>A technical problem is that during winter, the temperature of buried devices can drop quickly, creating a possibility that the mechanisms of the mine will cease working due to low temperatures in the winter.[5] Various methods were studied to solve this problem, such as wrapping the bombs in insulating blankets.
One proposal suggested that live chickens would be sealed inside the casing, with a supply of food and water.[6] They would remain alive for approximately a week. Their body heat would apparently have been sufficient to keep the mine's components at a working temperature.
It looks soulless, even more than a the generic "hacker man" picture, at least you could tell these were made by a human. For me its one of the lowest "effort" you could put in a picture. Of course thats entirely subjective but personally I hate it and it doesn't seems like im the only one here.
Correct. The injuries are comparable or worse to what you get if you try to use a .50 BMG cartridge as a hammer.
Videos show outright detonations (so far with notably little fire), nothing like the fiery deflagrations you see in “battery explodes” videos while someone is doing a repair.
Yes. There's sourcing for the first attack that Israel implanted daughterboards of some sort with small (30g?) amounts of explosive. The battery may have been involved with the triggering, but it wasn't a battery explosion.
But if you wanted to put 30g of explosive into a device, you wouldn't just want it sat there looking out of place to any curious person with a screw-driver. My guess is that you'd want to put it inside a component like say a LiPo pouch that looks like it belongs there. Half-battery, half-explosive - and maybe hijack the BMS components to also allow it to be triggered.
Anyone care to appreciate how effectively the new CT X-ray machines used by the TSA could have picked up the explosive materials in these electronic devices?
That might be one way to restore faith in one’s supply chain.
>My understanding is that they were extremely well concealed
Source? I'm not sure how you can concealed any meaningful amount of PCB/explosive in a pager/radio, unless you're hoping that your target never opens the plastic casing, or doesn't know what the internals are supposed to look like.
I'd guess the explosives were inside the "VCO can": the metal shielding around the VCO circuit. The picture of the radio shows the radio's metal casing bent away from the PCB, suggesting the blast came from that direction rather than the battery. The VCO can would have air-space inside it and is unlikely to be opened, even by a service tech. There will be an SPI serial bus running from the CPU into the VCO can, to allow programming of the VCO, which could be used as a conduit for a trigger command.
From the picture it looked to me like it was more aligned with the DAC, although I double checked and I don't think that any DACs of that size would be in the order of 20-30 grams. Could a discharge be angled like that within the confines of the can?
The most plausible theory seems, that the batteries were manipulated/replaced with smaller ones, from the outside still looking like normal batteries, but with explosive inside.
So a shorter battery life, but usually no one cuts open batteries.
the amount of explosives would be about the size of a pencil eraser, easily concealable imo. Reports are that they could have modified the existing batteries and put them inside there.
You know what a LiPo pouch looks like right? silvery bag, some yellow tape at the end with some wires sticking out.
Less likely you know what they look like inside, as it's been drilled into us not to pierce the things. Also if your laptop battery only lasts a couple of hours you might suspect something is wrong. If your pager needs recharging every month instead of every 2 months... well nobody has a clue how often a pager should need recharging.
I've no idea if it was the battery, but just feels like the right approach.
Some reports are saying the Icom-V82 devices were bought by Hezbollah 5 months ago, close to the time yesterday's beeper were purchased. However, the exploding part was the battery, imported to Lebanon only 2 weeks ago.
I wonder if this operation had two sides - implanting something in the devices that will allow remotely triggering the explosion, and then also tampering with the batteries to include explosive material.
One proposal suggested that live chickens would be sealed inside the casing, with a supply of food and water.[6] They would remain alive for approximately a week. Their body heat would apparently have been sufficient to keep the mine's components at a working temperature.