edit: after 20 comments, i’m adding a post description here, since most of the commenters so far appear not to be reading the article:
This is about how surprisingly cheap it is (eg $15,000) to buy a complete production line to be able to manufacture batteries with a layer of nearly-undetectable explosives inside of them, which can be triggered by off-the-shelf devices with only their firmware modified.
Did you read it?
The article literally talks about inserting an explosive layer inside the battery at production. Just like the comment said.
It isn’t “any batteries can explode”.
Reports indicate the explosive payload in the cells is made of PETN.
Such a sheet could be inserted into the battery fold-and-stack process, after the first fold is made (or, with some effort, perhaps PETN could be incorporated into the spacer polymer itself – but let’s assume for now it’s just a drop-in sheet, which is easy to execute and likely effective)
Just to be clear, the pager thing wasn’t exploding batteries, they had apparently been modified at the production level to have explosives in them, which could be triggered by the pager system itself.
What? 🤦 The comment I replied to said:
Just to be clear, the pager thing wasn’t exploding batteries, they had apparently been modified at the production level to have explosives in them, which could be triggered by the pager system itself.
It seems clear that “they had apparently been modified at the production level” is referring to the pagers, rather than their batteries. But the article is explaining how it could have been that the batteries were the part of the pager that had the explosives (in which case it was the battery that was exploding).
You are inferring what someone meant, and then applying some super pedantic reasoning.
When manufacturing pagers, that includes the pager electronics, the case, and the battery.
Wasn’t exploding batteries
The batteries themselves unmodified, standard batteries were not somehow hacked to explode. At some point in the manufacturing of the pagers which includes the battery, explosives were included.
