Comment by wongarsu

Comment by wongarsu 3 days ago

7 replies

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Most (pouch-shaped) Li-Ion batteries just look like square shapes packaged in heavy aluminum foil, with some Kapton tape to keep a small PCB with protection circuitry in place. Any determined hobbyist could buy smaller batteries and the packaging materials off AliExpress to make something that looks visually similar but has lots of space left over for explosives.

With cylindrical batteries it's a bit harder, but ultimately they are just a cylinder with pressed-on end caps. You can disassemble them (lots of videos on youtube), change the contents and reassemble them.

It is pretty high effort compared to just sticking the explosives next to the pager's electronics, but I don't think the barrier to entry is actually that high

Bluestein 3 days ago

> packaging materials off AliExpress to make something that looks visually similar but has lots of space left over for explosives.

But this, arguably, would be detectable, through low battery life?

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  • viraptor 3 days ago

    Pagers last for a very long time. Some one-ways can last for over a month. At that point, you probably wouldn't notice it's just over 3 weeks, or maybe think the product is lying in the advertisements and lasts less but not enough to replace the "company provided" one.

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    • Scoundreller 2 days ago

      > Some one-ways can last for over a month.

      More like a year or two off of a single AAA battery.

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  • andrewflnr 3 days ago

    There are tons of more likely explanations for that, though, with the top of the list being "dang bosses bought low quality pagers".

    And if they can make the combined package big enough that the battery life is still acceptable, it's even less likely that someone will pull the pager, notice that they should be getting "great" battery life instead of "just ok", and investigate deeply.

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  • baud147258 3 days ago

    I read elsewhere that Hezbollah recently changed to this pagers to communicate, maybe it those who put the bombs bet on the fact their victims wouldn't have time to realize that the battery have shorter life than advertised

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  • _xerces_ 3 days ago

    Not impossible they modified the firmware to improve battery life - look how sophisticated Stuxnet was.

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