Goddamn, that is a hideously well-reasoned article. Don't even worry about your phone. What about all the little things that have batteries in it. What's to stop a state actor from embedding minor explosives in our TV remotes, kitchen appliances, our goddamn inexpensive bluetooth headphones (ugh). Hell, any rechargeable cell on Amazon could be tampered with.
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.
I feared a simple, pontificating thought piece from the title. The author, in fact, provides a technical deep dive onto how the engineers fabricated a battery bomb and discusses easy supply chain attacks. A fascinating and well researched blog post.
This highlights the malicious, but most of the tech described is the far more mundane everyday aspect of what modern batteries are and how they work. Of the technical theory, like 5% or less is about "fabricat[ing] a battery bomb".
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.
> Our militaries wear uniforms, and our weapons of war are clearly marked as such because our societies operate on trust. As long as we don’t see uniformed soldiers marching through our streets, we can assume that the front lines of armed conflict are far from home. When enemies violate that trust, we call it terrorism, because we no longer feel safe around everyday people and objects.
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.
I think we could all agree that we shouldn't be sending billions of dollars to a country that uses the same tactics or worse than a militia.
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).
What are you talking about? It is well established that Hezbollah shot the missile. They bragged about it in their Telegram channels (I just happened to be reading the Gaza Now channel when they reposted it, I don't read the Hezbollah channels), and the direction and the debris are conclusive. The only reason to sow doubt is to protect these monsters. I think that you should really revaluate your reasons for protecting Hezbollah's reputation. Even the Lebanese hate them and want them out of their country.
Israel claims it was Hezbollah, while Hezbollah denies they were responsible.
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.
They claim - and I believe them - that they were targeting a military base further up the mountain. They claimed a direct hit on the base, then it was apparent that the missile fell in Majdal Shams (a city that I've been to many times, as recently as 2022), and they retracted their claims of hitting the army base.
Again, it is still not established as a fact that whatever hit the football field and killed those children came from Hezbollah (Personally, I do believe this is possible. I do not believe that this could have been deliberate).
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.
Do you think that missile came thousands of kilometers away from Ukraine? Do you think it was a Houthi missile? We've seen misfires of Iron Dome rockets (I've literally been watching Iron Dome rockets firing from my back yard for years) and they look nothing like the explosion seen by this rocket - or the damage. And yes, we did have a civilian killed by a misfired Iron Dome, and immediately said so.
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 is well established that Hezbollah shot the missile. They bragged about it in their Telegram channels
> 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]
---
[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."
> > It is well established that Hezbollah shot the missile. They bragged about it in their Telegram channels
> > 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.
From there to cell/smartphones there is a (very) short step. Would you be forced to not have with you your cellphone in plane trips if just one event of that happens? Put them in a strong/safe box on trip? What about notebooks? What about only letting "approved" manufacturers with zero maintainability? What about places or events where you use some of those devices? Once you cross one line, a lot of them may follow.
Very well-written analysis with factual support for three main points about this kind of attack: it's entirely feasible, it's cheap, and it's virtually undetectable.
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?
This is concerning. As I am typing on a laptop with fingerprint reader, one could make that battery explode after successful identification.
What a world...
I don't really get the premise, as if we didn't have suicide bombers in public places/transportation - we already live in a reality where stuff can just explode.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Somebody delete this if it’s inappropriate to ask, but if you had a software exploit where you could put the processor into a full power draw loop on the battery (so called halt and catch fire in the vernacular) the circuitry Buddy suggests could be significantly simplified?
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.
When you started posting here did you ever think you'd see HN form a strong consensus in favor of terrorism tactics? I'm pretty harsh on the place but this caught even me by surprise.
How is this terror, when it very precisely targeted militants. These devices were for use by Hezbollah on their private communications network. One civilian (an 8 year old girl) dead is a tragedy, but considering that over a dozen militants (and maybe up to 40) have been eliminated, that is a civilian:militant ratio unrivaled in history.
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 mean, this is the only place where I get most of these kinds of opinions, as I've excised them from my other media channels.
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.
The real point are not "batteries transformed in bombs" but black boxes on sale. Hw must be open, sw must be public for public safety interests. Not only: visibility/accessibility must be a surveilled parameter, of course, we can't really see what's inside a CPU, if it respect or not the public open hw design, but any device clearly designed against visibility and repairability must be sanctioned.
Excellent point that strikes at the essence of this. Already there were valid concerns about hardware backdoors and tampering, and now with such a dramatic event... well I can't exactly say I expect any change, but I do greatly hope this could motivate more such hardware transparency.
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.)
