It took years, three different shell companies, and an explosive called pentaerythritol tetranitrate, according to reports.
  • Andy@slrpnk.netEnglish
    39·
    2 months ago

    From a technical standpoint, this is an incredible achievement. From a moral or rational one, though, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST THIS IS TERRIBLE.

    I just don’t even have the energy to list all the ways this is an insane and destabilizing thing to do. Fuck. God, I wish we had any electoral power of America’s terrible foreign policy.

    • Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      I had a feeling that this war would start something like this. Israel has been a testing ground for advanced military technology/ideas for a while. Now that they are engaging in war it was inevitable that techniques or ideas that they have been hiding would eventually get used leading to the world being more dangerous than it was before.

      Also as a side note this is why low tech is such a good idea. A small amount of dependencies usually means something is safer in the long run.

      Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        8·
        2 months ago

        Going low-tech is what got them here. The change to bulkier devices gave Israel the opportunity to insert explosives. Using existing small devices would not have given them that opportunity.

        Of course, that would mean Israel could continue spying on their cellular communication. It’s a risk calculation.

        • Danterious@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Well maybe I should’ve been more specific. The reason why I mentioned low tech is because it tends to favor localized production and tech that can be easily repaired/modified/created. The pager and walkie talkie attacks came from them not having control over how the tech was produced. If they did have control over that then it would be less likely that this happened and even if it did they would be able to recover quicker.

          PS I actually don’t really care about Hezbollah doing this. They suck. It is just in principle it would be better.

          Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

  • recklessengagement@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    2 months ago

    Sounds like another reason to standardize easily replaceable batteries.

    If you can’t trust a battery in a device, you should be able to replace it with a trusted one.

    • daltotron@lemmy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I mean I dunno, even if you switch to some sort of li-on AAs (something which I think would also be good for other reasons, like making recycling potentially easier, being able to swap batteries between devices, making batteries slightly cheaper), I dunno how many people are gonna want to slice open their own batteries and run tests on what comprises them. Since the half-life on any given set of batteries is probably in the range of multiple years, or at least several months, you’d probably be able to set up an attack before any government agency or private battery replacement or analysis would start getting off the ground to sus out what you’re doing.

      I think the only reason this might be harder with replaceable batteries, would be that the potential for batteries to get swapped out of devices means that you’re less certain to see any kind of explosion from a given device that you’ve modified, and you’re less certain to hit the particular targets that you want, but it doesn’t seem like either of those would really be a big problem for whoever would want to do this sort of terrorism in the first place, so I’m not sure that’s a major deterrent.