[thomnottom]

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...

[VLM]

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.

[bitwize]

> 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.

[admax88q]

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

[Pxtl]

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.

[drzaiusapelord]

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.

[sqeaky]

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.

[zokier]

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.

[drzaiusapelord]

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.

[zokier]

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

[jnsaff2]

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

[agumonkey]

Note7 were quite quickly banned from planes.

[jdormit]

...So are explosives.

[agumonkey]

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