this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2024

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Turning Everyday Gadgets into Bombs is a Bad Idea (www.bunniestudios.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 3 months ago (5 children)

No kidding. Is this not some kind of war crime?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Yes, indiscriminate bombing is a war crime.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It seemed pretty discriminate to me

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago (3 children)

So they killed those kids on purpose?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Well israel does discriminately shoot children. We've seen them do this with everything from snipers to giant bombs.

But, obviously, the law against indiscriminate targeting doesn't allow for you to discriminately kill noncombatants, even if you're intentionally targeting children

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

It is Israel

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Yes.

[+] [email protected] -7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (5 children)

Thought sabotaging enemy equipment to explode isn't.
Had this been a bunch of Russian or Wagner Group radio equipment exploding because they had been rigged by Ukraine, it wouldn't be a war crime - combatants don't stop being valid targets even if they are on leave and are at fault of endangering the civil population, possibly themselves causing a war crime by effectively using civilians as human shields in the process.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 3 months ago

Pagers are civilian objects, they're categorically different from radio equipment because they can be used by civilians.

Furthermore, these exploded in civilian structures among the civilian population. Pagers blew up inside people's cars while driving down the highway. They blew up on grocery stores. They blew up children.

It's terrorism.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago

A pager isn’t “enemy equipment” in the same way a missile or a gun is. There were literally cell phone stores exploding in Lebanon. A 9-year-old girl died. This is 100% a fucking war crime. If someone kills a member of your family do you get to booby-trap the stove in their house so the kids get their faces melted off?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

War crime speedrunners doing something shouldn't make you think it isn't illegal. Booby-traps are illegal. https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/files/external/doc/en/assets/files/other/icrc_002_0811.pdf

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's complicated, but this might be considered a war crime. A key quote from the article:

A booby trap is defined as “any device designed or adapted to kill or injure, and which functions unexpectedly when a person disturbs or approaches an apparently harmless object,” according to Article 7 of a 1996 adaptation of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which Israel has adopted. The protocol prohibits booby traps “or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects which are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material.”

The prohibition is presumably intended to make it less likely that a civilian or other uninvolved person will get injured or killed by one of these seemingly harmless objects. If you're booby-trapping military equipment or military facilities then that's not a problem, civilians wouldn't be using those.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

When you are a paramilitary organization, the line between what is military equipment and what isn't gets quite blurry. Especially when they weren't really "boobytrapped", they were turned into remote explosives.m, they did nothing until explicitly triggered.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

If this isn't a military battle then that makes Israel's actions look even worse.

They were triggered indiscriminately. Israel had no way of knowing who was holding each pager or where it was located when it went off.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Are we playing hypotheticals? What if zios start blowing up anti-genocide politicians in usa? War crime or no?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

I would think involving civilians usually is. Not like it's a first for them.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago

In the second world war, guerrilla forces scattered large quantities of booby-trapped objects likely to be attractive to civilians. The idea was to cause widescale and indiscriminate death. The Japanese manufactured a tobacco pipe with a charge detonated by a spring-loaded striker. The Italians produced a headset that blew up when it was plugged in. More than half a century later, a global treaty came into force which “prohibited in all circumstances to use booby-traps or other devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects that are specifically designed and constructed to contain explosive material”. Has anyone told Israel and its jubilant supporters that, as Brian Finucane of the International Crisis Group points out, it is a signatory to the protocol?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

It should be if it isn’t.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Is turning anything into a bomb a good idea?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This article spent more time explaining the logistics on building pager-bombs than it did actually explaining why building pager-bombs is a bad idea.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

If I Did It, by Bunnie Huang 😂

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

When I first read this, I was kind of hoping it was in shower thoughts.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

It is a shower thought, just by a profilic tech celebrity.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

cant wait for the next post, 'water is wet'

so much insight

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

Not sure if sarcasm, but the article is actually super insightful into a few different methods bad actors could use to accomplish the same feat (short of giving them a formula, from what I can read, but I'm not a battery maker)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The first time I heard about BlueHat was watching Bunnie give a talk on hardware supply chain security in Israel in 2019.

Two questions:

How many years do you think you'd need to execute an attack like this? A bit less than 5 years?
How much do you want to bet that whoever designed this terrorist attack was inspired by Bunnie's talk in Israel?