Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs Is a Bad Idea
bunniestudios.com
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Of course, unless you think state-sponsored terrorism is a good thing, or that it actually works to "fight fire with fire" (hint: fighting fire with water is far more effective).
War is horrible, but it's sometimes the optimal strategy for independent actors to achieve their objectives.
War is based in basic game-theory.
In the case of Israel, they are intentionally failing the negotiation part as they commit an active genocide. Their motto has always been "do 10x to your enemy as they've done to you" and at some point it completely fails.
Most other nations don't get this fanatical.
People think war has rules because most wars on television are completely lopsided affairs.
Arguable genocides in war are extremely common in war, and are probably the rule, not the exception. In recent years we've effectively seen an equivalent in the Sri Lankan Civil War, DRC, Darfur, Burma, I could go on. War is fucking terrible, and people should take every reasonable avenue to avoid them.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing>
Power organises. Subordinated peoples attack that organisation, and it has long been this way.
Power, of course, resents that tactic. In large part because it is effective.
Most particularly given the responses made to similar methods used currently against the party which had executed KDH, as it turns out that there is in fact precedent. The personnel in the KDH event are significant both historically and politically, one later serving as head of state. And I find most people are entirely unaware of the incident, as I was until the past decade or so. (That's "recent" for me.)
I don't recall the specific inspiration for my search in which I'd learned of the event, but I think it was simply looking for what the first modern use of terrorist-type explosive attacks was. There are of course many earlier instances, and the notion of the bomb-throwing anarchist is reduced to cliche. But in terms of a significant planned attack intended to inflict mass casualties against an asymmetric foe, the KDH instance is an exemplar.
As I've said in several recent comments on pager/radio threads, I'm not a partisan to either side, I both condemn actions taken by both, and have a deep sympathy for uninvolved civilians (which is not, of course, all civilians). What I do believe is that a deep understanding is best served by a realistic view, understanding that most hats are at best grey, and that there's more history than many people are aware of. I'm trying to help spread that awareness.
That said, you were specifically responding to this comment:
> Too bad militants don't really follow those same rules regarding uniforms etc. Trust was lost long ago, before even the first suicide bomber wearing civilian clothes set themselves off in a crowded market.
My point was that this is long enough ago, and before Israel was even founded, so bringing it up as a counter-example of Israeli behavior, which is what you seemed to do, is very fraught. Israel didn't even exist at that time!
Again, it surprised me to learn this, and I find many others are similarly unaware. And again: the situation is complex and nuanced.
Also, I'd point out that the attack on the King David Hotel was widely condemned by almost all mainstream Jewish and Zionist organizations, including the official Porto-army of Israel which turned into the IDF, and including by Ben Gurion, Israel's first Prime Minister.
Btw, if you want a fact that's sure to wow people - I'm fairly certain that, to date, the KDH bombing was the deadliest terror attack in the Palestinian/Israeli territory. (Excluding October 7th, of course, which I'd personally categorize as an invasion, not as a single terror attack.)
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings>
(As I've said: all sides here.)
NB: Skimming that article right now, the bombing seems to have pre-dated Hezbollah (generally given to have formed in 1985), though Iran's hand in affairs is fairly likely, and "Islamic Jihad" may have been a label adopted by Hezbollah or a nascent precursor group. The event is somewhat coupled to events in Palestine given the PLO's involvement in Beirut.
Is children's trust that the football field is a safe place not violated now?
This is far from confirmed and is effectively just an opinion (not that children were killed, but that Hezbollah was responsible).
> I don't read the Hezbollah channels
ok... [1]
> The only reason to sow doubt is to protect these monsters.
i personally dispute misinformation because, well, it's misinformation and it's used by state actors to escalate violence. [2]
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[1] "Hezbollah, the most powerful paramilitary and political force in Lebanon, was quick to say it was not behind the attack, a rare denial from a group that normally claims every attack launched."
[2] "With Israel vowing retaliation for what was the highest civilian death toll in Israel-held territory since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, diplomats rushed to prevent an escalation that could spiral into an all-out war after months of exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah over the Lebanese-Israeli border."
source: https://apnews.com/article/israel-golan-heights-soccer-rocke...
> > I don't read the Hezbollah channels
I read the Gaza channels. They republish things from other channels. Right now I'm subscribed only to Gaza Now as that seems to be the source of much information that the other channels republish, as much news being made is being made in Gaza.
> i personally dispute misinformation because, well, it's misinformation and it's used by state actors to escalate violence.
The idea that this missile was not from Hezbollah is misinformation. They claimed it then retracted it. People there state that it came from Lebanon, apparently backed up by the direction of the debris and video. And the Druze - who famously abhor conflict - state that it came from Lebanon and they petitioned the Israeli government not to retaliate. If there were any doubt, the Druze themselves would be saying it.
