1990 Called. They want their technology back.
Today I got something.It makes it sound like an STD or something. Almost. LOL!One way, obviously.The coverage is outright laughable:Even compared to AT&T which typically doesn't get high praise...At least I get text messages to my phone which I'm really and truly guaranteed to have on me at nearly all times even when I'm not on call. :-) The pager can serve to try to wake me up if I get caught sleeping. The one thing that it is is loud. But I'm a heavy sleeper -- frighteningly, I can sleep through fire alarms -- so it'll be a challenge.One thing I heard rumor of is the fact that they offer guaranteed delivery of pages, which I can handily debunk: it is a one-way device. The central office can only transmit. It doesn't know if something is receiving it. Sure, it can re-broadcast it a huge number of times, but in no way can it guarantee receipt. At least with cellular SMS the carrier can get a ping back from the device since it is a two-way transceiver. Wikipedia confirms this of course.But in any case, this little devil is sitting on the 33cm chunk of the spectrum and it likely talking FLEX. I wonder if I can build a receiver for this? I have another pager sitting in my closet (back from the actual 90s) that I might be able to hack apart and maybe hook up a scope to it. Oddly, the protocol is also well known to be unsecured, so this would be a handy attack vector to see when critical systems and services are down.Hmmm... this might be the right excuse to pull the trigger on a logic analyzer. :-P It's running slow enough that even a stupid-cheap one would be able to sniff the protocol. Of course, that's nothing new. But it's an excuse to accumulate test gear! (BTW: Not looking to attack, just looking for some cool white-hat hacking opportunities!)
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Update: I was expecting to need some cash (i.e. > $250) to do a FLEX sniffer... turns out all you need is $10 and a cute girl!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbAqiC37yQg:-P