Question: what's the possibility of doing this with non-tampered with modern mobile phones?
Many phones today have a 5000mah battery, which I'm assuming could be triggered to overheat via a malicious app or webpage. Imagine this being used on a grand scale.
It's not easy. Lithium-ion batteries are designed to withstand heat without presenting an immediate or non-obvious threat to the user. The easiest way to cause a pyrotechnic discharge is to penetrate the battery itself, and even that isn't terribly explosive (here's a laptop battery "exploding": https://youtu.be/oieH2wwDGzo )
If someone did try heating up your phone to implement such an attack, you would feel it burning through your denim pockets long before it hits 210f. Futhermore, both phone SOCs and battery firmwares tend to implement emergency shutoff contingencies for when the phone overheats. Without prior tampering, nothing will really behave like it does in this attack. It is 100% a supply-chain threat.
I seriously doubt there is any way at all for software to trigger a dead short, and even if you did, the path would burn out quickly and the hardware only BMS part would cut power due to the massive voltage drop.
I've been living in Barcelona for a long time. The mayor is very, very cozy with the hotel industry, which is very much effected by tourist apartments and Airbnb. And he will most likely be out of power in 3 years, so won't actually have to see this through and is just doing this to make himself look good with the many citizens who believe we have too many tourist.
I had an very active artist page as a musician in several bands and projects for years. Many videos and photos and posters that I stupidly either didn't back up anywhere else, or it was scattered amongst other pages or hard drives. One day, woke up and it was all gone, the page was not there or any trace of it. I tried to find out what happened and never could and eventually gave up.
The big question is....whose going to play Elon Musk in the true-to-life film version, about the slow downfall of the man who wanted to be king of everything, but ended up a nothing as part of a musical duo with Kanye West, with a Reno casino resort residency.
His pipedream rocket company just succeeded at launching and landing the most impressive vehicle ever built by man. You could watch high-def live footage as the thing re-entered at the atmosphere at 20,000mph thanks to the space internet system that is rapidly becoming the best in the world. And in two days he's getting a $56 billion pay day granted to him by Tesla shareholders. It's a little early for schadenfreude.
When would you say the downfall started? Do you think the recent achievements of the companies he's involved with are repeated luck? Would you say that all successful individuals were always successful or had pleasant personalities?
I'm not necessarily a huge fan of Musk, but it's always interesting to see how his accomplishments are diminished. The attitudes towards Musk are remarkably similar to how others perceive Steve Jobs.
I never thought about it before, but you're right. He's got such an odd presence and unidentifiable accent(to me) in most of his roles, I think he'd be about the best we could ask for.
When I moved here to Barcelona, it seemed like many "squats" were punk and artist taking over unused or abandoned large spaces. Many we even open to the public and had events, and some were even part of the local community. Nowadays it's more often drug addicts and criminals and mafias taking over uninhibited homes (even when people are on vacation), who terrorize the neighborhoods.
Some people used to say that touristic companies promoted this to lower prices and buy cheap to remodel whole neighborhoods.
Like Raval. Some German companies had bought whole buildings and know they rent their flats, or even worst, rooms in flats with locks. This is crazy.
I've been in such a place, in the heart of Raval, full of drug addicts, and filth enter to a place remodeled inside with small rooms who "expats" pay a lot, A LOT. It's crazy.
That was one of the coolest sites ever, the other one being where you could make virtual mixtapes and send them to people. We can't have nice stuff anymore....