To date, there has been no independent verification of the weapon's remains. At this point it is very much a case of "he said, she said". On that basis I can only ask, why would Hezbollah deliberately target the Druze civilian population? You seem to imply that they did so deliberately (i.e. deliberately targeted these civilians). That, in my opinion is simply your opinion and not based on verifiable fact. There is not even a likely motivation for such an act.
To be clear, I am fully willing to accept - given the available evidence - that Hezbollah may have made a miscalculation and are responsible for the deaths of these children. Deliberately though? Very, very doubtful.
However, I do owe you an apology. In an earlier comment I claimed that you had implied that Hezbollah was deliberately targeting civilians in this latest conflict and after rereading it seems you haven't made this claim. Sorry.
What level of proof are you looking for? Hezbollah even claimed responsibility then retracted it when it was found to have hit a non-military target.
It seems pretty clear that independent verification of the debris would settle this conclusively. Hasn't happened. Why?
Because it was used as justification for a major escalation.
> Hezbollah attacks against Israel - and there have been literally thousands of such rocket attacks recently.
It does. Hezbollah denied it. They haven't been in the habit of doing that.
> This isn't the type of rocket that Israel uses at all.
Again, you are making claims without possibly being sure of them - unless you take the Israeli government's word for it - you cannot possibly be sure. Neither can I.
Anyhow, as it's clear that you are unwilling to entertain the possibility that this was not a Hezbollah rocket, I don't think there is anything to be gained from continuing this discussion.
I note that you are commenting from Israel. I am not. I'm a long way from this conflict. I hope that you and your loved ones are safe and can soon enjoy the kind of security and freedoms that most of us take for granted.
I'll just quote Wikipedia here:
> Israel blamed Hezbollah for carrying out the attack with an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket equipped with a 53-kilogram warhead.[7][9] Hezbollah said it had targeted a nearby military base and that the football pitch was hit by an errant Israeli Iron Dome air defence projectile. Western sources dismissed this claim, citing expert opinion that the rocket had been fired by Hezbollah or another militant group in Lebanon.[9][10][11][4][12]
Even if Hezbollah is correct that it was an errant Iron Dome projectile (which as you can see, is widely disputed), that would still be Hezbollah's fault, because the whole reason Iron Dome rockets need to be fired is because of Hezbollah's attacks on Israel.
What level of convincing do you think we need to take this from "unconfirmed" and "just an opinion" to confirmed?
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Wikipedia aside, Hezbollah has fired thousands, maybe tens of thousands of rockets at Israel over the last year, causing ~80k people to have to flee their homes, destroying parts of cities, and causing massive fires. They've been targeting civilians non-stop for almost a year.
Given this massive prior, I think on balance it is far more likely that this strike was another case of these thousands of other cases, and the reason they're denying it is because this one specifically wasn't intercepted and killed a lot of kids.
You really think that that's not more likely?
Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization, shoots thousands of rockets, claims them all, including initially attacks 3km from that field, but then when it turns out it killed a bunch of kids, denies responsibility. And you think taking their word for it is the more likely correct thing here?
You appear to be making the argument that my claim that this has not been conclusively confirmed is wrong because of what is likely/unlikely. That is fallacious and frankly comes across as disingenuous.
If you are going to make the strong claim you need to back it up with real evidence or you risk being accused of promoting misinformation for the purposes of justifying further death and suffering.
To the best of my knowledge the source of the rocket has not been confirmed. Are you claiming that it has (IDF or US repetition of IDF claims not withstanding)?
> What level of convincing do you think we need to take this from "unconfirmed" and "just an opinion" to confirmed?
Independent verification of the debris would settle this conclusively. Hasn't happened. Why not? Especially given that it was used to justify an escalation. Without verifiable evidence to support it that just looks like cynical use of these children's deaths to inflict more suffering for political purposes.
Well, all of our trust that our phones aren’t surprise explosive devices. As well as the devices in the pockets of the people next to us in a crowd.
I've had friends and coworkers murdered, kidnapped, and at least two that I know of had their children burned to death. My older daughter's friend was murdered along with both his brothers and both his parents - there was nobody left alive so this child didn't even have the traditional prayer said at his funeral. My younger son's camp counselor was kidnapped and later his body was retrieved. Shall I go on? Or would you believe me that this war has far worse inconvenienced us and we're doing what we can to end it as quickly as possible - including maiming 3000 enemy fighters in an attack so targeted that a single civilian child died among over a dozen dead militants and 3000 injured militants.
But it's unrelated to "nobody in the whole world can trust anything with a lithium battery anymore" and the cost of that over time will be much higher than your dead family and friends, in terms of say, people dying in hospitals over the next 30 years because pagers stop being used, or all kinds of anything where a battery powered device would save a life
If you were in Lebanon, that would be a different story, but making it some global feeling is pretty bs.
