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Comment by AlyssaRowan | Hacker News Reader

Do they realise yet how ridiculous they sound?

What is the scientific basis for this? Because unless it's very recently manufactured and still outgassing, I'm far from convinced hard drives, circuit boards or chips in general have any odour detectable to GLPC, let alone dogs!

Far more likely prospect - aren't "K-9 units" widely renowned for corrupt practice, in particular training the dog to react on command to enable illegal searches and the planting of evidence?

I'm not saying they're corrupt, of course, but I do find that more empirically likely.

But perhaps my judgment is affected by the picture with the hard-bitten glares and the hats. The hats don't help. <g>

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> Far more likely prospect - aren't "K-9 units" widely renowned for corrupt practice, in particular training the dog to react on command to enable illegal searches and the planting of evidence?

I don't see how this plays out. After all, it's not the dog who testifies at court either for a search warrant or at trial - it's the handler, who can lie about whether the dog alerted just as well as they can lie about whatever else would be sufficient to establish probable cause. If you're going to argue that the dog was cued, you might as well argue that the officer lied about the alert, which has nothing to do with dogs and everything to do with the police officer - he could just as easily have said that he smelled marijuana or that he saw contraband.

have you worked with hardware? I think i myself can sniff out a motherboard :) And dogs are very useful in detecting C4 for example, and i don't see why they can't detect various chemical stuff going into electronic components.

A new motherboard which is still outgassing, definitely. But the kind of thing they want to find - a well-aged microSD card - which is all chip packaging and doesn't even have a circuit board?

My friends who do hardware RE and occasional chip forensics generally have to dissolve that stuff (with happy fun acids that I don't particularly want to handle, like fuming nitric acid - I don't know which particular one, but I know it tends to be hypergolic - and hydrofloric acid, which my dad was familiar enough with and I never want to be friends with) before gas chromatography to identify it, because they wouldn't get anything if it had a magic smell and they just put it in there! Their reaction at this story when it was over on Slashdot was to laugh and wonder if they could replace the acids with dog slobber.

>But the kind of thing they want to find - a well-aged microSD card - which is all chip packaging and doesn't even have a circuit board?

i bet that the specific plastics types used for the cards are easily identifiable by dogs.

>Their reaction at this story when it was over on Slashdot was to laugh and wonder if they could replace the acids with dog slobber.

they could try :

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/277012.php

"A new study from Italian researchers, presented at the 109th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Urological Association in Orlando, FL, found that specially trained dogs were able to detect prostate cancer from urine samples with 98% accuracy. "

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