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Gotta love this ~20 year old limitation, conjured up because some idjit (more likely a committee of idjits) believed in some crackpot theory about terrorists co

Gotta love this ~20 year old limitation, conjured up because some idjit (more likely a committee of idjits) believed in some crackpot theory about terrorists cooking up liquid bombs: https://www.theregister.com/Print/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_terror_labs/ https://www.theregister.com/Print/2006/08/17/flying_toilet_t...

yawpitch 2y ago
That article really overestimates the desire of suicide bombers to survive their attempt. It also really overestimates how hard it is to do massive economic damage just by implying you know how to make TATP. What Bin Laden et al wanted to do was inflict long term economic pain, and they absolutely accomplished that goal. This just shows they’re still succeeding, really.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Y_Y 2y ago
  > In transaction processing, the Telecommunication Application Transaction Processing Benchmark (TATP) is a benchmark designed to measure the performance of in-memory database transaction systems. It's amazing how much of the world runs off inefficient databases! Certainly rigging a benchmark would do a lot more than a ziploc full of some volatile peroxide.
- pfannkuchen 2y ago
  I don't think long term economic pain was the goal. I think influencing the American people into opposing interference in the Middle East as "not worth it" was the goal. And that would be achieved by the visceral carnage and the implication of "we'll stop if you stop". Not through fuzzy and indirect economic effects. I don't think they ever cared about damaging the US in general, they just want the US and the west in general out of their backyard.
  - hyperman1 2y ago
    I think that not the US, but the Arab world were the target of the message. Al qaeda simply didn't care one bit what the average USian was thinking. The USA was the stage, not the public. Their message to the arab world was to unite against a common enemy, hated and proven vulnerable.
    - yawpitch 2y ago
      Bin Laden wasn’t all that interested in pan-Arabian unity, or even pan-Islamist unity, unless you were Sunni, more specifically Salafi / Wahhabi. Whatever his message, for the majority of Arabs it included the “oh, and follow my literalist interpretation or die, takfir”.
    - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
      We can't say anywise as the guy is dead and we can't for sure believe anything he said but based on the reaction of my fellow Arab colleagues, 9/11 had an important moral effect on them. As one of them explained to me, they felt victims for decades, and now for the first time in history they managed to have the upper hand.
  - bhj 2y ago
    "We, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat ... So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/03/usa.alqaida https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/03/usa.alqaida
  - yawpitch 2y ago
    You don’t chose the Twin Towers as the target for the second time in a decade because what you’re trying to do is talk to average Americans about geopolitics… you’re literally trying to hit them in their stock market. Twice. You also don’t hit that economic target with two planes full of people because you’re trying to imply you’ll stop if they do. Asymmetric warfare is almost always about bleeding the big, fat, slow moving one of his resources, and anyone that punched America in the face from Afghanistan understood that history, while also knowing how much (expensive, for decades) hell was going to come to rest on his doorstep. He was trying to inflict economic pain and also goad an idiot president into invading the graveyard of empires of his own accord. He didn’t want them out of his backyard, he wanted them stuck in his backyard. And he succeeded. On all counts. Dude got exactly what he wanted.