My point is a lot of crap in the world happen, I don't see this being something that will actually occupy anyones mind unless they're in job/role that puts them in harms way.
More worried than I was a few days ago, at least.
But it's emphatically not most Israeli's perspective. Israelis are very much in the front lines of this - around 80k Israelis have literally had to abandon their homes are internally displaced, because the North of Israel is under rocket attacks from Hezbollah every day for the last 11 months. Cities have been partially destroyed, and fires have raged across the North. And if a wider war with Hezbollah happens, most likely all of Israel will be under immediate fire.
So this perspective of "trust" that the author talks about does not, at all, exist between Israel and Hezbollah. Which is why Hezbollah are designated a terrorist organization among so many countries.
> The reason we don’t see exploding battery attacks more often is not because it’s technically hard, it’s because the erosion of public trust in everyday things isn’t worth it.
For the US that is maybe, maybe, true.
But for Israel that is absolutely not true. The reason Hezbollah doesn't do this kind of thing is because they can't. But they have been doing things they can do, like shooting rockets, and they have also tried to cause terror attacks inside of Israel.
I do think there's a difference between the relatively peaceful times though, and the current situation, for all parties.
> The Israelis have chosen to maintain a continuous military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for almost six decades, rather than integrating them or letting them be independent, which locks the region in permanent conflict of varying levels of intensity.
You seem to imply that all the blame for the region having conflict is the occupation, which is... not quite true. Israel was founded and immediately attacked, and was attacked several more times before the military occupation; one major reason the occupation even happened in the first place was because Israel feared further attacks from neighboring countries, and wanted more of a buffer.
Look, I'm no fan of the occupation, to put it mildly (very mildly). But it's not the whole reason for the conflict. And more importantly, it's not just Israel "choosing" a military occupation instead of "letting them be independent".
There were very serious attempts to try and reach a settlement with the Palestinians that would give them an independent state, and indeed that was the birth of the current Palestinian government/state in the form of the PA, with what independence they do have. But the Palestinians refused and walked away from getting a state.
And Israel did leave Gaza, to at least some extent - they then elected Hamas and started firing rockets at Israel two years later.
I'm obviously a bit biased towards the more pro-Israel narrative, though I try to see things from the Palestinian perspective as well. But I don't think you can completely lay the blame on one side, as you seemed to do (and sorry if I misunderstood you).
From what I have heard, the idea the Palestinians were ever actually offered a state may be a myth, but I think the more important thing there is that Rabin was assassinated and that torpedoed the process. Netanyahu has never really seemed interested in peace, his political career depends on it not happening.
> From what I have head, the idea the Palestinians were ever actually offered a state may be a myth [...]
It absolutely isn't a myth. It was widely known and accepted by most people that the Palestinians walked away from very good deals, probably the best Israel can do. I'm not sure why there's a modern movement to change that knowledge, when reading the accounts of most people surrounding the negotiations gives a pretty clear picture.
Specifically, Barak offered a decent deal in 2000, the Clinton parameters of around 2001 were an even better proposal that seemed to give the Palestinians almost everything they wanted, and Olmert made a proposal that was really, really good. The Palestinians walked away from these deals without any alternative offer, without saying what would work for them. Don't trust Israel's word for it - trust Clinton's! Or trust numerous other US negotiators.
> [...] Rabing was assassinated and that torpedoed the process.
This is wrong, he was assassinated in 1995, all the offers I talked about happened afterwards, from 2000 to 2008. Israelis voted multiple times for people who vowed to pursue a peace process, and even Sharon, who was a very hawkish PM, ended up doing the Gaza withdrawal.
What really torpedoed the peace process was that Israeli steps towards peace, including the Oslo process that founded the PA and gave them semi-control over the land, was met with the second intifada's terror attacks. Israelis saw steps towards peace being met with more violence, not less.
The same happened again with the Gaza withdrawal - the hawkish Israelis warned that withdrawing the army and giving Palestinians full control of Gaza would end with them using it as a terror base, and that's exactly what happened. Again, to Israelis - a step towards giving Palestinians more control ended with far, far more violence.
> Netanyahu has never really seemed interested in peace [...]
This is absolutely true, and the major correct criticism of Israel is in its actions under Netanyahu over the last 15ish years. Israel has not only not continued to pursue peace because of the destruction of the Israeli left, but under Netanyahu, actively thwarted peace in many ways, weakening the PA at the expense of Hamas to keep the conflict going.
As the stronger party, I think Israel has a moral duty to pursue peace, and to help foster leaders that can bring peace.
