed - eventually.

But as anyone who has dealt with the courts is well aware, everything is glacial - unless it's going to make your life a pain in the ass. That usually happens quickly.

But like everyone else, one you're in the system, you're going to have a bad time regardless.

What else do you propose is going to happen though?

> What else do you propose is going to happen though?

Not parent but I don’t think that we should be holding anyone pending trial when what they’re accused of is so minor, child or otherwise.

Furthermore any decisions about pre-trial detention shouldn’t hinge on remorse or contrition, they should hinge on the alleged offenders risk of flight and their potential risk to the community.

The judge is supposed to consider severity. Obviously it went too far in this case.

Regarding remorse/contrition though - that is absolutely a factor of in potential risk to the community.

Example - Someone gets arrested for DUI. Who is higher risk? Someone who insists they didn’t do it and fuck anyone who thinks they did and they’ll do what they want, or someone who says ‘that was terrible, and I didn’t do exactly what the prosecution says, but I’m not going to be driving anytime soon until this all gets worked out’?

Because plenty of people in the first category end up driving drunk while pending trial and kill more people.

So you want them to lie? My dad was like that. I admitted to several things I didn't do in order to reduce the amount of caning.

This led to a funny incident at school. Somebody did something, and another grassed. The bully came to question me - I had no memory of telling on him, but the way he described the comments, I though oh that does sound like something I'd say. I took the beating. Then the actual grass came up and asked me why did I admit something I hadn't done?

Unclear what a 'grass' is. Are you referring to falling down?

"Grass" means "report to the authorities." Seems to originate in Britain as rhyming slang between copper and grasshopper, though I looked up the etymology for this post.

Grass is British slang for informing on someone

Fair or not, this is the idea behind 'no contest' pleas in court.

No admittance of fault, but not going to fight the prosecution either because it isn't worth it.

It isn't necessarily fair or sane - it's predictable though. Which is something.

This line of thinking is entirely incompatible with the presumption of innocence and the right to protection from self incrimination.

Welcome to bail/pretrial detention hearings.

Practically, what are the alternatives?

Every arrest is cite and release pending conviction? Society would be even more out of control.

The alternative is to charge them as a juvenile, and to refrain from inferring a guilty conscious from their lack of "contrition" (which is a patently ridiculous thing to expect from an 11 year old - which is the real issue with charging children as adults, not that they supposedly are more reformable, but that they cannot be held to the same standards as adults).

You're engaging in a slippery slope fallacy. This was a miscarriage of justice. Civilization would not have crumbled if this child wasn't put through the wringer.

No, I’m not arguing if it is right or wrong. I’ve been explaining why the levers exist as that was what was being asked. And to be clear, the case I’m referring to the kid was tried and convicted (originally) of 1st degree murder with a shotgun. In juvenile court.

And if it turned out the kid did murder them, then people would be up in arms that he got released early - especially if he committed another murder before he got locked up again. Which could happen.

Cases like this too [https://www.klfy.com/local/iberia-parish/trial-for-11-year-o...].

Was it a miscarriage of justice? Perhaps, I haven’t seen the evidence. The courts eventually came to the conclusion it was! Until they did, according to the courts it wasn’t.

it was also legal while it was happening.

And 11yr olds are plenty capable of being defiant, malicious, contrite, etc. too.

And active dangers to those around them.

I wasn’t there in court when this was going on, so I have no idea if the kid was being out of control, or the judge was being out of control. I’ve seen both play out. The appeals court felt it was the judge.

The whole situation is quite terrible regardless. But that’s what the criminal justice system is for - to resolve terrible situations in some eventually sensible way. Woe to whoever gets caught in its gears though.

Children might be incapable of determining certain actions are wrong or illegal. They might be able to do that, but unable to apply this knowledge to their own behavior. A trial won't fix immediately this, just like charging an 11 year old like an adult won't make him grow a beard.

The case involved an 11 yr old accused of 1st degree murder with a shotgun.

Yeah? My point stands. Also: Throw the owner of the gun in jail.

The owner was the one murdered, if I remember correctly.

> in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards

As far as schools go, zero tolerance policies have been put in place. The concept of zero tolerance is something that just makes no sense to me. Not every thing that happens in a school needs police involvement, but because the rules/laws that have been put in place removes common sense and power from principals so that everything is now a police matter.

Legislatures have done similar things to judges with mandatory minimums and other draconian small minded knee jerk reaction to look like they are being effective.

> removes common sense

This happened about 5 miles from where I grew up: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/7-year-old-suspende...

In the 80s, kids would have bows or hunting rifles in the car or truck in the school parking lot. Now eating your pastry the wrong way gets you sent home.

In the early 2000s my middle school had archery for a few days as part of gym class as a special event. Only the girls were actually allowed to do it though, they had something else for the boys (don't remember what though).

Same was true in my middle school in the 80s. In hindsight it really was the right call. That same year we had a sub in gym class playing tennis and four of us boys managed to launch about a hundred tennis balls over the fence and into the woods home run derby style. We would have definitely put an eye out with archery equipment.

Zero tolerance policies are a direct response to discrimination claims.

If you allow people to have discretion, then it will be used(and abused).

Also some of the stories I hear about school in the 70's and 80's make me think that the current claim that "schools were always authoritarian and used to subjugate children to turn them into compliant workers" is probably BS.

Probably current administration needs to justify it's existence and high pay by making rules.

> Zero tolerance policies are a direct response to discrimination claims.

Source? Because if that's true, that's the wrong implementation of a great policy (anti-discrimination).

That's basically saying "well instead of having a policy of reasonable punishment for a given situation, we'd rather be as extreme in our punishment as possible so that we can still hurt kids we hate"

From wiki on Zero Tolerance, specifically talking about harrasment:

>Various institutions have undertaken zero tolerance policies such as in the military, in the workplace, and in schools in an effort to eliminate various kinds of illegal behavior such as harassment. Proponents hope that such policies will underscore the commitment of administrators to prevent such behavior.

It leaves out how when we went into these things, there was outcry over administrators covering up harassment, showing favoritism, etc.

If there is a fight between 2 kids, one kid gets expelled and the other does not, this situation can seem unbalanced.

>I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime, but this sort of thing is shockingly common, even when dealing with children.

The justice system has gone mad. Politicians probably encourage it behind closed doors as well. Fear is the road to authoritarianism.

It is a long discussion, but the TL;DR version is Puritanism.

> I don't know what it is in US culture and society that makes it so hostile towards anyone and anything even vaguely suspected of a crime,

In a lot of cases I think it's a proxy for racism.

I think there's also a tendency towards black and white thinking, where people are either good or bad, and they're very willing to bucket people as bad rather than considering shades of gray or that authorities did something wrong.

Additionally, in a lot of threads about crime I also sense a lot of jealousy. The sentiment resembles "I work hard to pay my bills like a chump and this guy has such a sweet and easy life not playing by the rules." They might feel their working life has them too stressed and they want to hurt "criminals" as some kind of revenge fantasy.

