Episode: 1459
Title: HPR1459: Locational Privacy with retrotech-the lowly pager
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1459/hpr1459.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 03:29:55

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We need an END
Hey it's DeepGeek, I wanted to give you guys a short and informal show on privacy
and security.
When the reason I say it's short and formal is because show notes and editing is coming
to a point becomes a roadblock to me making new content for HPR and so I said to myself
I'll call in a show and not edit and get out there quick and dirty like there's something
not quite right about the calling system so I thought I just record this incident of
the can but this belongs in privacy and security series and what I want to explore with you
today and put forth to you and see if there's any interest and perhaps opening a dialogue
on the usage of this thing is I've been playing with an old retro technology in the name
of locational privacy, a mobile technology, please don't laugh too hard.
I went out and I purchased a beeper, yes a pager, yes you know what I'm talking about,
the little stupid thing on your belt that people can call up and key in a phone number
and you're supposed to call them back, why, well locational privacy is the idea that
you can go out into the world in Sally Forth and not have the man get a blow by blow of
your location which currently they can do with cell phones.
We have a guy at the Hope Conference this gives a presentation called Piracy is Dead Get
Over It, he's a private investigator, if you haven't listened to these I would advise
you to do so and the cell phone is a dream snitch to have someone carrying around with
them. They do analysis on which cell phones which IMEI's stay in the same tower for
prolonged periods of time and create lists of associations and guilt by association
is supposed to go against our legal system here in America, but it doesn't. If the FBI
is drawing up lists of 1000 people who are in the same conference hall at the same time
and decide they're all evil hackers and they get all get FBI files open on them it's
fucking sucks. There's no way about it. So the problem it occurred to me is the fact that
cell phone technology for all its robustness for all the great things about it happens to
pinpoint your location and lock you into the nearest tower. It does that because it has
a transmitter, a radio transmitter that sends out a beacon every 10 minutes or if your
OJ Simpson driving in a road chase 10 times a minute, yes I'm not kidding. And it just creeps
me out. I just the idea that when I go to my next conference that I will be on a list
in the FBI's offices of computer criminals subject to investigation just freaks me out.
And so the transmitter is the culprit. That's what's doing the beckoning. And I used
to own a T900 page which is a Motorola 2 way pager and because it was meant to be used
in hospitals and at the time of manufacture it was thought to interfere with medical equipment
you could turn off the transmitter and it would function as a regular pager. Reminded
me that your basic one way pager does not have a transmitter. It does not have a transmitter.
It takes a little dinky AA battery and it's not constantly needing recharges. It's not constantly
telling them where you are. When you buy it again you've got to tell the page and company where
in the country you are. And I apologize to people who are listening internationally. I don't know
what the pager situation is in your country. I do see some resources out there for pagers but
I don't know the situation. So I'm going to be talking from a US perspective. But if you carry
around a pager the pager company does not know where you are in the country. They just blasting
it out. They have a series of transmitter posts throughout the country and they turn on your state
or in my case there's a conjunction of three states that are very close to each other in the
United States that has a specific name. And the end you know someone will dial this number. They'll
get the characteristic four short beeps. And they'll touch a tone number. And then the pager
company will transmit that to via satellite usually a bunch of transmitting locations. You know maybe
a thousand. And they'll all blast at the same time your pager's ID and you'll get the message
provide you're in the 75 square mile radius thing that you've told the cell phone company to
expect you to be in most of the time. And I want a dream advocating to you giving up the cell phone.
I myself am involved with taking care of Ellie and laws. A slew of heart patients including my wife.
I have to be reachable in a certain way. Mobally what I am saying is that if you're a privacy guy
and presumably if you're listening to the privacy and security mini-series on HPR presumably
you're a privacy guy right. If you're a privacy guy what I'm suggesting is that you might want to
look at carrying around a pager once again as we all did in the 90s that it will give you an
important option you can save yourself for the next half hour or for the next hour I won't be
traceable. For whatever reason you want not that you're going to do anything wrong but you know
your privacy guy your moody that way. You might be saying to yourself and hopefully the
laughter has subsided at this point. Hope you you might be saying to yourself
didn't this stuff die? Do people still use this? Well it turns out you have to separate the network
the data network from the actual device as a potential pager customer. You are but one of the things
that uses the network. You will be sharing the network with a bunch of applications
that keep the pager companies in the black and cause them to survive and continue to make profits
and continue to post dividends year after year even to know the user base has dwindled down
to what by mega corporation standards or by national corporation standards is nothing.
