5 ms·

When did we all become so paranoid? Pagers used to be used by millions of people, in thousands of companies. 99.999% of the messages sent would have been utter

When did we all become so paranoid? Pagers used to be used by millions of people, in thousands of companies. 99.999% of the messages sent would have been utterly mundane. Stuff like 'call the office' or 'go to place x'. Just like our chat platforms of today, the data just isn't that interesting. Pagers were good for the era they were invented for, and at scale ended up being almost free to operate for the companies that used them. Encrypting stuff requires CPU grunt that pagers simply did not have, especially when the driver was to have as long battery life as possible. If anything, I miss that simpler era when we didn't have to assume that everybody in the chain was a bad actor trying steal our information.

minitoar 5y ago
Even Caesar encrypted his pages.
Spooky23 5y ago
We didn’t assume because of ignorance. Innocence lost. Plenty of people were listening - there’s an archive from 9/11/01 that was released with many of the pages in lower Manhattan that day. Police routinely monitored this stuff, and it’s reputed that PIs, ambulance chasing attorneys, etc did the same. Was it relevant/meaningful to when my mom was going to pick me up from work at the mall was a page? Probably not.
klyrs 5y ago
> When did we all become so paranoid? One industry that makes extensive use of pagers is health care. Frequently, personal and identifying information (PII) is transmitted over pages. By all rights, this is a violation of privacy laws (e.g. HIPAA). Why does a desire for privacy constitute paranoia? Pagers aren't only a technology of yesteryear -- they're still in use by millions of hospital staff. Despite the availability of cheap & easy strong crypto today, the technology is still stuck in the past. I'd wonder why, but upgrading infrastructure is expensive and it will probably take a class-action suit to make continued privacy violations more expensive than upgrades.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mikecsh 5y ago
  >> I'd wonder why I'm a doctor, and whilst I despise carrying a pager it does have some benefits over more modern alternatives in some scenarios. Mobile (cell) reception in hospitals is generally very poor and wifi connectivity is also generally poor. Trying to rely on either of those to deliver critical communication (e.g. bleeps to the crash team to respond to a cardiac arrest) is more unreliable than the hospital blasting a simple radio signal that any pagers within a few mile radius will always receive and decode appropriately. For less critical communications (e.g. where you might bleep someone to contact them to a refer a patient to their specialty) there is a (slow) move towards messaging apps or email. These solutions do not yet have the immediacy and reliability of a simple pager for critical applications.
  - Fogest 5y ago
    I'm curious what personal health information would be transmitted via a pager anyway? I assume a doctor would only need to know a room number and maybe code or chief complaint in the page? I see other commenters mentioning some PHI is being shared via pagers and I am unclear what that may be ?
    - mikecsh 5y ago
      In my experience (UK) there is no personal information transmitted. There are two main types of bleeps: 1. Sending the number of a telephone extension you want the recipient of the bleep to call. For example, if I need a cardiology opinion, I will bleep the cardiologist with a telephone extension and wait for them to (hopefully) call back while I am still but he phone and before it is called by anyone else. This data is not sensitive. These are the types of bleeps which are being replaced slowly by asynchronous communication via apps 2. Emergency bleeps which are designed to alert a specific group of people on the arrest team to respond to an emergency. These usually work quite differently. Instead of 1:1 they are 1:many and usually carry a different alert tone, followed by a (generally poor quality) audio alert of the operator saying something like "paediatric cardiac arrest inbound to ED, ETA, 5 minutes". Again these carry no sensitive data.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
Well one thing that is a difference is that receiving paging feeds was not as trivial back then as it is now. Grab a $10 rtlsdr and free software and you're set. Back in the 90s you needed serious hardware to do this.
grishka 5y ago
How much CPU does it require, realistically, to implement an asymmetric + XOR cipher? Each pager would have a key pair provisioned by the provider. The provider would generate a unique key for each message and then use the pager's public key to encrypt that and send it along with the XOR-ed message. I'd bet you could decrypt that on a weak-ass microcontroller.
- ac29 5y ago
  Paging never really passed 1980s technology. Sure, its easy enough to en/decrypt short messages now with nearly zero battery use, but it was probably deemed unnecessary at the time. edit: looks like someone bolted AES onto FLEX: https://americanmessaging.net/elite/ https://americanmessaging.net/elite/
  - rfdave 5y ago
    Paging was also highly interested in making sure every bit that went over the air generated revenue, so adding bits to provide security was a hard sell. FLEX and ReFLEX are 90's technology.
tinus_hn 5y ago
It used to be pretty difficult to capture, record and process all that data. Now you can do it yourself for next to nothing. And so can anyone else.

minitoar 5y ago

Even Caesar encrypted his pages.