In this case it's a white kid though, and a lot of the kids from "kids for cash" were white. If we look at the prison population and include just the white population (~60%), the US still incarcerates vastly more people than other comparable countries. It's not even close. While in general racism is certainly a contributing factor, I don't see it being the main factor.

I don't have the impression the other factors you mention are unique to the US; people from all types of backgrounds seem to have problems with black/white thinking. This sort of thing seems innate to the human condition.

So the question remains, what is so special about the US? I don't really have a good answer to this. "Puritanism", as another commenter offered, seems too simplistic, and the US isn't the only country with a history of that sort of thing, either. Same with "war on drugs", another popular answer. Drugs are illegal (and sometimes heavily persecuted) in many countries. Maybe it's a bit worse in the US, but it's not unique to the US.

Maybe there just isn't a good/clear reason, and it's just "how the chips fell". The Aztecs went to war for no other reason than to capture people so they could rip out their hearts for sacrifice. There have been cultures where cannibalism of slaves, even child slaves, was socially acceptable for no other reason than "it tastes good". Why were these cultures like this? Who can tell... Probably a complex interaction between various factors.

Well, I don't think the tough on crime rhetoric is totally unique to the US either. I hear them coming from other countries too. Eg. when I was paying attention to Javier Milei's presidential bid in Argentina, it's largely the same talking points about crime, could have been lifted word for word from American internet comments.

From what I understand I think northern europe in particular has more of an attitude geared toward prison being about reform of criminals, and less towards vindictive punishment.

PS: Kind of tangential, but since you did bring it up: I believe a lot of the stories about natives being cruel warriors and cannibals were invented or exaggerated by Spaniards.

The main reason is that we refuse to spend money to address the root causes of crime. We won't fix urban poverty or the failing urban education system so most people choose to live in car-dependent suburban hellholes that make our youth uniquely miserable. Some of them shoot up schools, leading to zero tolerance policies and to moral panic campaigns to ban some inanimate object as the culprit that is supposedly corrupting kids.

If we had a functioning safety net and opportunities for people who grow up in the inner city to achieve a better life that doesn't involve playing professional sports, we'd be a mostly urban population like a normal country and we wouldn't have the teen mental health problems that only we have or the school shootings that we've only had for the past 30 years or so of the 400+ years we've had gun rights. We won't do that because that would involve spending our tax dollars for the benefit of people who aren't millionaires, billionaires or corporations.

The thing is, the vast majority of convicts in jail are genuinely guilty. I'd put it at 99% at least, probably more. And even many of the "innocent" people there are more likely to be of the kind: "I did not rob and kill this guy, I only fenced his watch".

What can be done with it? I now believe that the only way is more aggressive policing with almost zero tolerance. At the same time, the jail terms need to go _down_.

So if you steal bread to feed your sister's starving children, you WILL go to jail, just like Jean Valjean. But only for a couple of days, not 19 years.

Additionally, prisons and jails need to become _better_. No unpaid labor, better conditions, different tiers of jails for different offenders. Mental health resources and job training.

Oh, and alternatives to jail such as community service are great too.

I think you underestimate the rate of wrongly accused and wrongly convicted. Estimates vary, iirc I've seen some papers claiming 5% and others claiming as high as 20%. There is a lot of over-charging going on too.

Then, most cases don't get to trial, so you have people pleading guilty to things they did not do because they fear wrongful conviction for something worse.

Sorry, not buying it. There's no way 20% of convictions are wrong. Even 1% is honestly pushing it, especially these days. Extrapolation from convictions overturned via the DNA evidence also results in about 0.5-1%.

I volunteered as an unpaid IT support at a non-profit working with ex-cons who were trying to get back to normal life. So I got to speak with lots of people who were actively trying to get away from the prison life. Some of _them_ were saying that _they_ met no innocent people in jail.

And this is not really an exaggeration. You can pull up a roster of prisoners in your local jail and try to do a search for their names. You'll find that pretty much everyone there has a loooong rap sheet, with jail time merely being the "crowning achievement".

And it's always the same pattern: a long list of crimes that result in no punishment (ignored fines, ignored community service, probation, ignored bench warrants, etc.) until they get unlucky and encounter a prosecutor or a judge who is not willing to tolerate bullshit. Or if they commit a grave crime that can't be ignored.

That's why I think that we should absolutely make jail time one of the _first_ deterrents. And this also should absolutely apply to juveniles (yes, "jail our kids").

HOWEVER, the jail terms also need to go down. Especially for the first time offenders. Not years and months, but days or weeks.

And there is solid research backing that up. It's the _inevitability_ of punishment that is the best deterrent, not the strictness of it (that's also why the death penalty is useless, btw).

You can keep believing this and being confidently wrong.

Seems like my point about plea deals blew past you. Repeat: Innocent people often plead guilty to lesser charges because they fear wrongful convictions for something more serious. The system is set up around this.

When wrongfully convicted, it's also very common to get denied parole because you don't admit to doing something wrong. From what I've heard it's very very hard to overturn a wrongful conviction, even in the presence of new evidence or signs of misconduct the system fights it at every turn.

Sorry, but YOU are wrong. Go on, do the experiment I mentioned.

Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty. It's just a method of cutting down on the cost of the trial.

Wrongful convictions certainly exist, but they are not even close to the main reason for the prison population.

Bystander here, but I think you should open your horizon a bit.. or maybe you're a troll, who knows?

And have you tried to open _your_ horizon past the usual slogans ("mass imprisonment", "school-to-prison pipeline", etc.)?

Try it. It might help you. Or not.

>>Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty.

So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial, then the DA comes around and says "look you can go to trial and maybe get few years in prison, or you can plead guilty and we'll count your time in jail as time served so you can go home tomorrow"

1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?

2) If you were in that situation as an innocent person, can you not imagine yourself being tempted to accept just to go home to your family?

Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.

> So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial

At least in West Coast states, you are almost guaranteed to get a low bail or no bail at all. You'll likely be denied bail only if you are accused of something heinous, so your sentence will be longer than the time in pre-trial. Or if you have a history of skipping bail.

So your scenario is highly unlikely, at least on the West Coast.

> 1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?

They certainly can happen and do happen, but they are rare. I dislike plea deals in general, and they certainly need to be reformed.

My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial discretion or plea deals.

> Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.

If you are interested in criminal justice in the US, you should start communicating with prisoners. Your state department of justice will have a program that allows you to exchange letters with prisoners. Do it, it helps people to stay connected with the outside world.

I did that. I now think that prisoners definitely belong in jail, and that trying to reduce the jail population by just ignoring crimes is folly. However, we absolutely must _improve_ the jail conditions. A LOT.

And very few organizations are lobbying in this direction. Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is destructive, and it's not helping.

>>At least in West Coast states,

The stories I've read were mostly in New York where this kind of thing happens not infrequently, so I guess - I have no data to prove otherwise.

>>My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial discretion or plea deals.

Well, we 100% agree then.

>> Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is destructive, and it's not helping.

I also agree.

> The stories I've read were mostly in New York where this kind of thing happens not infrequently, so I guess - I have no data to prove otherwise.