Oh c'mon -- you're not giving Bibi his fair share of the credit, here:
“They asked me before the election if I’d honor [the Oslo accords],” Netanyahu said. “I said I would, but … I’m going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the ’67 borders. How did we do it? Nobody said what defined military zones were. Defined military zones are security zones; as far as I’m concerned, the entire Jordan Valley is a defined military zone. Go argue.”*
Smiling, Netanyahu then recalled how he forced former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to agree to let Israel alone determine which parts of the West Bank were to be defined as military zones. “They didn’t want to give me that letter,” Netanyahu said, “so I didn’t give them the Hebron agreement [the agreement giving Hebron back to the Palestinians]. I cut the cabinet meeting short and said, ‘I’m not signing.’ Only when the letter came, during that meeting, to me and to Arafat, did I ratify the Hebron agreement. Why is this important? Because from that moment on, I de facto put an end to the Oslo accords.”*
So Netanyahu may have talked a big game, but his POV wasn't winning at that time.
Of course, that all changed when he came into power and stayed there for the last 15 years. But part of the reason he originally won, and continues to win, is because the left has been so thoroughly discredited.
Perhaps a more pertinent question to ask would be: do you consider the settlements (at more or less their current scale) as being helpful to Israel's security interests -- or unhelpful? (For the purpose of this question, we can just allow ourselves to imagine that it was somehow possible for civil society in Israel to get its act together and implement a working freeze on settlement footprint, and perhaps even roll back some of its more egregious recent expansion).
But it's not the whole reason for the conflict.
Not the whole reason, of course. But the occupation (and the settlements issue in particular) does seem to be an integral component of the "magic sauce" that's been keeping the conflict going for far too many more decades more than the international community should have ever allowed it to.
It basically seems to be its center of gravity, in fact.
No, I think keeping a war going with your neighbors, not to mention occupying another people, is a pretty terrible long-term idea from a security perspective, even without looking at the moral dimension. At least in the long term.
I'll try and defend the other side for one second here; there are basically two reasons to have settlements in the West Bank:
1. Some people think we are "entitled" to that land for religious or other reasons.
I obviously don't subscribe to this view and think it's immoral nonsense. This is a minority view, but a minority that unfortunately has gained political power because, frankly, they're the only people still willing to work with Netanyahu.
2. There is a real argument that in the short term, the settlements do help Israel with security. E.g. when Israel decided to leave the Gaza strip, and uprooted all Jewish settlements there, they elected Hamas and almost immediately started firing rockets at Israel, not to mention long-term planning October 7th.
The argument settlers sometimes make is that they provide a defensive line, and that if there weren't settlements in the WB, Israel would just have another Gaza strip situation on its hands.
This has some merit, in the short term; though I think that if Israel really wants to, it can just use the army to protect against the WB even without settlers, and rogue citizens providing security is a terrible situation (leading to the terrible settler violence happening in the WB all these years, and especially over the last year).
In any case, this argument falls apart long-term. The only real long-term security is to make some form of peace with the Palestinians. Obviously there'll need to be security guarantees to Israel somehow, and similar guarantees to the Palestinians somehow, but that's the only real long term solution.
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Btw, when the WB and Gaza (and Sinai) were initially captured, there were far bigger reasons to hold on to them - Israel had just been attacked by Jordan and Egypt, and those territories provided buffer zones that were very necessary to help defend the country. Nowadays, of course, Israel has semi-peaceful relations with Egypt and Jordan, that has held for half a century - so that reason is no longer very relevant.
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> Not the whole reason, of course. But the occupation (and the settlements issue in particular) does seem to be an integral component of the "magic sauce" that's been keeping the conflict going for far too many more decades more than the international community should have ever allowed it to.
This is actually complicated and not the whole story, though you are somewhat right nowadays. I personally think the real, fundamental, problem is that the Palestinians still believe they are entitled to, and going to get, all of the land of Israel. That's the underlying reason that the peace accords failed, it's the underlying reason they continue to use violence to try and, in their minds, "drive the Jews back to where they came from", etc.
If they truly were willing to accept a two-state solution, they could have had one at multiple times throughout history. It's the reason the occupation is ongoing - because the only way practical way to stop it is through a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, but as long as they refuse to accept Israel's continued existence, such a settlement can't happen!
Of course, over the last 15 years, Israel has done plenty to go against any chance of having a peace, including deliberately hurting the Palestinians who did try to work towards a resolution. So while the underlying goals of most Palestinians is to blame here, Israel is also to blame for fostering those underlying goals.
I suspect there are technical issues with some of those applications, but I feel like I woke up in a different world after reading this article.
More recent phones have switched this around somewhat, largely on account of the multi-component cameras which actually occupy much of the available space. But other than that, you could characterise the guts of a smartphone as largely being a battery with some electronics attached.
And they're hardly the limit for miniturisation. An HN submission last week featured the world's smallest computer ... as of 2015, which is roughly the size of a grain of rice:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41547378>
<https://ece.engin.umich.edu/stories/michigan-micro-mote-m3-m...>
The principle challenges with electronics this small is finding ways to power and interconnect them.
