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Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

My friend found out the school he sysadmins for was using weak rfid card keys (despite the readers being smart enough to handle higher level encryption) and found he could clone his key and get in places. So basically he pen tested and then they decided to upgrade to the less or non-cloneable card keys. Security for the win.

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Before anyone tries this, doing this without first checking with security/facilities would likely be grounds for “disciplinary action, up to and including termination”

Termination is a favor if security is that lax.

> Termination is a favor

Losing your job is never a favour. Would you prefer termination if any issue was found with your work place?

Losing your job may not seem like a favor at first, it depends on how high you bounce after the fact. Being self employed for 20 years after being laid off was the best favor anyone ever did for me. I would have never taken that initial risk without being pushed into it. Now risk is comfortable.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted for this. It's 100% correct advice. The person you're replying to is a sysadmin so they are probably okay in this situation but cloning access cards without permission would be a serious breach no matter how well intentioned or how easy.

I countered the statement and also getting down voted. The key is to train your brain to like down votes just as much as up votes. When the number is just a number not attached to dopamine then you are free.

This just makes you disappointed if you don’t get negative or positive attention.

I never thought about that. Good point.

there are people that read without voting.

you could be getting attention of all kinds and not even know it.

Another good point.

I bet an equal number vote without reading.

That’s an interesting thought. 0 is a good number. Being satisfied with 0 can be conditioned as well.

The votes are not there for your benefit - they're there to make good/useful/valuable comments rise to the top, and bad/low-value/spam ones fall to the bottom.

I agree with the second part of your statement. There is a real brain chemical benefit to the votes though.

Nontheless the point about learning to accept downvotes is valid because "why was I downvoted?"-crybaby posts are annoying, useless and tend to also get downvoted.

Just as this meta-voting-post of mine should :)

... bad/low-value/spam/contradictory/unpopular opinion/dissidents/opposition/etc.

My comments got more than 200 downvotes and ban in discussion about physics about decade ago, but I nailed the problem. Also, I receive downvotes from Russian imperialists at constant rate just talking about history of Russia and Ukraine, because real history of Russian Federation/Russian Empire is well guarded secret in Russia.

Probably bots

If coercion was going to ever rule the world someone would have accomplished it fully already as many have tried. Yet here we are still free to say nearly whatever the fuck we want in the free world thankfully.

Because that’s, like, just your opinion man. Rules are made up.

Hes getting downwoted because this site is called hacker news. Dont be such a corpo chicken. I am pretty sure people are aware of legality of similar actions and dont need this mentoring.

If only issuing clone-able key cards were the infraction instead...

Unfortunately, it sounds potentially criminal, as well.

Quite often the keycards have sequential IDs which means you can increase or decrease the number a few times and find a colleagues card with higher or lower privileges than you.

You can achieve this exact same use case with a $15 RFID reader/writer, supporting higher frequencies and encryption.

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