I'm not too familiar with NY data sources, but it looks like they have reformed bail recently: https://www.fwd.us/news/new-york-bail-reform-success-story/

But even before that, they had a below-average ratio of pretrial/post-sentencing detention.

> (that's also why the death penalty is useless, btw).

I’d argue that if a criminal is dead, they can’t commit future crimes, therefore the death penalty is quite useful. Why waste space and resources on prisons when there is a more efficient option?

Death penalty does not serve as a deterrent compared to life imprisonment. It also sometimes applied to innocent people.

Killing somebody for murder is called being a hypocrite.

I think your estimates are way off. A study in 2014 found that 4% of death row inmates were wrongly convicted[1]. This is likely to be the highest scrutiny cases in our system, so I'd expect that non-death penalty cases would have a wrongly convicted rate of >= 4%. And that's not even counting the people that have been leveraged into plea deals for crimes they didn't commit simply because the system is so weighted against them.

1: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111

> what kind of school brings this matter to a judge in the first place...?

The kind of school that prevents a student with dreadlocks to attend schold indefinitely [1]? This is happening right now. In the past, there was also the role playing game (dnd) satanism scare...

Granted, I'm not sure if there have been actual arrests, but it's the logical next step to take.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68377156

School is a place to teach kids how the world works.

Submit to authority or face the consequences future wage slave.

Arresting kids for bringing something that's legal for them to have is one side of a spectrum of silliness, thinking that arresting a kid for violently assaulting someone is a "maybe" is pretty far on the other end of the same spectrum. There are plenty of things it's completely reasonable to arrest a child for.

I was almost arrested twice; once for having phreaker box plans in my bookbag (in 1998, when they no longer worked), another time for "computer hacking" (fixing the school computer's proxy settings).

And they wonder why we grew up to hate authority figures.

Treating public school as public space with public rules creates a huge class divide with the private schools. Short of actively shooting up the place, I can't think of a single rule you could break at the private university I went to that could result in law enforcement getting involved. I knew of at least one kid who got caught with most of a kilogram of cocaine, who got off with little more than a slap on the wrist.

In contrast, a kid at my brother's public uni got arrested for petty vandalism. It's an extremely stark class divide.

It doesn’t need to be this way. Essentially all UK universities are “public” and none operate this way. There aren’t special police forces that roam their campuses (Oxford had this for a time, but I think it was the only one). Violation of university rules is no more serious from a legal perspective than violating any other private rules.

I think campus police are an insane idea. There should obviously be a good relationship between any university and the police in their area, but the idea that they should report to the university leadership is nonsensical.

It really upsets me that the VHF pager networks were shut down.

VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications without having to offer up your location to surveillance. All satellite pagers require transmit-before-receive, and of course LTE requires that plus actively cooperating with the towers' triangulation of the receiver.

VHF POCSAG over large urban areas is something we never should have let go of.

Plus, VHF signals can get where no LTE or satellite can arrive, even if you are two floors underground. Downside is that anybody can read POCSAG, especially nowadays with inexpensive SDR receivers...

Nothing prevents you from sending encrypted payloads over POCSAG.

Sure, you can send whatever you want... but is there any off-the-shelf solution that can display encrypted messages?

There are a bunch of POCSAG paging products that support their own flavors of encryption. Unication has a few that support AES encrypted messaging. You keyload it at the same time as the rest of the pager setup.

https://www.unication.com/alpha-pagers

And here's LRS's implementation of encryption on POCSAG:

https://paging-systems.readme.io/docs/encryption

Nice to see, thanks!

"VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications without having to offer up your location to surveillance"

...and instead anyone in your city can read every single text message with a trivial amount of hardware?

There's nothing wrong with open communication when everyone understands that it's open and treats it accordingly.

They can read my AES-encrypted ciphertext all day long and I don't care.

You can even buy two-way pagers that transmit with AES-128 encryption. Hospitals have to use this due to HIPAA:

https://www.spok.com/blog/standard-or-encrypted-pagers-whats...

I think you're confusing commercial pager services with Ham radio.

Usually pagers were used to ask people to call back so I don't think that is a big issue. It is like shooting at someone you recognize far away in the street so he can look back and meet you. Everybody will hear that but not the actual content of the conversation afterwards.

Hams still have and use them.[1]

I'm not a ham, because I don't want to hang out with self-appointed cops, so I got a new Chinese pager made up with a center frequency of 433.5MHz (ISM, unlicensed), then configured it to work with a Pi-Star rig radiating well under the EU/Irish legal power limit, and receive messages infrequently enough not to run afoul of duty cycle limits. Because I know there's some ham who's just salivating to track me down and quote the rule book to me, and I want to deny him (it's always a him) that pleasure. It reaches all the way to the far end of my farm!

You can get traditional alphanumeric belt loop pagers or snazzy modern wristwatch pages these days. Check AliExpress.

[1] https://hampager.de/#/

>I'm not a ham, because I don't want to hang out with self-appointed cops

Hams do have a "Whacker" problem. General Boomer mentality scares away a lot of new Hams as well.

I’m not sure I understand the bit about cops. I’m interested though, please do tell.

The tedious sort of people who like to make it their mission in life to quote the rulebook as often as possible, frequently incorrectly, in an effort to assert their authority and dominance. I want nothing to do with them.

Yes!! This. I would totally carry a pager if the network still existed. Not all the time, but just sometimes when I'd like to feel free.

Ps there is still the iridium paging service which is one way and is not transmit before receive. But they want to get rid of it and stopped selling hardware. It's really hard to find now second hand.

I was carrying a pager as late as 2009 because a customer's data center was two stories underground in one of the older tower blocks in downtown Toronto.

Yes it is amazing how good the coverage was.

I had one and I've only been outside the coverage area once, when I went on cave trip. I noticed my pager said OUTRANGE which was something I had never seen any other time. The coverage really was phenomenal due to the low frequency (159Mhz).

No, iridium is definitely transmit-before-receive.

The only thing you can receive without transmitting is a one-bit "message waiting" indicator, so you don't waste uplink bandwidth polling the satellite unless there's something there for you. Basically the satellite broadcasts a list of terminals that have messages waiting for them. I recall there being some kind of bloom filter, so technically it's less than one bit.

You can't get anything else downstream unless you transmit first to ask for it. Also the only way to clear the "message waiting" bit is by transmitting to the satellite, so you can't even try to encode a message by flipping that bit on and off.

No, the original Iridium paging service really is (was?) one way.

You had to manually update your paging location by dialing some number or by using a web interface when moving significantly, or link an Iridium phone to your pager, which would then automatically update the paging area (MDA) every time you made a call.

What you mean is probably Iridium SBD, but that’s a different, bidirectional service (also used for pager-like devices these days).

Yes, Iridium SBD requires transmitting before you can receive.

I did not know about Global Data Burst; I think that's what you're referring to. Holy cow it's expensive though, although I guess it has to be since you're using a lot more bandwidth*footprint. Like $6.00 per message per delivery area expensive. And they're kinda vague on how big a "delivery area" is.

https://apollosat.com/featured/iridium-gdb-pager/

No, I’m referring to the Iridium pager, which is just its own service and has been around longer than SBD, I believe. Messages were (are?) free to send on top of a monthly flat subscription rate per pager.