The power problem largely solves itself if what you're distributing calls itself a battery. Heck, plenty of batteries already have management systems on them to deal with charging and thermal management, so an additional chip (perhaps concealed as a capacitor or resistor) isn't going to draw much attention. TFA mentions this:
It turns out that almost every lithium polymer pack has a small circuit board embedded in it called the PCM or “protection circuit module”. It contains a microcontroller, often in a “TSSOP-8” package, and at least one or more large transistors capable of handling the current capacity of the battery.
So now you have to distinguish benign vs. malignant circuits.
Any explosive / weapons payload is probably a larger concern. That might be explosive as used recently, or potentially a chemical, biological, or radiation mechanism. Again, TFA details how that could be incorporated into the battery layers themselves, alternatively they might be an additional package within a battery. Cylindrical cells in particular could conceal shaped charges.
And those batteries could go into anything. Phones, walkie-talkies, baby monitors, electric toothbrushes (shaped charge, consider the possibilities), flashlights (handheld or strapped to a head, either would cause considerable or lethal harm).
Or all manner of technical, professional, and/or military hardware, some of which might have far larger batteries as part of various components, which of co-opted could have significant effects.
I'm pretty sure that RU and UA are taking copious notes presently, if not other parties.
Which is, perhaps ironically, to prevent the battery from igniting from discharging rapidly (shorting) the battery. It also protects the battery from 100% discharge (which won't ignite it, but will kill the battery).
Makes you wonder if that's how it worked. If you wanted to use a lithium ion battery by just mixing PETN directly in the battery electrolyte ... (maybe it even dissolves, but you'd need an additive for that. Complicated. You could definitely put it directly in the battery in the same space as the electrolyte though) and then using the battery discharge as a "blasting cap", by sabotaging the protection circuit on command, that might work. That would maximize the effect of the PETN, might even use the, at that point superheated, battery electrolyte as shrapnel.
This setup would even auto-disarm itself. If it's not triggered for months to years it will, by itself, destroy the explosive slowly and safely. And yes, that will destroy the battery, but I imagine that's not a huge concern. Might be a problem if the battery then ends up in repair shops and people put it in battery testers.
This would also be completely impossible to detect at airports or the like. For directly checking chemical compounds they need to be able to touch them, so if you wash it and keep it clean it'll be invisible. And the battery is packaged in a metal! That's how all batteries work, so that's not suspicious at all. The metal will prevent other methods of scanning, and it'll be really hard to detect the nitrogen and oxygen of the explosive. I'm not sure if that would even be suspicious in a battery. It probably would.
I still think the fact that "plastic explosive" exists, the more modern variants is the bigger threat. Because you that way they can make an explosive that is a plastic. The very cover of a cell phone, or sunglasses, ... and the item itself can be the explosive. And of course, you could use something bigger. The danger of this is that people carry heavy pieces of plastic and it might be possible to take maybe even a few kilograms of explosive anywhere past almost any security check, because the explosive IS a suitcase, which would make a very scary amount of explosive not suspicious.
Is this a threat? Sure, but I don't see how it's that different from other more direct explosive threats.
Shading this as being a blog post about weapons is a deep misservice & actively deeply harmful to the author & discussion. It is about this weapons topic, I cannot deny, but 95% of the technical content is providing background contexts on what batteries are, how they are made: knowledgeable depth which again shows who Bunnie is & what Bunnie does. There's only a tiny semi-obvious bit of conjecture & malevolent device creation attached. 'Just point this transistor that way'.
People who know their shit & can share are amazing, but I want to stress a care in emphasizing what is known & talked about here, because most of it is mundane as hell (we just didn't know it), and knowing it ought not be a risk or questionable in terms of motives. Focusing on the weapons part seems not the point of the article to me & shades a bad light/gives the wrong impression.
This isn't some random submitter changing the title or something like that.
I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion if you carefully read the article. Here are the third and fourth paragraphs of the article, reproduced verbatim:
> The reason we don’t see exploding battery attacks more often is not because it’s technically hard, it’s because the erosion of public trust in everyday things isn’t worth it. The current discourse around the potential reach of such explosive devices is clouded by the assumption that it’s technically difficult to implement and thus unlikely to find its way to our front door.
> That assumption is wrong. It is both surprisingly easy to do, and could be nearly impossible to detect. After I read about the attack, it took half an hour to combine fairly common supply chain knowledge with Wikipedia queries to propose the mechanism detailed below.
These two paragraphs explain that the article will seek to dispel the misconception that it would be difficult to create a fully-functional but booby-trapped lithium ion battery pack. The last sentence of the last paragraph explicitly states that the article will go on to describe a plausible mechanism for manufacturing a battery that is a functional battery and also a bomb.
