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Comment by user_7832 | Hacker News Reader

Do you also dislike say the arduino or the raspberry pi which popularized sbcs/microcontrollers, as they can be used for nefarious tasks? What about bell labs, without whom none of these issues would have occurred?

Technology will always develop, it's important to plan and regulate it, sure, but bans are need to be extremely carefully thought out to enforce well.

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Even the smallest amount of friction to acquiring a device like this (e.g. you have to build your own and flash your own firmware) would prevent basically all the attacks we see on the news with a Flipper. "Script kiddies", by definition, are buying pre-made, turnkey devices and lack the ability to build their own.

This is a really expensive device in Canada, and you do have to flash the firmware if you want access to the more harmful capabilities.

The people stealing cars are an international organized group that have managed to exploit holes in the federal government, the railroad companies, and the ports. The way they are stealing these cars is outside of the capabilities of a stock flipper, and requires custom hardware.

Banning the flipper is going to do precisely nothing to increase the friction on the problem they are trying to solve.

The problem they are trying to solve is the perception they aren't doing anything to stop organized car theft.

Banning the Flipper is a minimal effort way to minimize it as an election issue.

If people are stealing cars with a Flipper, banning it seems like more than a token gesture

The major ports (Montréal and Vancouver) are controlled by organized crime. But those people are scary (and/or well-connected). Much easier to go after hobbyists.

Sport shooters can insert a certain James Franco meme here.

If you choose, as Flipper Zero has, to market your device as a tool for "pentesting radio protocols, access control systems, hardware", I think you have some responsibility to mitigate the obvious and trivially foreseeable consequence of people using it to just outright penetrate those things.

That's fair, I wasn't aware that was how they advertised it. I would hope they use more responsible advertising, however I still don't think that deserves it to be banned.

How do the developers of Kali Linux mitigate against black hats? They don't. It's impossible.

They don't, for example, make posts on the front page of their public website (https://flipperzero.one/) about specific technologies such as key cards which are subject to easy exploitation.

i’d be more forgiving of the device if it had practical utility beyond “fucking up other people’s shit”. for me it’s in the same category as stink bombs, glitter bombs, and vuvuzelas.

I use mine as a handy NFC reader/writer, and for emulating a handful of badges and key fobs so I don't have to carry them all around with me.

So are you more forgiving of it now?

I use mine to open my own garage door and I use the GPIO pins to check if some of my I2C devices on my breadboards are using the correct address they are supposed to be using.

Does this mean your garage door doesn't have rolling codes, or does it mean that you know how to make the flipper work with that?

Presumably since they have access to their own garage door the Flipper can be synced as a new remote without any "hacking" or brute forcing rolling codes.

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