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Comment by duncancarroll | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but this would be more widespread and harder to counter; imagine a major phone vendor is a victim of the supply-chain attack he's describing. Even if only say, a thousand people buy Android phones with bombs in them, if suddenly no one can trust anything with a battery in it, that is going to have a major impact on society.

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.

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This was a shipment of pagers used on Hezbollah's private communications network - they have a parallel cellular network. And many videos show that civilians standing right next to the targets suffered no more than ringing ears.

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.

Read the article. Success by disrupting Hezbollah for a month or a year means nothing if you've effectively demonstrated to the world that ubiquitous technology can be weponized by robust non-state actors and triggered at random.

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.

> 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.

This assumption could use some supporting evidence. We've been here before.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Mission_...

The international news channels talk about a dozen dead Hezbollah. But the Arabic channels are talking about tens of dead militants, which they find unusual because such organizations (not Hezbollah specifically) usually inflate casualties. But Hezbollah, it seems (from what they say on the Arabic channels, I really don't know if it is correct or not) does not inflate casualties and almost always gives a name and a picture of every martyr. So them actually hiding casualties is unusual (among militant groups, not specifically Hezbollah).

Are the international news channels giving reliable estimates for the number of wounded Hezbollah? It strikes me as pretty important to know how many of the booby trapped devices failed to harm their intended targets and harmed a bystander instead.

Hezbollah has tens of thousands of fighters. Hundreds of deaths, even thousands of injuries, would impact about 10-20% of their force. Don't get me wrong, that's a significant disruption! But will that really "prevent even one more attack like that which Hezbollah killed 12 Israeli children"?

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?

A terrorist in the US could buy a bunch of junk off Amazon, replace the batteries, and return the junk, then 6 months later, make explosions all over the US.

This is the evil that Pandora has unleashed with this new invention

So we had the anthrax attack in the past.

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.

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