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yeah, for a fraction of the price and as good of an experience (both reading and writing), I'm using the kindle scribe and have no fomo


comedy is simply an inevitable surprise!


could this be a replacement for emailonacid's device viewport preview feature?


This absolutely could work with HTML emails. One challenge with Email On Acid's is you do need to have an account with them, and it is limited to emails. We find most of our viewport testing is related to landing pages, etc.


so how does one verify that the battery in their iphone doesn't contain explosives?


As long as it doesn’t say “made in Hungary”

And on a more serious note. Hizbolla is a blacklisted terrorist org, they can’t just order stuff from regular factories. Buying from an anonymous white label factory in Hungary with no address and little information is probably pretty normal from them - because anyone doing business with them in the EU will go to jail

As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine


> As long as you’re not buying electronics from shady factories with no known owners you’ll be fine

For now and to our knowledge so far.


Exactly. The EU designates Hezbolla as a terrorist group. It is illegal for EU to sell to them.


Well, are you a member of a terrorist group? If no, then odds are that nobody is going to go through the trouble of adding explosives to your phone's battery.

In this case the people responsible must have discovered where these terrorists were buying their devices. Since basically no one except for them was buying large quantities of these, they were easy to target.


Have you angered Mossad? If no, you are almost certainly fine. If yes, you are already dead.

James Mickens explained this clearly a decade ago.

https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf

You cannot answer any security questions without a threat model. Are you worried about your neighbor putting a bomb in your phone? Mossad isn't putting bombs in random phones.


X-Ray image compared to known X-Ray of the exact same model

Bomb sniffing dog or chemical test of surfaces


Allegedly hidden well enough that a casual X-ray of the pager wouldn't have revealed it.


It might have looked like a normal pager under xray, but I bet it looked _different_ than an unmodified pager. Not suspicious on its own but suspicious because it was changed.


Interesting that it wasn't discovered by any bomb sniffing dog in Lebanon. They had thousands of devices. There must be at least a few bomb dogs in Lebanon right?


Simply because "bomb" dogs, like "drug" dogs are a scam to give the police a legal excuse to violate your rights. The dogs don't detect bombs/drugs, they detect cues from the controlling officer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detection_dog#Criticism

  The law was reviewed in 2006 by the New South Wales Ombudsman, who handed down a critical report regarding the use of dogs for drug detection. The report stated that prohibited drugs were found in only 26% of searches following an indication by a drug sniffer dog. Of these, 84% were for small amounts of cannabis deemed for personal use.[27]: 29  Subsequent figures obtained from NSW Police in 2023 revealed that between 1 January 2013 and 30 June 2023, officers had conducted 94,535 personal searches (refers to both strip searches and less invasive frisk or "general" searches) resulting from drug detection dog indications, with only 25% resulting in illicit drugs being found.[28]


Bomb sniffing dogs can't detect every explosive compound under the sun. They're trained on some of the most common ones but there are almost infinite variations of explosive chemistries.


"According to Sky News Arabia; Mossad was able to Inject a Compound of Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate (PETN) into the Batteries of the New Encrypted Pagers that Hezbollah began using around February, before they even arrived in the Hands of Hezbollah Members, allowing them to Remotely Overheat and Detonate the Lithium Battery within the Device."


I am extremely skeptical.

High explosives rarely require only heat to detonate, and most can be quite literally set on fire by an open flame and burn without detonating. PETN is not terribly sensitive, and should require a detonator of some sort. What's more, that doesn't jive with the other claim that they added a daughterboard to the device.


This report came out 4 hours after the first attack.

I'm very skeptical of a report about a specific compound and method 4 hours after an attack - Its not enough time for analysis


If that's true, then does that make electric vehicles into potential car bombs if "the right thing" is injected into the battery?


This wasn't something magical that turned the battery into an explosive, they allegedly injected an explosive compound into the battery which would be triggered by intentionally overheating the battery.

Like if you packed C4 into an electric car battery, it would be a bomb, much the same way if you packed it into an ordinary empty box. Sure the battery adds some extra energy, but the explosive is the explosive, ya know.


If you add explosives to a car, it becomes a potential car bomb, yes. Doesn't matter what the power source is.


how the hell is anyone going to be able to fly anymore?


the idea TSA security has always been a farce, detecting only the crudest methods of attack.


The mechanism of action is unclear at this time. I’ve seen it written that the explosives were part of PCBs with electronics that mimicked the original.


It was an addon board with explosives on it which was attached to the existing normal circuit board.


Was there enough empty space in the device for this? Were other components removed or miniaturized?


It was a few lines in a news article, so unknown.

But you can see photos of the same model of pager and it's an LCD screen in a plastic shell, the kind that seems like there would be room on the inside for a little addon board to be attached to the existing board.


The supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger than for a Gold Alpha pager, and it's likely that the same thing will end up being true of these ICOM radios: they'll turn out to be designed and branded by ICOM, but actually manufactured and distributed by some random Eastern European outfit that paid to use ICOM as a skinsuit. That would never happen with an Apple device.


It is likely that they were authentic Icom devices. My understanding is that it is common for commercial radios to be programmed by distributor. Or Gold Alpha gave a good deal on pagers and radios and then were intercepted from warehouse.

I don't think Icom would ever put name on generic radio, they make all their radios in Japan. It is like Toyota putting name on another car.


There's lots of Toyotas in this list[1] in both directions. Toyota is happy to build cars with other people's names on them, as well as put their name on a car someone else built.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_badge-engineered_veh...


I read that Icom V82 is discontinued and most available are counterfeit.


Toyota puts their engines in other cars all the time.


> The supply chain for an iPhone is much stronger

Probably not strong enough to make it unreachable by a sophisticated agency like the Mossad.


I think the most likely outcome here is that all these devices were intercepted from the same firm.


With enough time, effort, and money? Sure.

But that would be many orders of magnitude more difficult that what they pulled off here, which was already very impressively difficult to pull off.


Israel has shown us (again) that we cannot trust any device whose full supply chain hasn't been properly audited. Which you can't really do at this scale.

So yeah, literally anything you buy can apparently just be stuffed full of explosives waiting to kill you and anyone near you.


Yes. Explosives can be placed in any device that has a small cavity. This has always been true....


It just hasn't been likely.


Replace it.


As I understand, Hezbollah reactively replacing their phones was the exact thing that made yesterday's attack possible.


Replace the battery, not the device.


Imagine if the Russians managed to do something like this in the US...


Start with "do I work for Terrorist organization?"


Don't be a part of a terrorist organization and if you are - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bring_your_own_device


in a pure infinite monkey scenario, works of Shakespeare would be generated at some point


You can't guarantee that monkeys are typing perfectly randomly. We may never see better than "it was the best of times it was the blurst of times"


It doesn't need to be perfectly random; you just need every sequence to have a nonzero probability of being generated.

"to be or not to be" may be more likely for a monkey on a keyboard to generate than a random string, actually. The keys to generate it are highly repetitive and relatively close together. That's true for any NL string: the lower entropy of NL strings are reflected in the keyboard layout. If the monkeys switch to Dvorak, they could probably generate Shakespeare even faster.


  What, you egg?
    [He stabs him.]
(from Macbeth)

Are you certain the real thing isn't "the blurst of times" already?


Your monkeys are pretty bad at Shakespeare if the best they come up with "it was the best of times it was the blurst of times".



> Your monkeys are pretty bad at Shakespeare

Worse, they can’t even tell their Shakespeare from their Dickens (It’s the opening line of A Tale of Two Cities).


you misunderstand infinity


So if I randomly type letters from the top row of my keyboard forever, I'll eventually type the entire works of Shakespeare?

Of course not. There are lots of ways you can bias random that remain random, but prevent every possible output from being generated. That's all GP was saying. You can't just say "infinite time", you need to rule out biases that would prevent the desired result.


You don't need "perfect randomness". The claim was about "perfect randomness". You just need a non-zero probability for the outcomes in question. And you need independence between subsequent random events.


how so?


If you have infinite monkeys, then (at least) one of the monkeys is Shakespeare.


If you have finite monkeys, let's say they number M, but infinite time, then for small values of M it would be faster to breed the monkeys until one of them evolves into Shakespeare.


hmm have you tried /r/movies/ ?


I used to be super into /r/movies, but then two things happened.

First, the user who used to make weekly box office analysis decided to stop doing it for free. Good for him/her, but that was a big blow for the subreddit.

Second, once you're long enough you realize how the hype machine is always there. From "leaked" picture to teaser to poster to trailer, all negative comments are met with "you can't judge until you've seen the movie" while positive ones are upvoted to the top. Not the only forum guilty of this, but it turns the subreddit into yet another arm of the movie PR industry.

I guess it's the inevitable end of all forums, so maybe this one will capture the magic that /r/movies lost.


A majority of forums turn to shit, but some thrive. HN is one of the best examples out there, especially as it's public with no wall.

What's the magic?


Full time moderator(s) who are paid a proper living to do their job and happen to be literally _excellent_ at it


dang


What are some of the other examples?


> First, the user who used to make weekly box office analysis

What does box office performance have to do with quality? Already looks like the subreddit has the wrong focus.


It's a proxy for both the movie quality and for where the cinema winds are blowin.

It also adds context to better understand what's at stake for movies based on distributor, producer and genres. When a horror movie costs 2M and a Marvel film 200M, "20M box office" by your favorite director can mean two very different things for their future.


> and a Marvel film

But a Marvel film has nothing to do with quality.

It's fine if you're focusing on the movie business. Just don't confuse the two.


Leaving aside that it's an example and any other movie could be there: Marvel movies have collected multiple awards including 2 Hugo awards, 4 Academy Awards and 2 Grammys. I think you'll have a tough time finding any measure of quality that at least one of their movies doesn't fulfill.


It's lame. God created mankind in his own image; why can't I try to create a film community in my own image ?


I understand the Citizen Kane link, but… I don’t think “New York Daily Inquirer” is a great name for this project.


Yeah, it's a pretty long name, but the goal is to discourage average users. Having a long domain name already discourages lots of users. You immediately understanding the meaning behind 'New York Daily Inquirer' gives me hope that other users will be interested in giving it a try, as it's a word-of-mouth project. My take is that if you want to build a good community in any subject, you have to discourage average users; they are poison to the conversation. Lean and mean.


I suppose Hacker News likewise dissuaded average users with its brutalist design, which made users to focus on the content of their post/comment. Furthermore, ycombinator.com is not a domain that seems friendly to the average user.

Like any social networks, the key to this website's success would be retention. I hope you find a way to make users come back often.


Go ahead my guy, you have my support :)


r/TrueFilm is much better imo. Far from perfect, but it seems much closer to "HN for film nerds" than r/movies.

Still, a new community that isn't beholden to Reddit's quirks and whims is always welcome.


For the electronic music sub-genre, some streaming compnay needs to buy https://www.1001tracklists.com/ for their playlist data (i.e. DJ set lists from soundcloud) and incorporate it into their recommendations. Your welcome Spotify!


Could have used etsy's help back in 2013:

“Seeing more items faster is presumed to be a better experience”, McKinley said. But the A/B tests showed various negative effects of the feature, including fewer clicks on the results and fewer items “favorited” from the infinite results page. And curiously, while users didn’t buy fewer items overall, “they just stopped using search to find these items.”

http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/


Great article, thanks.

For me personally, the author nails it with this: "But in practice, maybe they lose a sense of orientation?"

Infinite scroll just makes me feel bad, like I'm lost at sea and getting farther and farther away from the shore. I'm not sure it changes my clicks per search, but there's this creeping sense of nausea that I'm quite sure has made me more negative about using Google over the past few years. I wonder if there are a lot of cases like mine and if/how it shows up in the A/B metrics.


I have long hated infinite scroll, but was never really able to articulate why beyond "I don't like it." Much of what you said resonates with me, though.

I do know that I avoid websites that use it, regardless of why.


I know there is an internet archive version of the site, but is there anyway to download a dump of this site (along with all the sample music associated with the genres) for offline usage/access?


are the code for chapter 4 through 8 missing?


It's in progress still. I have most of the code working, but it's not organized into the chapter structure, yet. I am planning to add a new chapter every ~month (I wish I could do this faster, but I also have some other commitments). Chapter 4 will be either uploaded by the end of this weekend or by the end of next weekend.


Depending on your level, it could take a lot of weeks to go through the already available material (code and pdf), so I'd suggest to purchase it anyway... It makes no sense to wait until the end, if you're interested in the subject.


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