Hacker News Reader

if you physically control the pager I don't even think it's called hacking anymore. you can change the hardware and software willy nilly. put an extra SIM that you control in there, and call it. put a radio receiver. a timer. heck, a dog whistle audio detector, you blow it and they blow up. infinite possibilities.

View on HN

Pagers don't have SIMs, they are simply programmed with a "Cap Code" which is basically the address of the pager.

Pagers can be programmed with multiple cap codes, and can function differently based on which cap code address receives a message. For instance, a single cap code could be programmed to just vibrate the pager, vs an audible alert.

Pagers are sent out via very high power distributed transmitters as one way transmissions simulcasted transmissions.

The format is typically:

[CAP CODE] - Message

That's literally it.

I mean they probably did hack to some degree the default software/hardware in the pager to get it to do something nonstandard. I doubt they have access to the full source code and build stack of the OG pager, so even just modifying the software running on it to do something different is indeed a hack.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com