Guy uses HoloLens to get around laptop/tablet ban on flight from Dubai

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I don’t get it. Where is the processor? In the glasses?

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Yeah. The glasses are basically a self contained Intel Atom based PC.

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That’s not how God meant for glasses to work, and I fully expect His agents the TSA to figure out this virtual spreadsheetery scam and put a swift end to it.

Make paper and pencil great again!

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Does the ban extend to a single-board computer not in a case? Because then you could have more computing power, using the glasses as a display. (But perhaps a tsa agent would see a beaglebone or pi taped to a battery and think “bomb”.)

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Think this over: the better you disguise your processor, the more it will resemble a well-disguised bomb. If you pass, you’re fine, but if they find it, that’s a one-way ticket to Gitmo.

The point though is that it wouldn’t be disguised at all; no case in which to hide explosives. Just a bare board.

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If they were smart, they’d worry more about the fact that Microsoft named their virtual assistant Cortana. Her record on things that fly isn’t exactly reassuring. :smirk:

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Is there some principle preventing airlines from providing all their passengers with a power supply, so they can check batteries as luggage and take the battery-less devices into the cabin?

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This assumes you can remove the battery - or it will run without a battery (many don’t for some reason). Most modern aircraft have AC power receptacles, though.

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I don’t think it’s about the batteries. It seems like they’re worried you could empty out your laptop and fit a bomb in the cavity. If anything it sounds like they’d prefer it if you took your batteries in carry on (in case they rupture or explode) but stow the rest of the laptop in your checked bag.

When you fly in other countries, they make you take out your laptop and electronics and put them in a separate tray to go through the X-ray. I guess this is to help them see all the other shit in your bag that would otherwise be obscured by all the details in a circuit board, but I can’t help noticing that you can see pretty well into the laptop itself and you’d definitely see if somebody had taken out the insides and replaced them with a wad of explosives.

So my question is, for anyone here who might have the authority to answer: Is this bullshit? This is some bullshit, right?

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My guess is that someone finally figured out you can remove many of the individual battery cells in a laptop battery and replace that space with your explosive de’jour and you would still have enough power that the laptop for inspection and blow a big enough hole in an airplane.

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I think that’s probably right. If you look at most modern laptops, they’re mostly battery with a small logic board. Many have soldered ram and tiny flash storage, all to try and maximize battery life in the smallest form factor possible. It’s not exactly the largest area ever to put explosives (compared to, say, cleaning out the innards of a 90’s era laptop), but I wager that’s where the concern is coming from, especially because I wonder how much a security screener can really differentiate between a densely packed battery cell and explosives anyway.

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I think any SOC or even a clear-case laptop would provoke the “OMG! WIRES!” reaction.

Especially if this is your alarm clock in the carry-on:

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