• SeattleRain@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Enjoy losing the electronics handheld market to the Chinese as everyone gets paranoid about Western smartphones. Will you still be laughing when this hack inevitably leaks and is used to harm you or your family. I’m a computer hacker and it’s looking more and more like these were done by hacking the devices and detonating the battery. But hey, at least you got to do a completely militarily impotent terrorism against a group fighting a genocide.

    • fuckingkangaroos@lemm.ee
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      2 months ago

      I’m a computer hacker

      🤨

      it’s looking more and more like these were done by hacking the devices and detonating the battery.

      🤨🤨🤨🤨

      • nuke@sh.itjust.worksM
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        2 months ago

        I’m a computer hacker

        Careful. I heard about this guy on the news. Apparently he’s a famous hacker, goes by the name Four Chan.

      • SeattleRain@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Very cute but there are reports of people analyzing the pagers and not finding any evidence of explosives. This is a developing story so maybe this will come to not but your incredulity doesn’t change these facts in the ground.

        • zanariyo@sh.itjust.works
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          2 months ago

          And if you were even a little familiar with lithium battery fires you’d know such reports don’t match up with the reports of exploding pagers killing people. So which is it?

          We’ve had numerous cases of phones catching on fire in people’s pockets and resulting in horrible burns throughout the years, but how many of these have killed people? A lithium battery is an incendiary device under the right circumstances, not an explosive one. And you need a bigger battery than one in a pager to cause enough damage in a short enough timeframe to kill a person before they can save themselves.

          Not to mention that it’s not a simple matter to make a lithium battery catch on fire remotely. What are they gonna do, try to draw more current than the battery can provide? That’s not going to make a battery catch on fire.

            • evranch@lemmy.ca
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              2 months ago

              Without compromised hardware even igniting a battery is pretty implausible (unless the phone was on charge, and obviously these weren’t) as you’d need to basically short it out and this would be hard even with full bare metal access.

              Pagers are famously hard to hack as well since all they do is display strings. And they aren’t on the public net, they don’t even have IP addresses as they communicate hub and spoke with a big slow RF transceiver.

              Much more likely triggered by a message or long time fuse.

          • SeattleRain@lemmy.world
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            2 months ago

            Reports of batteries in the past exploding were unintentional. So if one were purposely causing the batteries to explode then it’s logical that you could make it a lot more potent.

            The idea that it was a hack is more prevalent outside the west. No doubt because western intelligence is trying to stop the story of any electronic made by them being a potential bomb under their control.

          • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deM
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            2 months ago

            depending on particular noises made by their favourite rumor mill, they might have heard that pagers contained 0, 1, 3, less than 20, or 30 to 60g of explosives. these might have been in battery or in extra (fake) element. nobody knows shit as of now

            taiwanese manufacturer denies involvement and directs to a hungarian subsidiary, but that hungarian subsidiary is only nameplate on a residential address. their pagers contain different chips and are overall different model compared to what taiwanese make and sell. it might be very well that israelis didn’t have to intercept shipping of pagers, because they made them and routed through a few cutouts, one in hungary, another in bulgaria. israelis have a policy of not telling anything and i haven’t seen anywhere internals of the alleged pagers. it will take some time until anything will be known with any certainty

    • VeganCheesecake
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      2 months ago

      All credible reporting I’ve seen is relatively certain that it was a small amount of military grade explosives.

      If you have the device in front of you, and are prepping it for your secret operation, that also seems like a much more straightforward solution than trying to manipulate a lithium ion battery in a way that both allows it to work normally for years, but then explode violently enough to kill someone holding it.

    • AVincentInSpace@pawb.social
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      2 months ago

      Oh right! I keep forgetting that Israel is “the west” and Palestine is not despite being geographically on top of each other. Someday I’m gonna have to figure out where exactly this “west” is so I know not to go there.

    • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The command might have been a hack but the physicality is just not something normal batteries are capable of producing.

    • YeetPics@mander.xyz
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      2 months ago

      Will you still be laughing when this hack inevitably leaks and is used to harm you or your family

      My family isn’t a part of any international crime syndicates. Feelin’ pretty fuckin’ safe despite your best efforts.