I get that some folks have a very strong opinion that talking about weapons of destruction is bad, bad, bad. But to shame folks for talking about the production of weapons of destruction when the stated goal of the article is to _talk about weapons of destruction_ is just plain fucked up.
I wrote what I wrote because it felt like comments were coming in swinging against the second part, saying this was a dangerous bad thing to write because it was technically informative.
I feel like you are focusing onto her third party, the policy & strategy. Which is a great part, and is the part where Bunnie giving opinion. And I don't want to diminish that from Bunnie. But the bulk of the words & illustrations by page length was part 1, explaining batteries, and then part 2, some conjecture on how to subvert that. The policy part was dense & to the point (your couple sentences of quotes encompass almost all of it!), and leaves plenty to argue over & discuss, but I felt like it was part 2 that is 3rd rail radioactive, is where folks were saying you shouldn't even be allowed to post about this, oh no, techies are dangerous and a menace, and I was trying to show how that's not really what the technical content (of which there is super much) is super deep on.
By reframing the article whose very, very explicit aim is to demonstrate how not-at-all difficult it is to build combination batteries/hand-grenades and whitewash it as primarily a primer on the techniques behind the construction of modern lithium ion batteries, you are *absolutely* minimizing Mr. Huang's article.
You can find "How it's made: Lithium Ion Battery Pouches!" tutorials in many places. What you cannot find in many places are expert folks talking clearly and explicitly about how it wouldn't actually be difficult to build a fully-functional battery with a plastic explosive layer, put in the electronics to remotely detonate it AND make it so it would probably be REALLY hard to discover that it's a bomb.
> ...it was part 2 that is 3rd rail radioactive...
Yes, as I mentioned before: "I get that some folks have a very strong opinion that talking about weapons of destruction is bad, bad, bad. But to shame folks for talking about the production of weapons of destruction when the stated goal of the article is to _talk about weapons of destruction_ is just plain fucked up.".
The article would be useless without the technical walkthrough, but the technical walkthrough is NOT the point of the article. The entire point of the article, visible from its title ("Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs Is a Bad Idea") to its opening paragraphs, which I have already quoted, to the final section, (which I quote in its entirety below) is to demonstrate how absolutely nontrivial creating a booby-trapped, remotely-activateable hand grenade that's indistinguishable from an ordinary battery is, and to humbly suggest that maybe this is weapons tech that should not be proliferated. To pretend otherwise does Mr. Huang an enormous disservice.
> _Pandora’s Box is Open_
> Not all things that could exist should exist, and some ideas are better left unimplemented. Technology alone has no ethics: the difference between a patch and an exploit is the method in which a technology is disclosed. Exploding batteries have probably been conceived of and tested by spy agencies around the world, but never deployed en masse because while it may achieve a tactical win, it is too easy for weaker adversaries to copy the idea and justify its re-deployment in an asymmetric and devastating retaliation.
> However, now that I’ve seen it executed, I am left with the terrifying realization that not only is it feasible, it’s relatively easy for any modestly-funded entity to implement. Not just our allies can do this – a wide cast of adversaries have this capability in their reach, from nation-states to cartels and gangs, to shady copycat battery factories just looking for a big payday (if chemical suppliers can moonlight in illicit drugs, what stops battery factories from dealing in bespoke munitions?). Bottom line is: we should approach the public policy debate around this assuming that someday, we could be victims of exploding batteries, too. Turning everyday objects into fragmentation grenades should be a crime, as it blurs the line between civilian and military technologies.
> I fear that if we do not universally and swiftly condemn the practice of turning everyday gadgets into bombs, we risk legitimizing a military technology that can literally bring the front line of every conflict into your pocket, purse or home.
My head is clearly full of custard today. This should have been "absolutely tractable".
I'm done with this convo, bye.
You literally said:
> Shading this as being a blog post about weapons is a deep misservice & actively deeply harmful to the author & discussion. ... Focusing on the weapons part seems not the point of the article to me & shades a bad light/gives the wrong impression.
It doesn't matter at all how angry people are about the article being about weapons manufacture, nothing justifies claiming that that's not what the article is about. While I'm sure you believe you were well-intentioned, claiming that it is NOT about weapons manufacture in an attempt to placate angry people is harmful in the same way that -say- systematically yanking the teeth out of wild cats is.
If the people who get angry about frank and direct talk about weapons manufacture get angry about the article, then that's __good__. It means that the article is doing what it's intended to do, which is to start a frank and public discussion about just how easy it is to build remotely-activateable booby-trapped batteries that are indistinguishable from normal batteries, and that doing so at scale might really actually be a bad thing.
The issue is that once you have a "democracy" doing this, and the world's largest military saying "yes, good, this was the right move". Then you've welcomed this new model of warfare.