> Thus, one could conceivably create a supply chain attack to put exploding batteries into everyday devices that is undetectable: the main control board is entirely unmodified; only a firmware change is needed to incorporate the trigger. It would pass every visual and electrical inspection.
I've never encountered a more effective way to articulate the significance of FLOSS.
Or - better firmware attestation. You don’t need open source implementations, and in fact that wouldn’t help you if anyone can replace the firmware. You need cryptographically signed firmware that cannot be changed without a root of trust signing it.
True, but condemning it as a war crime would do a lot to limit its use. Poison gas is also cheap and easy to deploy, but it’s rarely used because of the stigma.
This, and I wish the warnings in the article were the chief takeaway for the general public. These attacks have to be condemned internationally NOW. The use of the new weapons for the first time is a perfect time to discuss universal condemnation and agreements amongst at least state actors to never do it again.
it wasn't a war crime. it was a targeted attack that probably caused the lowest collateral damage in any urban warfare conflict in history. it's the opposite of a war crime. if only there was a switch you could flick and your enemy combatants would drop, causing minimal civilian deaths - they flicked the switch and the enemy combatants dropped screaming.
We do have some success in regulating abhorrent uses of technology. See mustard gas and chemical weapons in general. Sure, some will persist, but it is preferable to not attempting to restrict such uses.
these are quite unfocussed weapons though, and cause mass civilian casualties. blowing up pagers bought by terrorists to avoid using the cell network is the opposite of abhorrent use of technology. it's the use of technology to minimise civilian casualties. there's no other way ever devised that would drop 4000 terrorists in an urban environment with barely a handful of collateral damage.
Obviously, my use of the word 'abhorrent' is a subjective judgement, but ask yourself honestly, if Hezbollah had carried out exactly this type of attack on Israeli defence force personal and their associates, would this not be almost universally accepted as evidence that Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation?
Goddamn, that is a hideously well-reasoned article. Don't even worry about your phone. What about all the little things that have batteries in it. What's to stop a state actor from embedding minor explosives in our TV remotes, kitchen appliances, our goddamn inexpensive bluetooth headphones (ugh). Hell, any rechargeable cell on Amazon could be tampered with.
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.
I feared a simple, pontificating thought piece from the title. The author, in fact, provides a technical deep dive onto how the engineers fabricated a battery bomb and discusses easy supply chain attacks. A fascinating and well researched blog post.
This highlights the malicious, but most of the tech described is the far more mundane everyday aspect of what modern batteries are and how they work. Of the technical theory, like 5% or less is about "fabricat[ing] a battery bomb".
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.
> Our militaries wear uniforms, and our weapons of war are clearly marked as such because our societies operate on trust. As long as we don’t see uniformed soldiers marching through our streets, we can assume that the front lines of armed conflict are far from home. When enemies violate that trust, we call it terrorism, because we no longer feel safe around everyday people and objects.
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.
I think we could all agree that we shouldn't be sending billions of dollars to a country that uses the same tactics or worse than a militia.
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).
In this analogy, what is water in the real world?
What trust do you feel was violated? Hezbollah just two months ago shot a rocket into a football field, killing 12 Israeli children.
Is children's trust that the football field is a safe place not violated now?
> What trust do you feel was violated?
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.
> Hezbollah just two months ago shot a rocket into a football field, killing 12 Israeli children.
This is far from confirmed and is effectively just an opinion (not that children were killed, but that Hezbollah was responsible).
What are you talking about? It is well established that Hezbollah shot the missile. They bragged about it in their Telegram channels (I just happened to be reading the Gaza Now channel when they reposted it, I don't read the Hezbollah channels), and the direction and the debris are conclusive. The only reason to sow doubt is to protect these monsters. I think that you should really revaluate your reasons for protecting Hezbollah's reputation. Even the Lebanese hate them and want them out of their country.
Israel claims it was Hezbollah, while Hezbollah denies they were responsible.
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.
They claim - and I believe them - that they were targeting a military base further up the mountain. They claimed a direct hit on the base, then it was apparent that the missile fell in Majdal Shams (a city that I've been to many times, as recently as 2022), and they retracted their claims of hitting the army base.
Again, it is still not established as a fact that whatever hit the football field and killed those children came from Hezbollah (Personally, I do believe this is possible. I do not believe that this could have been deliberate).
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.
Do you think that missile came thousands of kilometers away from Ukraine? Do you think it was a Houthi missile? We've seen misfires of Iron Dome rockets (I've literally been watching Iron Dome rockets firing from my back yard for years) and they look nothing like the explosion seen by this rocket - or the damage. And yes, we did have a civilian killed by a misfired Iron Dome, and immediately said so.
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.