- lamontcg 2y ago
  > That article really overestimates the desire of suicide bombers to survive their attempt. The article addressed it pretty well. They have a fairly strong desire to not blow up in the taxi to the airport, so you can't carry premixed TATP around. And it won't work to just dump it into the toilet or sink and let the reaction rip, you won't get enough TATP out of that to matter.
  - yawpitch 2y ago
    When you’re facing people who are willing to joyfully blow their own genitalia off just to have a hope of downing an aircraft — the actual goal isn’t that, it’s to inflict economic damage to the economy that keeps the planes moving, which doesn’t even require an attempt, just the whispers of a credible attempt — you can’t consider the odds they’ll fail to do their worst, you have to consider the odds they’ll make a return on investment. Terrorism doesn’t work, as a political program, by seeking repeat success, it works by capitalizing on your very occasional successes by making the targeted people spend way more resources on defense than you do on offense. That’s my whole point… they don’t need to actually succeed at taking down the aircraft to make a return on investment. If they sacrifice a few pawns on failed attempts they get the worldwide airline industry and governments around the planet to spend more on persistent security theater then several thousand times the operating budget of all the world’s terrorists combined, they’ve achieved their goal.
harha 2y ago
Always surprising how airports in South America and Asia manage not to have issues with this.
- rishav_sharan 2y ago
  Its the same in India as well. Can't take any bottle with more than 100 ml of fluids in it inside the security area.
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  I used to forget lighters in my check in (in the hold) suitcase when flying to hk, th or sg; in the eu not an issue, in there I always got called to the little room; 'lighter!', for every lighter in there.
  - harha 2y ago
    A lighter‘s more dangerous than a bottle of wine on a plane I’d say
    - anonzzzies 2y ago
      In the cabin maybe, but in the hold? Ah well, everyone seems to disagree about all of it anyway.
bookaway 2y ago
Is the tıtle purposely ambiguous for clicks? They obviously mean each liquid bottle has to be max 100 ml, not that the total amount of liquids allowed is 100 ml, right?
- emmanuel_1234 2y ago
  What's with the weird 'i' in "tıtle"?
  - ASalazarMX 2y ago
    Probably used a Cyrillic keyboard.
    - majewsky 2y ago
      ı is not a Cyrillic letter, it's a letter for the Latin alphabet that is most commonly used in Turkish.
      - com 2y ago
        It exists in non-modern Russian and modern languages - such as Ukrainian - Cyrillic alphabets in various forms, sometimes with top and bottom horizontal strokes, sometimes just like this.
more_corn 2y ago
Liquid explosives are a fantasy, I can’t believe serious security people are fixated on it.
- lamontcg 2y ago
  I think airport people are fixated on it because of the increased revenues from beverage sales (and some security people are happy to help if they can sell wildly overpriced scanners at a massive profit)
skygazer 2y ago
I thought it was because the density of water was similar to explosives and x-ray scanning equipment at the time was not sensitive enough to differentiate without many false positives?