This is different from suicide bombings, which have been effectively universally condemned and are not an active strategy of any real military.
Note that these Hezbollah militants killed 12 Israeli children two months ago. So if one really cares about civilians, eliminated Hezbollah is probably in their interest.
A kid died in these attacks and hundreds of other random civilians have had life altering injuries because of it.
Yes, I address that in my other comments on this thread. The loss of that child is tragic.
You'll notice how in threads about Israel, many people comment on the tragic loss of a child and completely ignore the 12+ dead and 3000 injured terrorists. That is a civilian:militant ratio unmatched in any warfare. No other operation in history has caused literally thousands of militant injuries and over a dozen targeted militant deaths at the cost of a single civilian. If this operation prevents another Hezbollah rocket from killing another 12 children playing football, like Hezbollah did two months ago, then the operation was well worth it.
I’m not even counting the death. I’m counting all the injuries that happened with everyone else who was in the vicinity of this terror attack.
And if you're so concerned about civilian deaths, please show me where you've ever posted concern about Israeli civilian deaths. Or did you forget who started this war with Hezbollah.
The other side is a self proclaimed most moral army of the world.
I’m sorry that I don’t put these both on equal footing. Are you suggesting I should?
And yes, history exists. There’s enough blame to be thrown around. Neither side(s) of this conflict have been angels and neither side(s) of this conflict are universally justified in their actions.
Based on your commentary, I can’t really find a line you’d say Israel shouldn’t cross. Is there such a line for you? If so what is it and I’m curious why you’d say that’s the line.
Yes, I am suggesting that you judge our enemies by the same standing that you judge Israel. Why hold them to a lower standard? Do you have such disrespect for them?
Yeah? No shit I do?
I’m holding Israel to a higher standard because it’s an actual democracy?
Did you not answer my question on where you’d draw the line? Can I assume that you don’t have any issues with any military action then?
Had these guys put on uniforms and tromped out to a battlefield, they'd be dead already. They instead chose a tactic that surrounds them with their own civilians, in the hopes of deterring attacks against them. And that works, to a point.
But their opponent is unlikely to tolerate it forever, and will eventually strike even knowing that it will cause civilian damages as well. A just evaluation of the situation would divide blame on both sides, but world opinion is rarely just.
HN is a great place to go to get the opinions of the Patrick Batemans of the world.
So, no, I am not surprised. They don't think this kind of violence will ever be visited upon them. Since they are absolutely assured that God/History or whatever is on their side, of course the only thing worth talking about is how cool it is.
However, a counter-thought: When a shipment can simply be intercepted and parts quickly swapped out, and when the batteries are difficult to casually detect alteration-of, how far do we take transparency to feel safe-enough?
Footage inside every cargo container? Even more aggressive anti-tampering packaging with hard to replicate seals?
(Meant to be a very genuine question, if it sounds silly I'm just not very informed as to what good solutions would be.)
Beside that the guarantee does not exists in nature, but the likeliness of an event have a really big impact on our life.
See Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust": <https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358198.358210>.
More recently, and very much part of the extant cybersecurity landscape are zero-day and backdoor vulnerabilities which are prevalent in both closed and open-source software.[1] And the typical end-use buyer is not equipped to audit code or even interpret audit assurances (e.g., some level of certification on a device). That might work for large-scale organisational buyers (corporations, national governments, major NGOs, militaries), but would challenge even many of these.
TFA goes into depth on how HW characteristics already vary tremendously even within product lines and production runs, and firmware modifications could weaponise otherwise benign-seeming hardware.
Open SW/HW might help, somewhat, but not against a motivated state-level or other advanced actor (e.g., major narco syndicate, independent militant organisations, and the like). The requirement is far from sufficient however.
________________________________
Notes:
1. I'm trying hard to not open that particular religious war, though my bias is that evidence tends to suggest F/OSS is more secure than closed source in general.
An example, some (Handala crew) observed that Vidisco (an Israeli company) produce the vast majority of airports and ports security scanners, and they are proprietary devices running closed source software, so potentially they have some code to allow not seeing things the Mossad marks as "not to be seen" with some kind of "tagging" or even remote commands. Could their customers trust Vidisco or John Smith llc doesn't matter? If their design it's open and their code developed FLOSS openly in the wild maybe. We can't be sure the code we see from it's start is really running inside their devices, we can't audit entirely BUT it's still much better than now.
Similarly in an open world innovation inevitably happen mostly in public funded academia, meaning it's perfectly possible to infiltrate but it's still the best option we have to ensure trust and interoperability, as long as we have normal interoperability the possibility to keep something really hidden is far, far less than now.
Aside, obviously States must produce in house all their critical gear, at least for some "not constant" productions (like weapons) with domestic partnership with industries normally doing other things (like automotive). A corporative world is a savage, unsafe world and probably can't be stable as well.
