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Comment by derleth | Hacker News Reader

This will be responsible for a few deaths if it ever becomes widespread. The obvious way is by preventing people from calling 911, but the other way, potentially just as deadly, is preventing people who are on-call from being called into hospitals where their services are required.

Someone who's on-call isn't always at the hospital. They might well be across town, within a certain range as dictated by maximum response time; that is, they can be anywhere within fifteen minutes' travel to the hospital once they've been called. Of course, if they don't get the call, or get the call late, that could mean someone's life.

There's an actual, articulable reason shit like this is illegal, and it isn't just arbitrary FCC bullshit. Being annoyed at cell phone calls isn't worth someone's life.

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Not to detract from your point, but it wouldn't affect home lines, so they'd still be able to contact 911. As for cell phones, if someone, say, collapses in public, I've witnessed 5+ people try to contact 911. The likelihood of everyone having the same network and thus being knocked out is relatively low.

And finally, many doctors use pagers/beepers, which wouldn't necessarily be knocked out in the same way a GSM network would.

But that's just me talking on a few details; I agree with you, it should obviously be illegal and could be deadly.

> it wouldn't affect home lines, so they'd still be able to contact 911.

First: Land lines, not home lines. My home line is a cell phone. Many others can say the same.

And this only helps when a land line is available, and when someone thinks to use it. Being out in the boonies is an obvious failure mode, but the other one, which can also be deadly, is people getting panicky and forgetting that the phone what hooks to the wall can be used to make calls.

> As for cell phones, if someone, say, collapses in public, I've witnessed 5+ people try to contact 911. The likelihood of everyone having the same network and thus being knocked out is relatively low.

Maybe I'm too used to living in the boonies, but I doubt most of the towns I've been to have any more than one network for the entire community. Simply not cost-effective to build-out in the flyover states.

> And finally, many doctors use pagers/beepers, which wouldn't necessarily be knocked out in the same way a GSM network would.

I know for a fact there are towns which are cell phone only as far as hospital personnel are concerned. You're right that pagers would likely be immune to this, but that only helps if they're actually being used.

Good catch, I meant land lines.

When I said the same network, I probably should have said network provider - I meant that if a GSM network is knocked out, odds are there's a CDMA Verizon user in the bunch trying to call 911.

Good points all around.

This attack will not affect the caller because "paging" is only used when the Network tries to get in contact with a phone that it doesn't already have an ongoing connection with.

It should affect all Network initiated communications though including push notifications.

I could see it being potentially being much worse. Some could buy a phone for every tower, set them up to wait for a trigger call that when received will cause then block every call in the country simultaneously. There are probably close to 200k towers in America so it would be fairly expensive and unlikely to get that many devices into place. Then again someone could just target the top 5 populated cities or if they coordinate it with a terrorist attack or if they are smart enough to know what the stock market would do...

The way I understand it, this attack prevents GSM from receiving calls, not from calling, so preventing people from calling 911 this way won't work.

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