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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Well, it would, if you had a 30W infrared spotlight with you.

Which begs the question: how hard is it to build a 30W, portable IR spotlight that you could get through a concert’s metal detector unnoticed?

> Taking photos/videos on small hand-held cameras and smartphones is permitted.

I suspect you could fit that into the form factor for a "small hand-held camera" that is apparently permitted into the tour.

It would be a fantastic form factor. After all, such a device wants a decently large battery, focusing optics, and an emitting surface at the focal plane big enough to dissipate the waste heat. This sounds a lot like a small digital camera with the sensor removed and an IR LED array put in its place.

Anyone aiming such a device across the venue would be extremely obvious, as everyone else’s inadequately filtered camera would see it :)

Right, because people looking through their cameras at all of the chaos, flashing lights and pulsating wristbands would _definitely_ notice one human being standing there with an IR transmitter and be able to understand what they were looking at.

I think at least a few photography nerds would notice the 30W white blob coming from where you're standing. Now whether that would get you in trouble...

They already have an even more powerful IR spotlight sweeping over the stadium; if that isn't ruining the photos, then I doubt the attacker's 30W source would even register.

Can confirm that everyone there is taking shitloads of photos and videos with their phones and I've never seen the stadium IR emitter appear in any of them.

The battery to run a 30W thing and the cooling required to dissipate it would look much closer to a large hand flashlight (the 3kg ones, with the handle) than a camera.

You'd need a whole row of conspirators to bring in camera-sized components that could be fit together ...

A single 18650 can do much more than 30W. My Emisar D4v2 can pull ~17A from a single 18650 on turbo mode, and it's not much bigger than the battery itself. I carry it on my belt everyday. It starts to get a little uncomfortable to hold and eventually triggers the thermal protection after about a minute of continuous turbo use, but that's more than enough for a quick prank. It runs an open source firmware too, so I could theoretically swap in some IR LEDs and program it with the appropriate modulation.

drones? that's a whole 'nother can of worms but it could work if you really .. really .. really want to be part of the light show.

Oh… drones are a really devious idea. You can imagine all sorts of political messages that someone may want to leverage an event like this to broadcast.

Flying a drone over a major concert is liable to get you charged with terrorism somehow even if you're just trying to do a prank.

Doesn't need to be big enough to scare people that badly.

You could sneak a heap of something like this into any big concert venue pretty easily:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004496779816.html

open them up and switch out the visible light LEDs for modulated IR ones, add a tiny microcontroller to send pre programmed data. Get you and a dozen friends to launch them all at the same time...

I wouldn't be surprised if concerts have anti-drone countermeasures in place already, given safety concerns.

Like what? This isn’t a battlefield, the FCC isn’t going to let them do any jamming and they sure as hell aren’t putting up CIWS cannons all over the place.

I've seen multiple NFL games be stopped in the middle because of one person flying a drone. They take this stuff extremely seriously - I wouldn't be surprised if the entire concert was put on hold until the drone was stopped. The people who have done this have served jail time and been hit with 6 figure fines.

Fwiw the show I saw was in a closed arena. I actually wish the roof had been open as the closed roof acoustics were awful, but you can imagine why they want to eliminate weather as a factor.

Go to a country where they do not use metal detectors in concerts

It transmits a code, so you’d have to clone the signal but I’m pretty sure it’s not cryptographic or anything.

There are a few at great locations in the stadium already.

Is 30W enough for a stadium audience?

What about those super bright handheld LED flashlights that have the power of the sun?

I mean one of their products is a big flashlight sized control rod, so they already exist.

> a big flashlight sized control rod

"Disclaimer: Use in nuclear reactors not recommended." ;)

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