GDB seems to be a successor to that, though.

GDB is just a branding for their own flavor of what they're selling which is Iridium Burst, which also appear to run on the 9602/9603 SBD modules, so... maybe Iridium Burst is just spicier Iridium SBD?

https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/

SBD is bidirectional unicast (and mandatorily so; as you say, SBD can't transmit to devices before they initiate a mailbox exchange, with the exception of a "message waiting" indicator.

Iridium Burst seems to be multicast-capable, and optionally bidirectional or unidirectional, so "spicier SBD" makes sense!

But their paging service was definitely unidirectional and unicast. Here's an old talk on decoding the signal, if you're curious: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6236_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281...

Yep -- actually contributed an NAL Shout Nano so they had additional protocol decoding on top of SBD ;)

In Sweden the "minicall" network (POCSAG, ≈ 169 Mhz) is still active and in use by some niche industries.

I know of it being used for fairly mundane things like Grafana Alerts (or the equivalent), but in circumstances where you need to reach people in areas where cellphones are forbidden or lack coverage (like security sensitive data centers for example).

Snooping on that frequency band in ≈Stockholm it also seems to be quite actively used for sending machine-to-machine commands in some industries, perhaps not always that stringently authenticated...

Which I guess is a downside though, you need to take proper precautions in the "application layer" since the network is completely open.

I dont own a phone, but to me a beeper is an okay compromise. During the quest to find one, I came across some really cool things.

- Some beepers are made to only RX, not TX, as to not skew results of medical equipment

- Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices

- Beepers are still sold today, new in box

- Two-way pagers have been almost totally displaced from the market (lack of service and hardware) despite being more advanced than regular beepers.

Anybody want to share a testimonial about their current beeper for someone who's looking for a good option?

I’m curious about your desire to not own a phone. Have you written about the experience anywhere?

I don't carry a cell phone, and stopped using email years ago.

When I do discuss these experiences, most people aren't able to believe me. "How?" is a typical response... which to me seems equally strange a question.

It does make parking difficult ("pay with the app!"); last time I had a court action, the judge required me to sign a document stating I did not use email, because this is "a required piece of information."

Until this year, I handed out my numeric pager as "my phone number," which grateful reduced successful contact [to my chagrin].

There are lots of us.

But I've learned that, aside from mentioning "I don't have a phone" it's really not useful to discuss it any further on the internet. There seems to be a large cohort of trolls who love arguing with anybody who doesn't have a phone. I guess it bothers them that some of us can be free from what so many are addicted to.

I wouldn't argue with you. I'd just observe that you cut yourself off from a lot of modern conveniences. (I certainly grew up without cell phone until well into my adult life and largely without Internet as well.) You don't need electricity or indoor plumbing either--although those are arguably at a different level.

Modern conveniences is right. Everything is two factor authenticated now. Even if you avoid that in your private life your workplace is liable to roll it out if they haven't already.

There are alternatives to 2FA that don't require phones. But, yeah, at some point you become the weird person who refused to have a smartphone (or a cell phone at all) and, unless you're really special in some way, you probably have a target on your back.

For my workplace it was a choice of downloading duo on the phone or getting sms codes. In the past year they cut out the sms codes, now you get a temporary code from the duo app you need to enter into the login portal vs just a push to duo.

There are hardware tokens. But, yes, not everyone supports them.

Maybe there is a market for minuscule TOTP devices. Just 7 segment displays for the code and the lowest res camera that can decode a QR code.

Or even lower-powered? https://www.amazon.com/Token2-miniOTP-2-NFC-programmable-Two...

I remember my dad worked at a bank in the 90s and had one shaped like this to enter one of the buildings: https://www.amazon.com/HyperOTP-Time-Based-6-Digit-Services-...

Yeah RSA made these for a looong time.

But if you don't have a phone to program it you'd need a camera or some way to manually enter the data.

FIDO2 Security keys should be considered good "hardware tokens" now , more phishing-resistant than TOTP

There are TOTP apps for regular computer. I am using an old tablet for the microsoft authenticator and banking apps.

Technically it is pretty much like a phone but it is not used as a phone. No number, no sim card.

I am pretty sure some of these apps could work on waydroid too if needed.

So in the end all this discussion really depends if we are talking about the mobile device as a whole that you carry with you nearly all the time or some parts of the ecosystem that you may have at home.

People cutting themselves off from modern convenience for moral reasons only gets interesting to me when it approaches Amish levels of commitment.

Not all Amish are the same. You're likely thinking of Swartzentruber Amish. It depends on your community, some have phones, some have a house with a shared phone. The Amish world at the moment is facing some of these changes, and some standards are evolving, but there will always be some separation with the English world until these modernities can be used in ways that don't erode community faith and relationships.

Maybe because phones allow to track people? It is a spy in your pocket.

It's Ordnung.

Which companies? Where can we read more about the no-TX design?

I heard about it years ago probably from WP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pager#Security

It's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast every message. This is why you can find an archive of pages from the morning of September 11th online, they transmitted unencrypted to a huge area.

So that raises costs and limits the coverage area. Fine for a hospital with 100 idk doctors who need paged, not fine for continental coverage of 100 million users.

It's very inefficient because every tower must broadcast every message.

No, it's incredibly efficient because the messages are tiny.

If you need to send a long message, then you page the person with "you have a long message from XYZ, please use higher-bandwidth mechanisms to retrieve it".

So it only works if you have a secondary communication system that is TX/RX.

Within the scope of "How does no-TX work?" it's very inefficient, because the payload is small.

Its not too bad when you only need 30 kHz of bandwidth per channel.

I happily used PagerDirect[.net] 2020-2023 — their service includes a receive-only pager, either numeric or alphanumeric. They also have Tx pagers, but I have no experience with that service.

An issue with Rx-only paging is that your device must be on 24/7, and within RF range — if offline/out-of-range, you will never receive that page.

I only stopped because I moved outside of their reliable service area (but they provide service to practically any metro center with greater than 100k people). When I lived 3 miles from "downtown" the pager was a great asset (for call screening, e.g.: spammers never "figured out" how a pager worked).

Have you found any that still have service over a significant area in the US?

Particularly the one-way (RX only) pagers.

Very interested in this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40070092

> - Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices

If you get a chance to add the names/links of these companies I would really appreciate it.

For posterity: one of the services appears to be https://spok.com

Still would like to know what the other one is.

a significant number of hospitals in usa do use american messaging, everyday: https://americanmessaging.net/

Iridium still offers it, I believe — 100% global coverage!

Note that the not-insanely-priced Iridium paging service requires you to transmit before you can receive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40072714

No, see also my answer to your comment. SBD and Iridium paging are two different services.

Hospitals have become a sort of a standardized customer

>- Basically 2 companies, operating with antequated websites (and prices) still provide service at the historic prices

Hold out companies for obsolete technologies always fascinate me. I remember reading there is like one guy who services candle pin bowling pin setters that run on 90s era Turbo Pascal software on whitebox 486 PCs and he's pretty much retired and drives up and down the North East in an RV doing his work.

I guess in the US there's still companies providing service but here in Europe (Spain in my case) we're straight out of luck, sadly.

Ps I would not want a two way pager anyway as that defeats the privacy purpose.

I got my pager at 18 (no one cool called it a beeper, this was when 'cool' was still a thing), and yes, my weed dealer had one, and knew my beeper code (it was a beeper code but you sent it to a pager, young people just do this). Beeper code is worth explaining: you'd send a number to be called back at, and there was room for more digits, so everyone had a three-digit number which was theirs, and you just kinda had to know it. Which could be tricky, so there would be conversations like "ok who is <three digit number>" "oh thats <friend>" "ah right". This let you page people from places which weren't your home.

The whole thing sort of worked, but we were happy to ditch it for cell phones when they became affordable.

Did people use the telephone number message to send alphabet messages or like '1' for 'I am home' etc?

I recall in the 90's we would add 911 if it was urgent and 420 if it was about drugs. We would also end with our 3-digit 'pager code' to identify who sent the message.

I remember this well. Crime, drug, and gang hysteria were very big in the 90s. "Gangs are using pagers to sell drugs to children" was a quick and easy way to demonize them and ensure that they get banned hastily, without a lot of questions.

The funny thing is that in political discussion, drug, crime, and gang hysteria are back. Rates of crime and gangs are much lower than the 90s. With drugs, fentanyl and its difficulty to dose correctly is definitely more deadly. But the rhetoric is pretty similar to the crack epidemic and the period shortly after.

There's always some kind of moral panic going on.

The policy at my school was that any "electronic device," be it a cellphone or pager, would be confiscated and held until the end of the school year. I had this happen to a (not yet modified) Radio Shack tone dialer.

> confiscated and held until the end of the school year.

How things like that were even remotely legal?

In most cases they are not, but you need to have a good relationship with your parents and they need to care enough to bother the school about it. Otherwise, they won’t listen to you, a child.

> In most cases they are not, but you need to have a good relationship with your parents and they need to care enough to bother the school about it. Otherwise, they won’t listen to you, a child.

It's more nuanced than that: there's shades of grey in there, not just black and white.

I had a good relationship with my parents, they cared a great deal about anything related to education and would keep involved with everything academic (even though my parents both never finished school at all, not even primary school). Most kids I was in school with had parents with the same outlook.

Telling my parents that I had broken a school rule would definitely get them involved immediately, but "playing with toys when you are supposed to be learning" is unlikely to win sympathy.[1]

The reason that the schools could hold things until the end of the year (mostly they held them for a week, at worst) was because if you complained to your parent that you were playing with a toy during a time when you were supposed to be learning, the parent with likely confiscate the toy permanently.

At least when the school confiscated it, you eventually got it back.

I imagine, even today, with most parents who care about their kids academic outcomes (surprisingly, quite a few don't), the conversation is likely to go like this:

K: The school confiscated my $TOY today. They aren't giving it back until year-end.

P: Why? Was it switched on/used/making/noise during class?

K: Errr ...

At that point, the kid is now in trouble with both school and parents. Only if the kid is reasonably certain that:

a) The parent doesn't care if they were not attending to the lesson at hand, and

b) The parent will call the school to get the $TOY back,

would the child complain to the parent.

[1] Of course, when I was in school you could take anything to school; you just couldn't play with it until a break in classes. I expect that the outrage now is due to confiscation happening not due to usage, but for simply possession of the toy.

My kid's school now just confiscates until the end of the day. Even that might not be strictly legal, but it's unlikely to get challenged.

This probably has more to do with the fact that 30 years ago if you brought an electronic device into school it was probably relatively cheap and there was a decent chance your parents didn't even know about it. And either way it wasn't really a necessary part of your existence. Now it's a $1200 phone that is most likely the primary way your parents communicate with you between the time you're out of school (around 2:30 or 3 when I was in, unless there were after school activities) and they return from work.

I don't know about cheap, especially for a kid. A Discman could easily be their Christmas or birthday present.

I don't see how it wouldn't be legal. The school has a variety of responsibilities surrounding its students, going back hundreds of years. They aren't a 'guardian', but the school is entrusted with a child's safety, and has responsibility. For example, a school may tell a child to "be quiet" and "sit down" and "sit in this seat" and "why are you not in class", even forcing you to go to school.

The school is allowed to dole out punishments, such as detention or even denying access to the school itself. This isn't a normal "a bunch of random adults are around" relationship.

TBH, most people don't get the `in loco parentis` bit of school. It's maddening that there are comments from well-educated, smart and intelligent people in this thread who are wondering if it is legal for the school to dole out punishment to kids.

Look up the relevant legislation in your jurisdiction; dig deep enough and you will find either explicit legislation or case-law confirming that it is legal, usually with the phrase `in loco parentis`.

Any on the spot decision that needs to be made with regard to the child, the school can make it with no requirement for input or consent from the parents.

Trust me, you don't want it a different way, else one day you are going to be asking the school either a question along the lines of "Why did you wait for a parent callback before you took action?" or a question along the lines of "Why are you requiring my response to these questions every single day?"

I’d be happy if other elementary schools didn’t encourage kids to bring devices to school…

I’m also pretty sure that 75% of the students had a newer iPhone than I do!

Probably one of those things where if the parent contacted the school, the item would have been returned but most kids didn't want their parents to know they had the item at school in the first place.

Children don't really have property rights, and even if they did, courts have consistently ruled that the bill of rights is reduced in school settings.

Children don't have property rights but their parents do and they own their children's things. If a parent went to the school and asked for the confiscated item that school would be insane to deny them.

They'd be insane to deny them because disgruntled parents can cause an incredible amount of trouble for schools, not because confiscating the phone when established by clearly communicated policy is actually meaningfully illegal.

Children own their stuff. Parents can control the child’s things like they control other aspects of child’s life. They give some of the control to schools.

What happens when child becomes an adult? They own all their stuff from before, the parents do not keep it. It can be complicated since parents let child use stuff, but anything given to or bought by the child is theirs.

> What happens when child becomes an adult? They own all their stuff from before, the parents do not keep it.

I think that parents basically "gift" their adult children their old things. At 17 years and 364 days a parent can take everything their child "owns" and burn it/throw it in a wood chipper with zero legal issues (concerning specifically the destruction of property anyway, burning/chipping some things will get you in trouble), however once the adult child has been informally gifted their old "belongings" there's no take backs without legal repercussions.

Things do get more complicated with things the child bought with their own money... I'm guessing the law would be more willing to accept that those things should belong to the child, but even if a 15 year old kid buys an xbox with their own money I doubt the cops would arrest the kid's parents for smashing it with a bat.

Yes, children have property rights. If there is a homeless 14 year old on the street, I can't just go up and steal his bike.

> Children don't really have property rights

Yes, they do.

> and even if they did, courts have consistently ruled that the bill of rights is reduced in school settings.

