The Zero-Armed Bandit | Hacker News Reader

The Zero-Armed Bandit

damninteresting.com

40 pointsca98am7913 comments

> Back in Lake Tahoe, FBI agents and members of the bomb squad strapped on air filtration masks and protective gear and crossed the field of glass fragments to enter the wounded casino tower. It looked as if a bomb had gone off.

You don't say.

One paragraph later:

   FBI agents scrutinized every smithereen

I don't think I've ever seen "smithereen" in print before. Merriam-webster.com only has "smithereens" a "plural noun". But the singular nicely fits the sentence.

I've always wondered why the bombs often portrayed in movies weren't designed according to those same principles. It seems that it is indeed possible to make it completely tamper proof.

Maybe exactly not to give possible bombers good ideas...

More prosaically because it allows the hero to defuse the bomb at the last minute. But it always pinches my suspension of disbelief when it happens.

Yeah. Why does the hero always defuse the bomb with exactly one second to spare?

Indeed. One thing you can have is a microcontroller inside with a timer, which allows for some final assembly steps. Say you have five minutes to close some panel and tighten some screws, after which, any further movement will trigger the detonator.

Nothing is truly tamper proof, but you could make it an order of magnitude harder to diffuse.

There's a MacGyver episode from 1986 ("Countdown") that involved a bomb extortion plot that was, in retrospect, almost certainly inspired by this event.

I wonder how effective some of the newer EOD disruptors like the PigStick[1] would be. It uses a shaped charge to generate and direct an incredibly high pressure water jet for similar sorts of 'decapitation strikes' on detonators and the like.

Although, we also have much better and faster radiographic imaging systems, so it might have been possible to get a better idea of the internal construction and identify a weak point for, say, drilling and endoscopy.

It sounds liek the guy really put a lot of thought into the tamper detection though - there are parallels with the protection of crypto security modules, some of which do all these things and more.

[1] http://www.chemringeod.com/products/defeat/PigstickDisruptor...

Nice use of "vomitoria".

TL; DR: Bombing at a Nevada casino in 1980. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey%27s_Resort_Hotel_bombin... for a more concise summary.

Thanks! Why would someone think I want to read a novel-length article about this?

Because it's really well-written!

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