I was listening to Matt Bracken on Rumble, and Matt brought up point I had not considered.
Israel just demonstrated a capability that should make all of us pay attention: the state use of wireless devices to execute a mass time on target attack.
What if, in the future, someone does this to cell phones of MAGA voters? Or, to get at Elon Musk, they do this to Tesla cars?
Who says they can't just overload your battery and make it explode Samsung style?
Not destructive enough.
These devices were rigged with small amounts of explosives. Lithium will burn like crazy but it doesn't react fast enough to cause overpressure. A lithium battery failing in your hand might fail fast enough to burn your hand, but it won't happen fast enough to blow your fingers off. It's not about the energy, it's about the chemistry. You need the right KIND of reaction. RDX and HMX get most of their energy from the extremely weak N-N bond, which REAAAALLLLY wants to become N≡N. Lithium batteries will get hot, they'll burn, they'll burst and vent hot gas... but they won't detonate.
I've seen a cordless lithium ion tool battery burst into flames at work about 8 years ago. Kind of a mini explosion. Only once, but it got me thinking years ago and I don't store my batteries in the house now. I have a feeling all lithium ion batteries are potentially mini explosives.
That'd swell and get hot and burn but not explode.
Also, modern lithium batteries have devices built into them to stop that. That's the problem - you could use software to try to tell a device to overcharge the battery, but the stuff that's built into the battery is pretty much inaccessible to the device and it'd go "hmm this isn't right" and turn off. Ever leave your phone sitting in the car and came back in and it was turned off because it was too hot? That's the battery reporting that to the phone, not the phone itself.
in theory you could find an exploit that overrode the circuit, assuming the battery circuit isn't read-only, but it would be so piecemeal that it wouldn't be worth the hassle.
they'd be better off going after us the old-fashion way at that point... "car accidents" and the like...