Courts have ruled that there are specific interests in school that meet the generally applicable (not special, weaker) standards applicable for permissible action where rights protected in the Bill of Rights are involved.

But establishing categories of and confiscating contraband is... not a disputed state power, in any case.

The underlying legal theory is that schools are 'in loco parentis' and can establish rules while the students are entrusted to the school by the parents.

Typically it's to the end of the school year OR until a parent comes to get it.

You could always bring your parents into this if you really wanted to. For some reason that rarely ever happened...

Because the loophole was you could get it back at any time if your parents came down to claim it. And (for me) it was always easier to get it back at the end of the year than to tell my parent, where I would still lose the item (via my parent's revocation) AND catch an extra punishment on top of it.

I was approached by the principal while I was using my modified tone dialer on a pay phone in the hall and he freaked out a bit and I showed him it was for dialing stored numbers and he looked at it for a second and said “Ok. It’s just that it looks a lot like a pager… maybe be more discrete with it”

In the 80's I had a walki-talkie confiscated till the end of the year also. It "just happened" to be crystaled for the same freq the school narcs/maintenance used.

> (not yet modified)

<wink> I just used a walkman

I used a recordable greeting card.

Also Walkman/ diskman / portable radios were banned

Yep. At best, the "electronic device" was a distraction, and at worst, it meant you were a drug dealer.

I can't imagine having a smartphone in grade school or high school. It's so alien.

My late father owned a small commercial radio business for a few decades. It provided sales, install, repair, and repeater service to primarily public safety groups and companies with a fleet of vehicles. A more consumer oriented side to his business was pagers through Metrocall.

A major drug dealer in our region was a kid in my high school. He leased a pager from my dad's company. During the investigation, authorities had my dad create a cloned pager. They could then record all pages sent to the drug dealer, about 6k in as many months, to track his activities and build their case.

Nobody was arrested for pagers at my school, but both pagers and cell-phones were minimum 3-day suspension on first offense and expulsion for repeated offense -- larger minimum punishments than bringing a knife.

In the Netherlands there was a brief period where “Maxers” [1] were all the rage. They were like pagers, except you could send text messages to them by calling to a specific service number and leaving spoken messages. It was outrageously expensive and GSM came shortly after so they rapidly faded into obscurity.

[1] https://www.mobilecollectors.net/phone/5064/philips-prg+2140...

The "buzzer" was also popular. The maxer got popular because pepsi gave them away. But the buzzer network was way more reliable (160 MHz Vs 400 something) and cheaper.

The reason maxers were so expensive was that a real person would transcribe your message from voice.

> Senator Ronald Rice passed away in 2023 - the New Jersey Pager ban still in place - months later The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, many of whose parents were once prohibited from bringing pagers to school.

I was waiting for the author to point to cellphones in the same breath. Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a one-way receive-only device and cellphones.

> Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a one-way receive-only device and cellphones.

Motorola released their two way pager, the Tango in 1995. In 1996, they had an app for the Tango to access the web [1]. You can't make a call with a pager, but nobody makes calls anymore; there's not a lot of difference in capability; although there's a large difference in distribution.

[1] http://www.wirelesscommunication.nl/reference/chaptr01/dtmms...

> not a lot of difference in capability

Ahh yes, I remember fondly the days in the 90's I spent watching porn on my beeper as a teenager. Good times.

If I has a beeper in school, I'm sure it would have been paged with 8008135...

Alphanumeric, watch out.

Pshaw, but what about the blisteringly high resolution of a TI-83? Find somebody who already has what you want and a link-cable. :P

Service was ~$25/month (and only worked in your area) and you were limited to ~100 messages a month at that price (with each message <100 chars long). I can't imagine browsing the web with that service would be affordable for any real use.

Prior to cell phones being powerful enough to just shove megabytes of JS at them and expect them to work it out, the web had a lot of little subsets like this. I'm sure it wasn't really "the web", but a few pages that used HTTP to access them but if you strayed outside that set it completely disintegrated. I believe I saw some Palm Pilot optimized web sites, there used to be web sites optimized for mobile devices back when that meant something, there were some Dreamcast-optimized sites, etc. It is probably better to imagine it as access to their bespoke services over HTTP, and they were all pretty useless as they lacked any network effect.

ahh my first tech job gave me one of these.

You kids complain about always on. This was the late 90's the beeper was so they didn't have to pay for my cell phone. I was making stupid money so...

I grew to hate that fucking thing.

One got dropped down 4 stories in a wire chase.

Another I threw in front of a steam roller on its way to flatten some asphalt. The driver gave me a thumbs up and I pitched it.

I nailed one to a the bar of a dive I hung out in.

I think I "flushed" two... The first one was a mistake (I think the first to die) I brought it back in a plastic baggie. I was told to throw it out.

One out the car window at 80 (I was young and stupid and it was BFE texas... there wasnt a car for miles)

Another in a lake...

At some point they asked me to stop, I did, but it was fun while I could get away with it.

I remember having to get an exemption to have my alphanumeric pager in school because my job (pc support for a Fortune 500) required me to have it with me when I got to the office... it was ridiculous but eventually worked out.

Alternatively I've got a modern DAPnet ham radio alphanumeric pager now that I use occasionally for notifications related to radio stuff. :) (https://hampager.de)

Hey I was waiting for someone to mention DAPnet. Which pager did you buy? Do you run your own gateway? I have a Pilot AL-A26 which is a neat little device, but my example is filtered for 450 to 458 MHz, and on 12.5 kHz steps. I can get it to just barely work with 449.800 MHz but that's awfully close to a local repeater.

I've just got a normal DMR hotspot and I ended up with the GP2009 just because it was stupidly simple to work with.. my only issue is nigh rechargeable batteries don't last as long as I'd like.

> The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, many of whose parents were once prohibited from bringing pagers to school.

I think we're too soon to know if this is a moral panic. It's a mental health worry for teenagers on TikTok etc. We don't know if it's justified or not.

Jonathan Haidt has a new book, The Anxious Generation, where he presents evidence that smartphones and social networking really do cause a decline in teenager mental health.

He did a pretty terrible job defending the hypothesis on Conversations with Tyler recently

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-a...

FWIW, I thought he did pretty well and came away more convinced of his theses. For most of Tyler's alternative and let's say colorful explanations of the data, Haidt provided different sets of data and explanations that were more convincing. As a libertarian and techno optimist, Tyler seemed pretty biased, for example when he offered as an explanation for the plummeting mental health of teens at the exact time smartphones get introduced a random " maybe everyone's mood just got worse randomly". The only thing Haidt didn't refute that well was Tyler's (imo overconfident) assertion that teens will just use AI to summarize social media to them and spend more time with friends.

> teens will just use AI to summarize social media to them and spend more time with friends

Yeah, this seems a bit off. People spend time with friends via social media. That's part tof the issue.

For what it's worth, it doesn't seem like TikTok would be any less addictive if there was a way to summarize it.

Haidt's claims are not supported by a preponderance scientific studies: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2

> Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. Worse, the bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.

...

> Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative. When associations over time are found, they suggest not that social-media use predicts or causes depression, but that young people who already have mental-health problems use such platforms more often or in different ways from their healthy peers.

Here is Haidt's detailed rebuttal of the piece you cite: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...

Beepers with text were peak technology.

Beepers are the minimal phone that we had all along.

YC summer 24: our beeper-with-text app startup is hiring full stack developers

Our SMS-to-Internet microblogging app startup is hiring full stack developers.

Couldn't Twitter do that once?

Yes. That’s the reason for the 140 character limit.

That was essentially twitter 1.0

That was the joke.

Yes, it was glorious.

That was the point of Twitter.

This is confusing. This exists already, no?

It wasn't until the two-ways that I even kind of wanted one. I remember being at the mall with a group of kids and one of the girls got paged by her mom and we had to go around to find a pay phone for her to check in and I recall thinking 'well that's stupid, I just check in when I get somewhere and when I leave, she's just carrying an annoying reminder to go find a payphone'

Once kids started sending little messages with them, I wanted one. Then they had fun colors and transparent cases. Luckily my nokia brick phone was just a few years away, half a life-time then, but just a few years in hindsight. ;)

None of my friends at that time were drug dealers, but they liked to joke they were because of the stigma.

Collect call with a "I'm on my way home" as the caller. Dad would decline.

I couldn't believe this worked when one of my friends did it! Felt like such an easy cheat lol

My parents likely wouldn't have approved but this payphone conundrum was what lead to me and my friends attempt to build a red box, which never worked well for us but we learned a lot in the attempt!

Nah, Nokia 3330 with WAP, that stuff was awesome. I built a bunch of WAP sites way back when. Slow, clunky, but usable on a phone with a tiny screen and a numeric keypad. Happy days.

A 386 in your pocket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlackBerry_950

I never knew the Blackberry pagers were 386s. I know they've made a variety of portable 386s (and still do) but had no idea they made them into Blackberries.

Literal beepers were still in use as late as 2012 as backups for on call people, enough so that we supported them at PagerDuty for redundancy (the API was email->provider->beeper)

https://www.pagerduty.com/blog/short-emails-for-your-pager/

They're still in use for people who work in SCIFs.

I bet there’s at least one person reading this thread who has heard of the company “PagerDuty” but does not know that it’s referring to a beeper.

I have people on PagerDuty who weren't alive when pagers were a thing.

I think I was 15 when I got a beeper? It was translucent green plastic, clipped inside the baggy khaki pants of my school uniform. Surfing the web to find lists of beeper codes, trading beeper numbers with friends, sending them "secret" numeric messages. Learning about hacking and how to intercept or transmit beeper messages (and not being able to, but still finding it cool).

Nobody thought me or any of my private school friends were drug dealers for having beepers. They just thought the beepers were a distraction, and not allowed in class. I don't remember them being banned but they might have been eventually.

Wow. Weird.

We never had this in the Netherlands. But we got them later.

In fact for a long time they were the only way to be reachable in hospitals because they banned mobile phones for fear of interference with medical equipment.

I don't really know how beeper works, why is it not interfering with medical equipment like mobile phone does? Solely because of low power?

No they don't interfere because they only receive. They send nothing. At least the pagers of those days didn't, two way pagers did exist but they were super expensive and really uncommon.

To be honest I wish I could still buy one because I'd love to be reachable but not trackable at times. Unfortunately Spain has no pager network in operation anymore.

In regards to how they work, the messages were broadcast over the whole country. Because the network had no idea where you were or if you even were reachable. This is why they had to be so short and why text paging was expensive.

The messages were not encrypted either so everyone could see them. It was not a perfect system but really most people just received codes or at most a phone number.

There were two way pagers (receive and send). The receive only ones rarely interfered with medical equipment. But occasionally the local oscillators on receive only pagers would interfere with medical or sensitive research equipment.

> But occasionally the local oscillators on receive only pagers would interfere with medical or sensitive research equipment.

Hmm yeah but then it was really really poorly designed equipment.

If they were that senstive that they'd even pick up a LO they'd be screwed by a police car mobile radio driving by, an FM station in the area etc.

My dad used to be really into collecting Swatch wristwatches when I was in primary school in the 90s. The coolest one was definitely one called “The Beep”: It had a built-in pager!

Battery life was about a day or so when in reception mode (it came with a key ring battery holder and the battery was hot swappable!), and sending a numeric-only message was horrendously expensive, but it was still just about the coolest thing ever when I got to borrow it.

(Close second: “Swatch Access”, which let you store RFID ski passes.)

My favorite pager moment: Was part of a large consulting effort - lots of people. One of the execs was doing a demo of the system and they were playing DNS games with dev/test/stage/prod. They did a quick restart - which is when we all found out stage and prod apparently used the same credentials. About 30 seconds or so after the restart kicked off, about 50 pagers went off.

Lets not forget the :

Rock-Satan scare of the 80's.

Rap-Drug Scare

Walkman will let kids get snatched up.

The pager

Trans people are coming for your husband.

Seems like every decade people have to freak out. But it isn't just the common generational trope. The religious right has to always have another issue that can be used as the poster boy for the war on Lucifer. If you don't have a boogie man, then how do you keep the troops lathered up and ready to fight.

Let's also not forget the scares about the dangers of smoking, leaded gasoline, asbestos, licking radium paint, and drunk driving.

Not all new inventions are a net benefit to society just because they are new, not all things are always good in all contexts, and 2024 is not the end of history, or of cultural evolution.

I agree.

But all of your examples are 'real'. Real physical things that can impact someone materially. Chemicals, products.

Lot of the 'scare' things are just 'ideas'. Should we outlaw ideas is the problem. That is basically how anti-communism works, 'communism' is an idea that the right calls a 'mind virus' that we should ban because it can infect people.

Of course, super hard to tell what is freedom of speech these days. I've been hearing the right scream about freedom of speech for years now, and all of sudden with Gaza they want to round people up if anybody criticizes Israel.

Having a television or radio blasting propaganda into your living room is real. It's an actual physical thing, it's not a concept. So is the Facebook app, and the social dynamics that prevail on it. So are screens in general.

I'm sure that the optimal amount of all those things is non-zero, but it's possible that it's also not 'all day, every day.'

It's not unreasonable for schools to restrict this, just like it's not unreasonable for a school to restrict you from bringing a mariachi band with you to class.

You forgot people summoning demons through Dungeons&Dragons.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/72/Occult_dnd.pn...

Comic books. Elvis and the rock-n-roll music. Heck, even self-pleasure makes you grow hair on your palms, lose your eyesight, and causes mental illness.

Don't forget home taping destroyed the music industry and nothing new has been recorded since the early 1980s.

And porn on BBSs predated modern Internet porn by a few decades and, as I recall, it was even a Time cover story once--when the weekly news mags were still relevant.

To me, two things are interesting in this post. First, even though urban legends have been documented and debunked for years, people still get suckered by them. Second, using photographs of newspaper pages is an increasingly rare form of documenting past events. While you can forge a newspaper page, it is more complicated than tweaking some HTML.

