site banner
PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   1629 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 22, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Do you think that Grim Beeper (the attack on Hezbollah pagers) puts us in uncharted waters - war crimes law wise. Usually the assumption is that the location attacked is well defined whereas who is inside is fuzzier. Here we have the opposite - who is attacked is extremely precisely defined, but when they pressed the make go boom button they had no idea where the booms would be.

My worry has been that some of the explosions could have happened on passenger jets... How did the Israelis know they wouldn't down hundreds of innocents?

According to the Times of Israel, the Hezbollah devices were detonated individually, with precise intel on targets (reddit link).

It feels like poor taste to gloat, but called it. Err, maybe rather, I am pleased to see that my prediction was acceptably-calibrated.

So like, are there hundreds of explosive pagers that ended up in god-knows-where that they just didn't detonate?

I think one needs to treat every single device manufactured in Israel as compromised in some way by Mossad. I would not want Israeli chips in my smartphone.

If you work for Hezbollah, that is a smart precaution. If you don't, you are just being silly. Which is of course your right, but the thought that Israel would waste top intelligence talents and years of intelligence work to target a random guy on the internet is hilarious. Maybe they'll start with stealing one of your shoes?

I would not want Israeli chips in my smartphone.

You already have Israeli chips in at least one of your devices, most likely your laptop. (Intel has a fab in Tel Aviv.)

I assume that it require a lot of stars to align together in a bad way. There no way to receive the signal while at cruising height. 20 grams of petn is not that much - I doubt it could cause decompression even on a window seat. Let alone serious structural damage. Also it is explosive - there doesn't seems to be reports about it bringing fire. I think that there may be one critical moment if this happened in just the right time during takeoff, in just the right seat. And they may have just excluded the airport cell from firing the command.

I mean true, but I think this event is going to change security in airports. While this event didn’t down any planes because it was fairly careful and used small charges, it certainly will make security more concerned about things like cellphones and beepers and iPads on airplanes simply because this sort of attack is now possible even without the person being aware of the explosive, and even though the device itself still works. Had the tampered device not worked they would have gotten new ones long ago. So we know that as far as the end users knew the device worked and it wasn’t doing anything unusual. Now you have a new risk in the form of every cellular device that goes onto that airplane, even if you turn it on and can use it, it might still blow up.

Laptops have been screened since forever. As were any container that is enough to pack enough explosives to hurt a plane. Including every cellular device, of course. I'm pretty sure if Hezs put their pagers through the airports scanners, stuff would light up - but most of them probably were too busy with other things to fly to an international vacation, or they left their work pagers at home.

Too small of explosions for that from the videos I saw

Despite supporting the attack and thinking it's unbelievably cool and hilarious: yes. Supply Chain as a vector of attack has been a thing in software forever, but it frankly makes me more anxious about the US outsourcing what seems like every meaningful element of production (mostly to our primary strategic enemy).

We already let China poison our children with lead every once in a while, and we've become unthinking lemmings about every super-dense electronic device being totally unserviceable. We're tracked constantly with GPS. The establishment already uses our laziness as a weapon through lawfare, but now has a true PoC if they ever choose to take it to the physical realm.

Grim Beeper

Amazing, did you come up with this?

Stolen from Twitter

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats