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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29665 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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IIRC it’s a liquid explosive that’s injected into the battery, so there’s nothing physical to check for.

Lol no. That'd mean inventing a whole new type of explosive that can be inside an working battery ?

Why - more likely these are custom made batteries no one thought to x-ray which were modified to have lower capacity and the empty space was taken up by a detonator and explosive. Much simpler.

Bunnie Huang has a not-implausible analysis of the difficulty. I think he underestimates some parts of it, which I'm not going to go into detail here around, but it's still absolutely plausible that the difficult part was setting up the front business and getting sales.

What worries me is that the explosive compound might not exist at all. Maybe this is something that all lithium-ion batteries can do with the right command.

Maybe this is something that all lithium-ion batteries can do with the right command.

Rednecks blowing up batteries would have discovered it by now.

I definitely remember seeing a few news stories of people having their jaws blown off by defective vaporizers.

It happens [cw: images of serious injury to face], but the explosion is pretty characteristic and very different from what we've seen from the pager explosions.

Ah, the old “vape that’s actually a lightsaber” trick.

Come on. Short the battery, see if the effect is just as bad as a normal battery. Use sympathetic detonation to test if it is explosive. Use mass spectroscopy to test the chemical composition.

Other than that, a pretty ballsy power move by Mossad, betting on Hezbollah being to stupid to check for explosives in other electronics after learning that explosives were hidden in some of them.

Then again, any senior commander who personally handles electronics within 24h after learning that some of them had a tendency to explode is simply to trusting to live.

Short the battery

This won't do anything (other than causing a potential fire).

Explosives like that require an initial shock to actually detonate and overheating just sets them on fire (like it can set a regular battery).

If I had to hide an electronically ignited bomb in a battery, I would try to set it up so that a short ignites a primer which will ignite the explosive. Fill an electrical fuse with a primer which is volatile enough that the molten wire sets it off, perhaps?

The alternatives being that you have three leads on your battery (e.g. +, -, boom, where connecting boom with + will cause the explosion.), which is much more noticeable, or having another component which serves as a primer on the PCB near that battery. Of course, 'shorten the battery when receiving a particular message' is not a standard feature of most pagers, so you have to modify or swap the PCB anyhow, and putting the electronic ignition in there might be easier.

I concede that just because a battery is not rigged to explode on short it might still explode in other conditions.

Quite a lot of lipo have more than two leads, starting at a third thermistor wire, going up to per cell voltage leads, and eventually going to annoying Apple bullshit.

And even with two leads, if you're manufacturing a thousand battery-bombs, there's a lot of ways to do a one-wire (and ground) protocol to pass data to a microcontroller, which can easily be the size of a grain of rice. Or you could hard-short the battery leads on a battery without builtin overcurrent protections, and use it as a primary for your real explosives -- even a well-contained lipo fire is definitely hot enough to set off most thermal-ignite explosives.

Explosives like what? AFAIK the pager bombs were triggered by heat rather than shock.

PETN and any other similar explosives with enough power in such small size. At least PETN can be triggered by a spark which is simple enough to generate electronically (you just need a small transformer to produce high voltage and a very short spark gap).

Even if Hezbollah was checking (and we don't know they weren't), this is an extremely fast turn-around. The second tower was hit an hour within the first, and it doesn't really project incompetence that it wasn't protected sooner.

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