The pager attack did change the world in two ways: the obvious one is where your point is most accurate (people becoming aware of how fragile supply chain are - just think snout what a terrorist could do with Amazon’s comingled inventory and returns!), but the other thing it did is start to legitimize this. If it’s only the Unabomber doing something, it’s clearly indefensible but as states use it other people will start to justify it on those grounds.
Hezbollah is hardly a sympathetic target but I’d be shocked if someone in the region doesn’t try to attack Israelis this way saying it’s not a war crime for the same reasons.
This is the most worrying part: Do we really need to normalize the idea of governments sending little bombs out into the civilian population and detonating them, hoping that they actually hit their targets? This is not how legitimate warfighting is done.
9/11 changed the world because it started two major wars in the Middle East, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It set the stage for world politics for the next few decades.
The reality of this attack is that it really won’t affect people’s lives in any meaningful way. Maybe a few people will be wary of using beepers for the next few months but I don’t see many people thinking of giving up their smartphones over this. Or perhaps I’m wrong and this foreshadows many similar supply chain bomb attacks in the future… I don’t know, but neither does Bruce Schneier and it’s too early to say definitively what the effect of this will be.
Literally the first sentence says the pager attack 'graphically illustrated a threat that cybersecurity experts have been warning about for years'.
The world is in a continuous state of change, and the fact that these pager attacks are now in the public consciousness introduces a whole series of potential pathways of thought and action that wouldn’t have been explored if not for this event. This is in addition to gaining clarity about the world as it already was immediately prior to the attack, i.e. yes we were vulnerable, and an entity was in the process of actively exploiting that vulnerability. Now we're aware, and that awareness has/will initiate a new cascade of change.
ETA: I'm very curious to understand how/why people disagree with this.