The Canadian government plans to ban the Flipper Zero and similar devices after tagging them as tools thieves can use to steal cars.

  • @Hobo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6•11 months ago

    I don’t disagree with your point, but the flipper zero for sure lowers the bar of entry. Before the flipper came out the, “You must be this tall to ride” required some pretty good knowledge of microcontrollers, hardware peripherals, and software engineering. The people that had that sort of knowledge tended to actually have paying jobs, which is like the biggest factor in not being a street criminal.

    The flipper made the barrier of entry at about the level of being able to operate a TV remote which any dipshit can do. However, the fact that the flipper exists at all means that the cat is out of the bag. As you said, someone else is just going to come along and release a similar product. You can’t just ban the flipper and expect it to have any impact. My concern is they will decided to make certain code illegal, which gets really stupid.

    • @just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1•11 months ago

      The Flipper is literally just an ends to a means. An easily accessible action for hardware. Nobody is stopping any random person from buying a number of $3 dongles for their laptop and using it in the exact same way.

      • @Hobo@lemmy.worldEnglish
        -1•11 months ago

        Yes but the flipper requires zero base knowledge to use it whereas setting up the hardware, installing the software, and troubleshooting any issues takes about the same amount knowledge as a helpdesk gig in IT. Again, I don’t think making them illegal does shit. I do think it’s rather obstinate to not acknowledge that the barrier for entry to execute those attacks was lowered substantially by the flipper though.

    • @ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5•11 months ago

      Barrier to entry to do what? They can’t be used for vehicle theft because you can’t replay attack a rolling code, which is what all vehicles use.

      The current attack is to use a repeater to amplify a fob that’s close enough to an outside wall to hijack and open these “get close enough and the doors open” locks.