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.

> 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.

Soon they'll have us dumping out water in the security lines.

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.

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...

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?

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.

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?

Social media is far more effective than a bomb. "tik-tok" ... "boom"

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.

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.

> 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.

it's too late for that. once an idea is born, it will be used.