Exploding pagers

The kind of questions you've been posing are highly suggestive of someone who has obtained access to high explosives but not the detonators. Detonators - usually but not always blasting caps - have to be stored separately from the explosives for safety reasons and invariably under lock and key. Two nut-cases have already tried to whack Trump. We don't need any more Left-wing lunatics scheming up ideas to de-stabilize an already fractious electorate.

If you mean Tetra, the handsets can also communicate directly with each other without any connection to a base station.

This makes them useful also in areas whitout coverage, or when the base station infrastructure is inoperative.

They're also encrypted. And it's a very tough algorithm which is reckoned to be unbreakable. Hopefully not in the same way as the Titannic was "unsinkable" if you will. Overall, it's a highly effective and flexible system ideally suited for police and security service use.

Right.

It can also be used by users like transport fleets.

There was nothing ostentatiously left-wing about the two lunatics who tried to whack Trump. He was most likely the target because he's had a lot more air time than any of the other potential targets.

Anybody who has ever seen "The Apprentice" - even briefly - would want to whack Trump.

The electorate is fractious mainly because Trump lies a lot. That make him attractive to you because you like your political entertainment thoroughly implausible, but many of the voting population take him seriously.

That was the claim.

As of 2023, there are significant reasons to doubt this claim. Several fundamental flaws in the TETRA encryption were identified (and some had been noticed even as early as the 2006 Wikileaks document dump).

See, for example,

There are debates as to whether this was the result of a deliberate back-dooring of the encryption algorithm (to e.g. allow intelligence organizations to decrypt communications), or whether it's the result of a common problem: "behind closed doors" design of cryptographic architectures which turn out to be flawed in ways that a public review by knowledgeable cryptographers would have avoided.

I liked "The Apprentice", but lost interest when it became "Celebrity Apprentice" -- the contestants no longer had any real skin in the game. I was pretty sure that the Trump we saw in that show was a character, and we weren't supposed to like him.

Fox ran a hilarious show called "My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss" that was the same premise as "The Apprentice" except that everything was fake and scripted -- but the contestants didn't know that. I believe the first task was selling hot soup out of a pushcart in Chicago in August; the losing team had to spend the night in sleeping bags on a vacant lot in a sketchy neighborhood. Per standard Fox practice with good shows, it was cancelled during its first season.

I quuit on the Celeberty version. I knew the woman that I forget her name would win from the start. I do not keep up with names of people very well.

Tetrazene meets your requirements at below the boiling point of water.

A military grade high explosive seems far more likely for a state actor. Weight really matters in a portable device.

Given the low internal resistance of a Lithium battery there is no problem in using a detonator that is in essence a nichrome filament coated in the right primer and RDX or HMX as the main charge. This was almost certainly done as a modification of the battery itself and was cunning enough to have defeated visual inspection by Hamas operatives.

There are plenty of explosives that will detonate at red heat.

I wonder if a tiny fraction of them did not detonate when instructed to do so or if there are any of them still out in the wild and not in Hamas hands. They will be interesting if a bit risky to dismantle.

A great opportunity to make more martyrs.

Am 02.10.24 um 23:06 schrieb john larkin:

like the 8 yo girl and the other kid that were among the first dozen of deaths.

Gerhard

A few innocents were hurt or killed in attacking the Hezbolla terrorists. That's regrettable but longterm probably many more Israeli lives were saved. Government and warfare both require brutal calculations.

The pager thing was very target-specific, as opposed to, say, bunker buster bombs.

Apart from x-ray examination, it would also be sensible to measure the electrical capacity of the battery and its weight, for any suspect device. As far as I know, there isn't another rechargeable battery chemistry with vastly higher Wh/kg than commercial LiPo cells, so it would be difficult to make a fake battery with the correct capacity and weight, if it also contained a significant mass of other things.

Capacity would probably not be quite as high as you might hope for a new battery but if ~10% of its mass was HMX that would probably be enough.

I suspect that in future terrorist groups will attempt to detonate any such handheld devices that they buy in. This was a one time pony trick.

My guess is that it looked OK on dentists X-ray and that terrorists would not have access to multiband X-ray or terahertz imaging which could determine the unexpectedly high nitrogen content of an explosive.

It is in essence a variant on the bottles of liquid explosive and fake toner cartridges that terrorists have tried to use against airlines.

And the reason why we still can't take more than 100ml of anything on a plane. Oddly my local airport is fully equipped with the right gear at great expense but the rules were relaxed only for a few weeks and then re-imposed. I have no idea why that happened it cost a hell of a lot to do and now the regional airports get no benefit from having done it!

Not all high-explosives are nitrates. I suppose even recent imagers can't be relied upon to distinguish all possible explosive chemistries.

Jeroen Belleman

Connect a 100 ohm resistor across the battery and drain it before attempting disassembly?

Joe Gwinn

I nevr could get a handle on the innocents in a war. Fine for the US to firebomb or nuke Japan and kill thousands of people that were not in the military. But do not kill one or two that are not in the military in those Arab countries. The way I look at it if the countries over there do not want the civilians killed get rid of the terrorists.

The Arabs do not really want to fight, just agervate each other. They should get in an all out war and get it over with. I am almost for giving each of those countries a couple of short range nuclear missles and tell them to eiter shoot or shut up.

TATP being the most notable exception if you don't care about its nasty tendency to explode even when you don't want it to. Not long after it was first in the news Amazon "helpfully" suggested to me after buying 40 vols H2O2 that "people who bought this also bought acetone" !?

That stuff is really nasty and unforgiving.

Azides and azo-bond based explosives are also high in nitrogen too.

Most of the other esoteric non-nitrogen based explosives are way beyond mere mortals to synthesise (and somewhat unforgiving even for experts).

There is a surprising amount of detail in the open literature these days if you know where to look.

That's why I open Amazon with a different profile, so that they can not track what I browse.

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