One other interesting tidbit:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41569955
Funny enough the Apollo pagers website appears to be down.
What if the company itself was a front?
I’m not familiar with the company, but it looks like it goes way back on archive.org, so I don’t think that it was a front. Might just be all the interested people hitting the website simultaneously taking it down.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hezbollah-pagers-blast-israel-lebanon-1.7325913
What type of pager exploded?
Images of the destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back consistent with those made by Gold Apollo, a Taiwan-based pager manufacturer.
The firm did not immediately reply to questions from Reuters. Hezbollah did not reply to questions from Reuters on the make of the pagers.
TRTWorld – not my ideal source, but I don’t think that they have a reason to make anything up here – says AAA rather than AA, but in either case, IIRC alkalines are normally intrinsically safe, can’t discharge quickly enough to explode. So if it’s alkaline rather than lithium, then it’d need to be be a supply chain attack:
The Alphanumeric Pager (AP-900) produced by Gold Apollo Co., Ltd. has been identified as one of the devices that exploded, killing and injuring scores in Lebanon.
At least nine people have been killed and over 2,750 others, including Hezbollah militants and medics, were injured when their paging devices exploded across Lebanon.
Speculation has emerged surrounding how the devices could have exploded and caused such high casualties, especially a pager like the AP-900 that operates on AAA alkaline batteries.
Initial investigations suggest that the pager’s standard battery configuration is unlikely to be the cause of the explosions.
Instead, authorities are leaning towards the possibility that the devices were intentionally rigged with explosive materials.
If explosives were rigged inside the device before it reached Hezbollah members, it could cause such significant damage when detonated by signal.
That probably isn’t good news for Hezbollah, but it’s good news for me, because I’m not in a fight with some nation-state and probably am not going to wind up with explosive-rigged devices.
Gold Apollo lists AA, FWIW
Power from a single AA alkaline battery (plus lithium backup battery).
EDIT: The AP-900 uses AAA.
And yeah they absolutely are legit and are used all over the industries that still use pagers (hospitals are big big one in part because of their reliability and lack of EMI).
Another interesting point about them is that they are:
UL-certified for use in hazardous locations