Installing an entire secondary circuit board (as seems to have been the case for the AR924 pagers used on 17 September) should be more immediately detectable, though a partial tear-down would be required.
As for in-house production: there's been a greatly increased reliance on "COTS" (common off-the-shelf) products in many realms, including the military:
"Off-the-Shelf Solutions for the Battlefield" (2008)
How are commercial off-the-shelf products helping to drive down the military's costs? Steve Polak and Brendan Jordan discover how these products are helping coalition forces in their fight for interoperability.
...
Since the 1970s the steady shift towards a consumer-based society and economy has seen civilian commercial entities increasingly replace traditional military suppliers as the leading drivers in technological advance.
In no industrial sector is this more apparent than in electronics, where the once dominant technological edge of military electronics of the 1960s has been replaced with the increasingly cutting-edge nature of civilian microelectronics driven by insatiable consumer demand.
<https://www.army-technology.com/features/feature1918/>
More generally (Wikipedia):
Not to mention that it's a state of war, it's not some random attack, don't see why it's any scarier than getting hit by some random rocket.
You don't even have to be proximal to the target, you can just swap a box of batteries at the factory a thousand miles away. Genuinely frightening if you ask me.
That said, there was an 8 year old girl killed in one of the explosions. That is a tragedy. But if this attack - that killed over a dozen militants (and in some Arabic telegram channels, possibly over 40 militants are being said) and injured 3000 more - prevents even one more attack like that which Hezbollah killed 12 Israeli children two months ago, then it was an astounding success.
Apart from the very well articulated point in the article, is the fact that they crippled Hezbollah, but everyone proximate to these attacks are much more likely to be polarized against Israel.
Weponized batteries are not the answer to how to stop Hezbollah.
This assumption could use some supporting evidence. We've been here before.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Mission_...
It's been 23 years since the US kicked off the war on terror, and 21 years since the "mission accomplished" speech, so I think it's worth asking: How'd we do?
This is the evil that Pandora has unleashed with this new invention
There will always be scary events, I think society is pretty resilient to these type of stuff, and I don't see anything really new in the latest event - people will forget about it and move on within a few weeks.
Did you know that it's well within the reach of even a small business to build batteries that are both fully-functional batteries and also hand grenades? Grenade/batteries that may well be indistinguishable from ordinary not-booby-trapped batteries to most anything other than destructive inspection or very close, low-throughput inspection at specialized labs... meaning that if someone cares to get them into the battery supply chain, they WILL get into the battery supply chain? [0]
I sure as shit didn't. I bet MOST people had no idea.
If the TSA was a credible organization, they would immediately be banning all electronics on public commercial passenger flights and requiring those electronics to be shipped via commercial shipper.
[0] Combine this with the godawful state of personal and computer security today... can anyone say with confidence that there's no way to remotely activate a battery/grenade installed in a phone or laptop using that machine's stock software? We know that side-channels abound, and hear about SMM exploits fairly regularly. I definitely wouldn't take the "It's impossible" side of that bet.
And the devastating effectiveness has just been live-demonstrated to an audience very interested in that kind of stuff.
So, yeah, air travel is going to become, eh, a bit different, soon. Get those cellphones and laptops with removable batteries while they're still available (and ensure the packs are models you can easily buy at your destination), as anything battery-powered is going to be off-limits in both the cabin and the cargo hold as soon as the now-extremely-motivated international terrorist community gets around to downing the first, oh, three airliners or so?
I've never encountered a more effective way to articulate the significance of FLOSS.
Unless you only allow third party firmware via some difficult to enable setting, then a malicious actor can just load third party firmware and nobody would be any safer.
And everyone has a possibility to replace it with a trusted one, unlike with a black box.
If you physically cannot change the firmware since you don’t possess the keys to actually sign the firmware, then a malicious actor is prevented from modifying it. That’s what you want to prevent.
The only other possibility is a one time cryptographic key that you add, that all firmware is signed with… but that means it’s worthless for the average user who won’t do that.
Ultimately, the most safe is putting the root of trust in a company (Samsung, Apple, etc) since they can properly guarantee signed firmware. The only potential flaw is a nation state actor that compromises them and their keys (hopefully stored in an HSM). Which is likely easier to harden against than a nation state actor compromising you specifically.
These battery attacks are so easy that a disgruntled employee in China could kill thousands in the US though
if heznobollas had done it, yes, it would have been terrorism. they are a non-state actor that's been constantly firing rockets into a legitimate state for a year, and are using violence against a general population to attempt to change the policy of their legitimately elected government.
it's precisely because it was done by a legitimate state defending its population, and in this case inflicting the damage on the very terrorists that sought the communication technology with minimal collateral damage that it's a legitimate weapon of war.
words matter.
If they're using terrorist actions, those should also be considered legitimate