And if you were even a little familiar with lithium battery fires you’d know such reports don’t match up with the reports of exploding pagers killing people. So which is it?
We’ve had numerous cases of phones catching on fire in people’s pockets and resulting in horrible burns throughout the years, but how many of these have killed people? A lithium battery is an incendiary device under the right circumstances, not an explosive one. And you need a bigger battery than one in a pager to cause enough damage in a short enough timeframe to kill a person before they can save themselves.
Not to mention that it’s not a simple matter to make a lithium battery catch on fire remotely. What are they gonna do, try to draw more current than the battery can provide? That’s not going to make a battery catch on fire.
Without compromised hardware even igniting a battery is pretty implausible (unless the phone was on charge, and obviously these weren’t) as you’d need to basically short it out and this would be hard even with full bare metal access.
Pagers are famously hard to hack as well since all they do is display strings. And they aren’t on the public net, they don’t even have IP addresses as they communicate hub and spoke with a big slow RF transceiver.
Much more likely triggered by a message or long time fuse.
Reports of batteries in the past exploding were unintentional. So if one were purposely causing the batteries to explode then it’s logical that you could make it a lot more potent.
The idea that it was a hack is more prevalent outside the west. No doubt because western intelligence is trying to stop the story of any electronic made by them being a potential bomb under their control.