Spooky23 5y ago

We didn’t assume because of ignorance. Innocence lost. Plenty of people were listening - there’s an archive from 9/11/01 that was released with many of the pages in lower Manhattan that day. Police routinely monitored this stuff, and it’s reputed that PIs, ambulance chasing attorneys, etc did the same. Was it relevant/meaningful to when my mom was going to pick me up from work at the mall was a page? Probably not.

klyrs 5y ago

> When did we all become so paranoid? One industry that makes extensive use of pagers is health care. Frequently, personal and identifying information (PII) is transmitted over pages. By all rights, this is a violation of privacy laws (e.g. HIPAA). Why does a desire for privacy constitute paranoia? Pagers aren't only a technology of yesteryear -- they're still in use by millions of hospital staff. Despite the availability of cheap & easy strong crypto today, the technology is still stuck in the past. I'd wonder why, but upgrading infrastructure is expensive and it will probably take a class-action suit to make continued privacy violations more expensive than upgrades.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mikecsh 5y ago
>> I'd wonder why I'm a doctor, and whilst I despise carrying a pager it does have some benefits over more modern alternatives in some scenarios. Mobile (cell) reception in hospitals is generally very poor and wifi connectivity is also generally poor. Trying to rely on either of those to deliver critical communication (e.g. bleeps to the crash team to respond to a cardiac arrest) is more unreliable than the hospital blasting a simple radio signal that any pagers within a few mile radius will always receive and decode appropriately. For less critical communications (e.g. where you might bleep someone to contact them to a refer a patient to their specialty) there is a (slow) move towards messaging apps or email. These solutions do not yet have the immediacy and reliability of a simple pager for critical applications.
- Fogest 5y ago
  I'm curious what personal health information would be transmitted via a pager anyway? I assume a doctor would only need to know a room number and maybe code or chief complaint in the page? I see other commenters mentioning some PHI is being shared via pagers and I am unclear what that may be ?
  - mikecsh 5y ago
    In my experience (UK) there is no personal information transmitted. There are two main types of bleeps: 1. Sending the number of a telephone extension you want the recipient of the bleep to call. For example, if I need a cardiology opinion, I will bleep the cardiologist with a telephone extension and wait for them to (hopefully) call back while I am still but he phone and before it is called by anyone else. This data is not sensitive. These are the types of bleeps which are being replaced slowly by asynchronous communication via apps 2. Emergency bleeps which are designed to alert a specific group of people on the arrest team to respond to an emergency. These usually work quite differently. Instead of 1:1 they are 1:many and usually carry a different alert tone, followed by a (generally poor quality) audio alert of the operator saying something like "paediatric cardiac arrest inbound to ED, ETA, 5 minutes". Again these carry no sensitive data.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

Well one thing that is a difference is that receiving paging feeds was not as trivial back then as it is now. Grab a $10 rtlsdr and free software and you're set. Back in the 90s you needed serious hardware to do this.

grishka 5y ago

How much CPU does it require, realistically, to implement an asymmetric + XOR cipher? Each pager would have a key pair provisioned by the provider. The provider would generate a unique key for each message and then use the pager's public key to encrypt that and send it along with the XOR-ed message. I'd bet you could decrypt that on a weak-ass microcontroller.

ac29 5y ago
Paging never really passed 1980s technology. Sure, its easy enough to en/decrypt short messages now with nearly zero battery use, but it was probably deemed unnecessary at the time. edit: looks like someone bolted AES onto FLEX: https://americanmessaging.net/elite/ https://americanmessaging.net/elite/
- rfdave 5y ago
  Paging was also highly interested in making sure every bit that went over the air generated revenue, so adding bits to provide security was a hard sell. FLEX and ReFLEX are 90's technology.

tinus_hn 5y ago

It used to be pretty difficult to capture, record and process all that data. Now you can do it yourself for next to nothing. And so can anyone else.