Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs is a Bad Idea « bunnie's blog
www.bunniestudios.com

edit: after 20 comments, i’m adding a post description here, since most of the commenters so far appear not to be reading the article:

This is about how surprisingly cheap it is (eg $15,000) to buy a complete production line to be able to manufacture batteries with a layer of nearly-undetectable explosives inside of them, which can be triggered by off-the-shelf devices with only their firmware modified.

screenshot of paragraph from the article saying "The process to build such batteries is well understood and documented. Here is an excerpt from one vendor’s site promising to sell the equipment to build batteries in limited quantities (tens-to-hundreds per batch) for as little as $15,000:" followed by a screenshot of "Flow-chart of Pouch Cell Lab-scale Fabrication" showing a 20 step process

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
    0·
    14 days ago

    Just to be clear, the pager thing wasn’t exploding batteries, they had apparently been modified at the production level to have explosives in them, which could be triggered by the pager system itself.

    What? 🤦 The comment I replied to said:

    Just to be clear, the pager thing wasn’t exploding batteries, they had apparently been modified at the production level to have explosives in them, which could be triggered by the pager system itself.

    It seems clear that “they had apparently been modified at the production level” is referring to the pagers, rather than their batteries. But the article is explaining how it could have been that the batteries were the part of the pager that had the explosives (in which case it was the battery that was exploding).

    • breadsmasher@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      14 days ago

      You are inferring what someone meant, and then applying some super pedantic reasoning.

      When manufacturing pagers, that includes the pager electronics, the case, and the battery.

      Wasn’t exploding batteries

      The batteries themselves unmodified, standard batteries were not somehow hacked to explode. At some point in the manufacturing of the pagers which includes the battery, explosives were included.

      • Arthur Besse@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
        0·
        14 days ago

        You are inferring what someone meant, and then applying some super pedantic reasoning.

        I think I am inferring correctly, especially since the person you’re talking about replied “of course not” to my question about if they read the article.