"Shoe bomb" and "how to defeat spyware"

[Eugene Leitl]

On Tue, 8 Jan 2002, Ken Brown wrote:

> that triacetone triperoxide can be home-made, and has intriguing

HMDT is another "alternative". Really fun to work with:

    Newsgroups: rec.pyrotechnics
    Subject: Re: HMDT
    Date: 10 Mar 92 04:53:20 GMT
    Organization: Tampere Univ. of Technology, Finland.
    :
    :
      Well, I put a small piece of HMTD into a brick, and hitted it with a
    hammer, and it didn't detonate. I also tried a 'spark-test' from a
    lighter, and didn't managed to detonate HMTD. ( Indeed in ntp, and in
    normal condition, HMTD wont detonate If you light it, It'll burn like
    cellulose nitrate - with a yellow flame. Well, I was more than
    Happy to see, That I'd found A PERFECT Primary-explosive to detonate
    high-explosives.
      Well At the July of 1989 It happened, I was damping HMTD into a .22
    LR copper cartridge, with a standart match, you see holding that
    cartridge in my left hand ,when it suddendly detonated, A HUGE explosion,
    and I found that for some reason, my hand was bleeding abt 1/2 liter
    of blood per min ( 1/9 gallon per min ) , and I could see my bone
    'shining' through scraped human tissue.

       Epiloque. Never NEVER load B-caps in your hand, Always use special
    tamping device when loading Blasting caps - any other use for HMTD is
    silly - Believe me, I had hitted HMTD with a Hammer, It didn't
    detonate, and now, when I try to load that stuff from same batch into
    a copper container, It detonates, even I press with maybe 1/2 kg
    ( = 1 pound ) force it.
       Maybe the batch was impure, but believe me, It really explode
    without no reason. I must say that HMTD is a good explosive, but It's
    truly unpredictable. I'm sure that there are many others in this
    newsgroup who can tell the same thing - months of hard handling, and
    then, a explosion by a minumum force.
:
:

> reference to "ping pong balls dissolved in acetone". Interestingly,

They're made (or used to be made until very recently) from celluloid,
nitrocellulose of low degree of nitration plasticized with camphor. It is
soluble in acetone, but diethylether/ethanol is a better solvent. I don't
see this being anything else than binder, stabilizer or desensibilizer for
the organic peroxides/PETN.

> despite scare stories, a simple google search doesn't turn up details
> on how to make the stuff (neither does the Science Citation Index,
> which might have been a better bet, though I imagine anyone with
> access to a University library could get the information)

A simple Google search should pull up dozens of links on how to make it.

Don't. If you don't know how to make it, it means you can't handle it
safely. Quantities of organic peroxides in novice's hands will quickly
make them missing digits, or Worse. Organic peroxides are much too
instable to be safely worked with, period.

> And google has just told me that the husband of a colleague of mine
> has published a paper on PETN - thousands of tons of which are
> apparently manufactured every year and used in industry and medicine
> (it is a vasodilator and cardioactive drug). So it might not be too
> difficult to find that for sale.

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/sci/chem-faq/part3/section-2.html
See: 13.8 What is the chemical structure of common explosives?

-- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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