> While you can forge a newspaper page, it is more complicated than tweaking some HTML.

With how many people are skilled in Photoshop compared to web development, forging a scan of a page is probably easier for a lot of people.

Yes, you are right, but theoretically, it's easier to prove the forgery if you have copies of the newspaper stored in multiple places. I think we need multiple archives of newspaper articles stored in an archival medium. We can't trust crypto signatures to be future-proof.

it's important to note that the fake panic over beepers is not related to the current concerns that kids shouldn't be on their phones all day long and at school. The former is a "fake moral panic" based on the premise that all kids were doing / selling drugs. the latter is a concern regarding mood/attention/bullying/self-esteem well established by statistics and experts (though not all experts, it's hotly debated. For parents with kids, not so much debate as it's extremely obvious).

The article refutes this: "months later The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, "

There's no "moral" panic about devices right now and this is straight up strawman. it's about mental health and learning.

Seriously, talk to a teacher about dealing with cell phone use in class. A friend relayed a story to me recently of a parent (whose child is constantly on their tablet during class) who had the audacity to respond to teachers' complaints by saying their child "shouldn't be punished for their [internet] addiction."

There's no reason kids should be on smart phones during the school day at all. The only "panic" is from parents who are terrified of being more than ten seconds away from contact with their child.

I think "moral panic" (to paraphrase Terry Eagleton on ideology) is like halitosis in that it's what the other person has and not oneself. Arguments that invoke it seem always to break down into finger-pointing and one-upmanship.

When I was a teenager in the 90s, playing in bands before I got into tech, I knew a slightly older girl who worked as a model. She had a beeper for go-sees that always made plans difficult. In hindsight I may have been very naive, but sometimes I'm still grateful she allowed me my innocence.

A "go-see" is when the model visits a photographer to discuss a potential shoot?

Or an agency for a potential hire - basically an audition, do you look the way we want the model for this shoot to look?

Implication being that she was actually a call girl or drug dealer.

I'm old so... I remember when someone having a beeper was awe inspiring. "Oooh that dude must be a doctor!" After a while it became more like "Oh that dude's sketchy" and finally "Oh wow that dude must be poor"

> New Jersey prohibited beepers for under-18s entirely, possession could result in a 6-month jail-term - a law proposed by ex-policeman and Senator Ronald L. Rice.

How the hell could a beeper be worse for a kid than 6 months jail time?

My fire department still gives out pagers to firefighters who respond from home. 99% of the time we get alerts from a phone app, but a few times it's gone down and we have to rely on pagers and a big horn that sits near the center of our local.

“People tend to think that a pager's foul”

A Tribe Called Quest - Skypager (1991)

For the youngins here, I can confirm this, getting caught with a beeper in my school was just as serious as getting caught with weapons or drugs. They were the ultimate contraband.

I’m sad that radio pagers are going away. They’re a much more reliable way of getting an emergency call out than a multifunction mobile phone. Their battery life is much longer and you won’t put it on do not disturb or silent mode.

Being on a separate radio network also means that in a real emergency when mobile signal is degraded, the pagers still work.

The other thing that’s convenient is that you can hand them off physically, so people know who is responsible for them at any time.

>They’re a much more reliable way of getting an emergency call out than a multifunction mobile phone.

More reliable than a landline?

Real landlines are a rarity these days, most stuff is VoIP. In any case, I was talking about getting an emergency call to the person wearing a pager (as in the case of doctors or other on call people), not the reliability of calling 911/999/112/whatever. Any mobile device is going to be more useful than a landline in that situation because the doctor could easily be out at the shops or having lunch. Pagers were invented for that particular scenario.

This probably varies wildly but in the US (or parts there of) landlines have to work in emergency situations - ie no power. Even if you have a 'phone line' delivered over optical the phone company provides you with an optical network interface device with a battery backup. I keep a landline just for emergency scenarios (also 911 actually knowing where you go if you call them and can't relay your address). Can't get that with no account virtual VOIP services or even rely on the big mobile providers to give you that functionality.

There's a video on YouTube of a doctor showing his beeper/pagers how it works and why he still has one. He goes two or three floors down in the hospital into a shielded room. His phone utterly lost no bars but the beeper worked fine.

Found it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAwW9arTxGo

While I do remember a vague connection between beepers and drug dealers in the 90's (probably from movies), I don't ever remember people just assuming you were a drug dealer just because you had a beeper in middle and high school. I don't believe I started carrying one until after high school though, so maby I missed out on all the fun.

I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a famous case at the time (don't remember the names) where a woman shot someone at his front door and the news was saying she was a drug dealer because she had a beeper.

But I had a beeper, and all my friends had beepers, and it seemed very strange to me.

This happened when I was in HS in the 1980's I think it was around 86-87 that they outright banned beepers/pagers, no exceptions.

I'm sure our elders did their best, I just wish their best hadn't been lies, paranoia, fearmongering and arresting children.

I graduated high school in 2000. I knew 2 kids in that school with pagers, and the only reason I paged them was to buy weed...

I went to high school in the early 90’s. Every kid I knew with a pager (about 5) used it primarily to buy or sell pot.

Yeah, initially they were associated with drug dealer types. Eventually in my group everyone had one so our parents could get in touch with us. The beep had a certain cadence when it started and even now when I hear it I get fun flashbacks to being a teen.

I remember when mobile phones started to become big, I still had a pager / beeper at the time and realised that you could SMS directly to the beeper number for them to appear - that was a pretty cool few months until everything went the way of mobile and 2 way texting!

Pagers in the 450 to 470 mHz frequency are still used in the senior living nurse call industry. It is still taking time to transition to an android or iOS device because of the cost to replace a $500 to $1000 device versus a $100 one, after it falls in a toilet.

Reminded me a bit about the use of satellite internet for anonymity

https://securelist.com/satellite-turla-apt-command-and-contr...

Only tangentially related, but emojis allegedly owe their existence to beepers: https://one-from-nippon.ghost.io/emoji/

Well it's nice knowing that moral panics have always been pretty stupid. But it's not so nice knowing that we keep making this same easily avoidable mistake.

"3 decades later, the New Jersey law was still on the books"

So, theoretically, what would happen if a student brought a retro beeper device to school today?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUZCV95SCXE

I remember this being a problem for high school students that were involved in activities like search and rescue.

aes128 pagers are the most secure side-channel on the planet. also a kept secret in telcoms.

add payload addressing per message and you can speak oneway to an unbounded number of pagers/devices, for only a few bucks a month. try doing that with cellular.

This may be hard to understand today, but you need to remember that a lot of these kids were already worshiping the devil due to backward messages that satanic heavy metal bands were hiding in their music.

It was a tough time to be a kid. I’m just happy so many of us made it through.

For anyone who didn't get it, I'm certain this was sarcasm, based upon the "satanic panic" moral scare of the 80s that led to the McMartin trial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial

haha the scary headline "Beepers Speed Drug Connections" like there's absolutely nothing speedy about a drug connection.

I'm a beeper sometimes.

<ph#>-420-911

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