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Comment by thomnottom | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat humorous in light of this comment on Schneier's post about the laptop ban:

"Get the 15" laptop, throw all the electronics away, leave just screen and keyboard. Put Raspberry Pi and three AA batteries inside. Voila - you are able to show TSA staff that this is really laptop, which executes some code, and have a lot of space inside to put in explosives.

Moreover, you have powerful processor and lots of program-controled pins to implement timer initiator."

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/03/the_tsas_sele...

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The problem with hollywood movie plots is people have been able to remove the optical drive or floppy drive from a laptop for decades, insert a baggie of weed or whatever criminal activity.

To some extent avoiding TSA scrutiny might be a goal behind the apparently meaningless quest for thin laptops at apple. No removable parts means you can't rip parts out and insert a baggie of whatever in the case. Also the laptop being lightweight means whatever you're sneaking in can't be too heavy, if a laptop is lighter than a derringer even if it physically fits its going to be weird explaining why your laptop weighs twice as much as a normal laptop.

Also I'm sure this looks fascinating on the xray machine.

> The problem with hollywood movie plots is people have been able to remove the optical drive or floppy drive from a laptop for decades, insert a baggie of weed or whatever criminal activity.

Indeed. And a decade or more before the movie's purported date of 2025, we realized that Johnny Mnemonic would be better served smuggling data by swallowing a toy balloon with micro SD cards in it. Today he could get away with just three or four cards.

Has the TSA ever weighed of even lifted up your laptop to nice how much it weighs?

For making a smuggler-laptop, it's probably simpler to 3D-print a fat chassis for a little-known brand of thin ultrabook so the agent wouldn't know that it's not supposed to be a half-inch-thick.

Except they all get scanned, so the person who runs the scanner would, arguably, be able to detect this. I imagine the dugout laptop is exactly why we have mandatory scanning of laptops.

I also imagine the software can automatically detect things that looks like contraband, explosives, etc. If not then we'd be seeing a lot more terrorist success using these methods.

There must be a lot of pressure on the devs who make the software that run these things. Whatever computer vision processing it does needs to be pretty good or else.

Much of the software at that level of detection is still research grade. What is usable for industry is either used in automation (eg Finding curled noodles at a straight noodle factory) or used in tech centric companies. Combine that with the government being a decade behind when its trying and I suspect that humans look at every scan.

I'd be very surprised if your average airport xray would be able to distinguish between lithium battery cell and well disguised explosive pack. Doubly so if the cell/explosive is inside an aluminum body of a laptop.

Well if that was true we'd be seeing nothing but explosions on planes. These systems are designed to notice explosives. We know the densities of common explosives vs li-ion batteries and are able to distinguish between them.

Or maybe, just maybe, the explosion threat is massively overblown and airport security is mostly just theater.

Or instead of explosives ten galaxy note 7's with theverge.com or something like that open to make them overheat.

Note7 were quite quickly banned from planes.

...So are explosives.

similarly, sprite_tm hdd controller hack shows that today anything embeds a computer..

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