Just because my enemy committed war crimes doesn't mean I get a free pass to commit war crimes
> It is well established that Hezbollah shot the missile. They bragged about it in their Telegram channels
> 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]
---
[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...
> > It is well established that Hezbollah shot the missile. They bragged about it in their Telegram channels
> > 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.
Soon they'll have us dumping out water in the security lines.
Soon cars will be reporting their location to the manufacturers without consent
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36473217
Do you think it's not there from the very start?
From there to cell/smartphones there is a (very) short step. Would you be forced to not have with you your cellphone in plane trips if just one event of that happens? Put them in a strong/safe box on trip? What about notebooks? What about only letting "approved" manufacturers with zero maintainability? What about places or events where you use some of those devices? Once you cross one line, a lot of them may follow.
Very well-written analysis with factual support for three main points about this kind of attack: it's entirely feasible, it's cheap, and it's virtually undetectable.
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?
This is concerning. As I am typing on a laptop with fingerprint reader, one could make that battery explode after successful identification. What a world...
I don't really get the premise, as if we didn't have suicide bombers in public places/transportation - we already live in a reality where stuff can just explode.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Somebody delete this if it’s inappropriate to ask, but if you had a software exploit where you could put the processor into a full power draw loop on the battery (so called halt and catch fire in the vernacular) the circuitry Buddy suggests could be significantly simplified?
One of the points I tried to make with this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41568670
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.
When you started posting here did you ever think you'd see HN form a strong consensus in favor of terrorism tactics? I'm pretty harsh on the place but this caught even me by surprise.
How is this terror, when it very precisely targeted militants. These devices were for use by Hezbollah on their private communications network. One civilian (an 8 year old girl) dead is a tragedy, but considering that over a dozen militants (and maybe up to 40) have been eliminated, that is a civilian:militant ratio unrivaled in history.
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.
If you gaze long into the abyss ....
Because, surprisingly, terrorists are also people who live around others who aren’t terrorists.
A kid died in these attacks and hundreds of other random civilians have had life altering injuries because of it.
> 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 mean, this is the only place where I get most of these kinds of opinions, as I've excised them from my other media channels.
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.
Social media is far more effective than a bomb. "tik-tok" ... "boom"
The real point are not "batteries transformed in bombs" but black boxes on sale. Hw must be open, sw must be public for public safety interests. Not only: visibility/accessibility must be a surveilled parameter, of course, we can't really see what's inside a CPU, if it respect or not the public open hw design, but any device clearly designed against visibility and repairability must be sanctioned.
Excellent point that strikes at the essence of this. Already there were valid concerns about hardware backdoors and tampering, and now with such a dramatic event... well I can't exactly say I expect any change, but I do greatly hope this could motivate more such hardware transparency.
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.)
> Thus, one could conceivably create a supply chain attack to put exploding batteries into everyday devices that is undetectable: the main control board is entirely unmodified; only a firmware change is needed to incorporate the trigger. It would pass every visual and electrical inspection.
I've never encountered a more effective way to articulate the significance of FLOSS.
Or - better firmware attestation. You don’t need open source implementations, and in fact that wouldn’t help you if anyone can replace the firmware. You need cryptographically signed firmware that cannot be changed without a root of trust signing it.
it's too late for that. once an idea is born, it will be used.
True, but condemning it as a war crime would do a lot to limit its use. Poison gas is also cheap and easy to deploy, but it’s rarely used because of the stigma.
This, and I wish the warnings in the article were the chief takeaway for the general public. These attacks have to be condemned internationally NOW. The use of the new weapons for the first time is a perfect time to discuss universal condemnation and agreements amongst at least state actors to never do it again.
it wasn't a war crime. it was a targeted attack that probably caused the lowest collateral damage in any urban warfare conflict in history. it's the opposite of a war crime. if only there was a switch you could flick and your enemy combatants would drop, causing minimal civilian deaths - they flicked the switch and the enemy combatants dropped screaming.
We do have some success in regulating abhorrent uses of technology. See mustard gas and chemical weapons in general. Sure, some will persist, but it is preferable to not attempting to restrict such uses.
these are quite unfocussed weapons though, and cause mass civilian casualties. blowing up pagers bought by terrorists to avoid using the cell network is the opposite of abhorrent use of technology. it's the use of technology to minimise civilian casualties. there's no other way ever devised that would drop 4000 terrorists in an urban environment with barely a handful of collateral damage.
Obviously, my use of the word 'abhorrent' is a subjective judgement, but ask yourself honestly, if Hezbollah had carried out exactly this type of attack on Israeli defence force personal and their associates, would this not be almost universally accepted as evidence that Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation?