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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29678 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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If it is true that the explosives were inside the batteries, then there is nothing to see. It would look normal inside.

You could cut apart the battery and compare it to similar batteries. Or blow it up with a sympathetic explosion to see if it has explosives.

Is the theory that batteries were augmented with explosive or are these explosions from thermal runaway of regular lithium batteries? Even a regular lithium fire can be quite explosive if triggered in an enclosed vessel.

In either case shouldn't there be some trace in the battery management system firmware?

In the case where the batteries are internationally being sent into thermal runaway, this must be commanded by the device or BMS firmware. Shouldn't you be able to dump the firmware out and check it's hash against an uncompromised version?

In the other case that the batteries have been augmented with additional explosives, shouldn't the BMS see that the battery has always been under rated capacity. Or in the case where the BMS was set to miss-report capacity, that you should be able to detect it as in the first case.

100% this was explosive charges in batteries. Funny they didn't notice the batteries had a low capacity somehow.

Most consumer devices are locked down in a way that prevents you from dumping the firmware. They’ll have UART disabled completely, or maybe if you’re lucky it might be programmed to support a connection if you provide power to some undocumented pins on the microcontroller.

And assuming you could dump the firmware, you end up with a binary that’s going to be nontrivial to analyze. There’s nothing human readable to give you context clues. Maybe an LLM could help to more quickly analyze, I haven’t tried.

Probably your best bet would be to watch network traffic to the devices, and try to catch it polling Mossad for whether it’s time to explode. But even then they’ve demonstrated the ability to trigger without need for internet access, assuming “walkie talkie” is a mere CB radio.

I wonder if they’ve also tainted Hezbollah ammo supplies, that’s a trick that’s been done before and is also greatly demoralizing.

What I had imagined was that the charge controller was some commercial off the shelf module and you could just compare a binary dump directly from the EPROM to a known good copy. I suppose the battery management could be integrated with the rest of the the devices firmware, and that the firmware is sufficiently localized that you couldn't locate an exact known safe version.

I'm amazed at the sophistication of the infiltration though.

Without getting into describing how to make an explosive out of a battery...a LiPo won't make an explosion, just a big fire.

Yeah, I managed to track down some unconfirmed videos of the reported explosions. It does look larger and more violent than you would get with even the most kinetic LiPo fire. In that case thought, the battery must have been significantly below standard capacity or have the dimensions way out of spec. Maybe that's fine though, like having to pull every radio and pager with a pillowly LiPo out of action effectively dismantles the communication network.

You could cut apart the battery and compare it to similar batteries.

For added fun, you'll need to be careful doing this because lithium battery chemistries have a tendency to spontaneously combust when exposed to oxygen.

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