A pitifully few million people use it but there's a whole variety of machinery that is talking
to each other over the antennas of the receiving and transmitting antennas of the pager company
and it's so you might be saying well is it viable in a long term? Well let me just you know I've
been doing the deep geek which means you read everything you can on the internet. That's you know
something my friends came up with doing a deep geek on that topic yeah I've been reading everything
there's a whole bunch of applications out there that are keeping these in America that's two
companies alive they involve a slew of things that you would not imagine like networks of
parking meters talking to their home base talking to meter readers talking to
parking enforcement personnel speed checkpoints you know listen little signs to say the speed
limit here is 55 miles per hour you're doing and it blinks 65 yeah that can be paged to a cop
around the corner just so you know anything that involves one transmission transmission
hitting a whole bunch of things that have to be turned on irrigation systems I will wonder how
all the sprinklers on an 18 hole golf course get turned on at once they don't want to run wires
under that grass now do they use a network so there's all kinds of things that are going on out
there that are using this and you're actually buying a little slice of time to transmit some stuff
to you you're doing it with the idea of locational privacy you could you could be any place in the state
so the two remaining companies after the rounds of buyouts here in the United States are American
messaging which is formerly Verizon and USA mobility which is formerly watch wireless and metrical
and you can go out out there to the web and read how how these companies began buying each other out
in the end you know a nice this is a kind of game where the national company makes sense
because you can get paid to multiple cities at once so people who travel around in a region
you know it's better than having a local paging company by local paging company back in the day
when this stuff started like in the 60s and 70s and 80s it was the hospital owned their own paging
system the fire department owned their own paging system and they worked in that city in that town
in that building but now we have these things on networked this technology is really heavily used
by first responders and medical personnel these are people who just can't afford to be out of touch
they're on call in a way that requires them to be reachable and so they have to worry about what
if the cell phone network goes down what if this what if the switching system behind the cell phone
network goes down what if my local tower goes down all those things can lead to a doctor or a cop
an ambulance driver a paramedic not getting the message they have to get so these people are carrying
two communications devices typically if not something that's managed by their local
organization and indeed one of the pleasant surprises I had because I happen to live in a
French service area I happen to live in an area where where I work there's only only one of the
cell phone companies has a tower and the paging company doesn't work where I happen to work but
happens to work at my in-laws and at my computer lab so I was very pleased to find out that there's
a service available from both the paging companies called message carbon copying what you do is
you define the email address to the paging company of that you want a copy of every page to go to
so if someone were to page me the paging company pages my device and at the same time sends an
email to an address that happens to be my mobile text phone number for my cell phone so my
page gets copied to the cell phone and just like you might have two distress mirroring each other's
content arrayed array in your computer and you get more nines of service that way because remember
this drive is what 94% reliable so if you get two distress mirrors each other the chance of both
of them filling it once drops down to 99.9% it's the same deal with this technology you can now have
this important number this page or number get piped to both your pager and your cell phone
and the idea of both of these systems failing together is so minuscule you don't have to worry about
it one of the questions you might ask is well who's going to use the pager you know because they
people now expect to be able to cell phone call you you know I'm reading resistance from friends
and associates about this but you know what if they have to reach you and you don't pick up your
cell phone guess what they're going to go into their phone book and pull out your pager number
if they're that close to you and they have to reach you so don't worry about it
in the meantime you may also get into having certain key piece of information transmitted
for instance you can have your a text pager a text enabled pager will have an email address
and an sms address so people can text into and or email you in the form of a pager command
and get you the message that way as well as the fact that you could forward select emails
to your pager if you want to you could write a script with proc mail to cause your email server that
you run to page you with with things like when you get an email or perhaps might want to make a
cron job and get a list of emails that have come in during the day at a certain time when you know
you'll be in range of everything the form factors fantastic my pager is about a core the size of
my cell phone i'm forever leaving my cell phone in the car because it's it's bulky the pager is always
on the hip it's always on i've also had one other application that i did want to mention to you my
dear listeners and that's this i get very very annoyed with voicemail i suffer like many people
from an affliction known as audio processing disorder which means my hearing is fine but my
interpretation of words is difficult especially over a stack a connection like a like a cell phone
call or something like that or if i was background noise it it those me i am better off reading
which is why i often communicate better by email regardless about what people who don't suffer
from that think of me and you know if i got people hanging up on my voicemail machine
i would drive into range get on a parkway you know one of these one of these interstate commercial
parkways with with big trucks on it right and my indicate we're going that that i had a voicemail
i would pull over into the curb because i have to type my password because i'm a privacy and
security guy to got a type in my password for voicemail and just to hear a series of people hanging
up on my voicemail machine as my car get but got gets buffered back and forth by 18 wheel trucks
going up the parkway i also got annoyed by robo calls too well guess what if people hang up on your
page or number it doesn't page you and those four beeps looking for a numeric input
absolutely baffle the hell out of robo calls software so if you want you can set up your home phone
to forward calls instead of to your mobile voicemail to your page accompany
for free you can get a recording of your voice saying hi it's deep geek because that's what all
my friends call in the real world too i'm not accepting voicemails anymore dial a call and number
on your keypad now and you will never have to deal with robo calls again for the rest of your life
so i'm greatly enjoying carrying two devices once again and from time to time i say now i need my
privacy and i'll peel the back off my cell phone and i'll pull out the battery of my cell phone
i'll leave my beeper on and it's a lot like that scene in the novel 1984 by george oh well
where smith goes into the part person he thinks is a co-conspirator
happens to be an inner party member he says i'm going to turn off the the tele screen for a half
hour that's what my life has become i feel like that character you can turn off the surveillance for
a half hour well dear listener if you are geeky enough you too can drop off the grid
for periods of time it's a little inconvenient you're roughing it comparatively speaking
but you can do it so this has been deep geek do yourself a favor and go to duck duck go or your
favorite search engine and key in the words of vocational privacy and um join the privacy
revolution after the summer of snowden my friends bidding you well good day
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