yawpitch 2y ago

That article really overestimates the desire of suicide bombers to survive their attempt. It also really overestimates how hard it is to do massive economic damage just by implying you know how to make TATP. What Bin Laden et al wanted to do was inflict long term economic pain, and they absolutely accomplished that goal. This just shows they’re still succeeding, really.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Y_Y 2y ago
> In transaction processing, the Telecommunication Application Transaction Processing Benchmark (TATP) is a benchmark designed to measure the performance of in-memory database transaction systems. It's amazing how much of the world runs off inefficient databases! Certainly rigging a benchmark would do a lot more than a ziploc full of some volatile peroxide.
pfannkuchen 2y ago
I don't think long term economic pain was the goal. I think influencing the American people into opposing interference in the Middle East as "not worth it" was the goal. And that would be achieved by the visceral carnage and the implication of "we'll stop if you stop". Not through fuzzy and indirect economic effects. I don't think they ever cared about damaging the US in general, they just want the US and the west in general out of their backyard.
- hyperman1 2y ago
  I think that not the US, but the Arab world were the target of the message. Al qaeda simply didn't care one bit what the average USian was thinking. The USA was the stage, not the public. Their message to the arab world was to unite against a common enemy, hated and proven vulnerable.
  - yawpitch 2y ago
    Bin Laden wasn’t all that interested in pan-Arabian unity, or even pan-Islamist unity, unless you were Sunni, more specifically Salafi / Wahhabi. Whatever his message, for the majority of Arabs it included the “oh, and follow my literalist interpretation or die, takfir”.
  - dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
    We can't say anywise as the guy is dead and we can't for sure believe anything he said but based on the reaction of my fellow Arab colleagues, 9/11 had an important moral effect on them. As one of them explained to me, they felt victims for decades, and now for the first time in history they managed to have the upper hand.
- bhj 2y ago
  "We, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat ... So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/03/usa.alqaida https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/03/usa.alqaida
- yawpitch 2y ago
  You don’t chose the Twin Towers as the target for the second time in a decade because what you’re trying to do is talk to average Americans about geopolitics… you’re literally trying to hit them in their stock market. Twice. You also don’t hit that economic target with two planes full of people because you’re trying to imply you’ll stop if they do. Asymmetric warfare is almost always about bleeding the big, fat, slow moving one of his resources, and anyone that punched America in the face from Afghanistan understood that history, while also knowing how much (expensive, for decades) hell was going to come to rest on his doorstep. He was trying to inflict economic pain and also goad an idiot president into invading the graveyard of empires of his own accord. He didn’t want them out of his backyard, he wanted them stuck in his backyard. And he succeeded. On all counts. Dude got exactly what he wanted.
lamontcg 2y ago
> That article really overestimates the desire of suicide bombers to survive their attempt. The article addressed it pretty well. They have a fairly strong desire to not blow up in the taxi to the airport, so you can't carry premixed TATP around. And it won't work to just dump it into the toilet or sink and let the reaction rip, you won't get enough TATP out of that to matter.
- yawpitch 2y ago
  When you’re facing people who are willing to joyfully blow their own genitalia off just to have a hope of downing an aircraft — the actual goal isn’t that, it’s to inflict economic damage to the economy that keeps the planes moving, which doesn’t even require an attempt, just the whispers of a credible attempt — you can’t consider the odds they’ll fail to do their worst, you have to consider the odds they’ll make a return on investment. Terrorism doesn’t work, as a political program, by seeking repeat success, it works by capitalizing on your very occasional successes by making the targeted people spend way more resources on defense than you do on offense. That’s my whole point… they don’t need to actually succeed at taking down the aircraft to make a return on investment. If they sacrifice a few pawns on failed attempts they get the worldwide airline industry and governments around the planet to spend more on persistent security theater then several thousand times the operating budget of all the world’s terrorists combined, they’ve achieved their goal.

harha 2y ago

Always surprising how airports in South America and Asia manage not to have issues with this.

rishav_sharan 2y ago
Its the same in India as well. Can't take any bottle with more than 100 ml of fluids in it inside the security area.
anonzzzies 2y ago
I used to forget lighters in my check in (in the hold) suitcase when flying to hk, th or sg; in the eu not an issue, in there I always got called to the little room; 'lighter!', for every lighter in there.
- harha 2y ago
  A lighter‘s more dangerous than a bottle of wine on a plane I’d say
  - anonzzzies 2y ago
    In the cabin maybe, but in the hold? Ah well, everyone seems to disagree about all of it anyway.

bookaway 2y ago

Is the tıtle purposely ambiguous for clicks? They obviously mean each liquid bottle has to be max 100 ml, not that the total amount of liquids allowed is 100 ml, right?

emmanuel_1234 2y ago
What's with the weird 'i' in "tıtle"?
- ASalazarMX 2y ago
  Probably used a Cyrillic keyboard.
  - majewsky 2y ago
    ı is not a Cyrillic letter, it's a letter for the Latin alphabet that is most commonly used in Turkish.
    - com 2y ago
      It exists in non-modern Russian and modern languages - such as Ukrainian - Cyrillic alphabets in various forms, sometimes with top and bottom horizontal strokes, sometimes just like this.

more_corn 2y ago

Liquid explosives are a fantasy, I can’t believe serious security people are fixated on it.

lamontcg 2y ago
I think airport people are fixated on it because of the increased revenues from beverage sales (and some security people are happy to help if they can sell wildly overpriced scanners at a massive profit)

skygazer 2y ago

I thought it was because the density of water was similar to explosives and x-ray scanning equipment at the time was not sensitive enough to differentiate without many false positives?