Canada’s intent to ban the Flipper Zero wireless tool over car thefts is, on the one hand, an everyday example of poorly researched government action. But it may also be a not-so-subtle peek into the harm misinformation online can cause by leading to said government action.
The Government of Canada recently hosted a national summit on combatting vehicle theft, and Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne proudly declared immediate actions being taken to ban devices used to steal vehicles by wirelessly bypassing keyless entry, the Flipper Zero being specifically named as one such device.
And yet, defeating a rolling code keyless entry system is a trick a device like the Flipper Zero simply cannot pull off. (What cars have such a system? Any car made in roughly the last thirty years, for a start.)
The Flipper Zero tool makes all kinds of useful wireless exploration and interactions accessible and fun. But it’s become prominently featured in videos that gleefully purport to show it doing something shocking (and likely staged), followed by making a YouTube face at the camera. Then it’s cut, upload, and watch the clicks roll in.
We’ve talked about how such videos are a very bad look, even if they’re hoaxes done for the lulz. Flipper Zero got banned from Amazon for being a “card skimming device” last year. There was a time when the Flipper Zero was going for crazy prices on eBay. We were going to provide a going rate, but they don’t even show up in search results anymore. Government action like this is another example of how a bad rap can make it harder for folks to obtain useful tools.
Ironically, owning a Flipper Zero and exploring the world of wireless data and communication is a great way to learn that many modern devices and protocols are so much better than their predecessors. For example, one can demonstrate how contactless payment with a wireless device like a mobile phone or Apple Watch is more secure and exposes far less information than tapping the physical card.
“Ironically, owning a Flipper Zero and exploring the world of wireless data and communication is a great way to learn” If that was the case then one could use WireShark. Most people buying the F0 are using it in the wrong way to cause trouble.
Can I ask what evidence are you basing that on?
“I saw some videos on youtube/TV”, “heard on a podcast” or “read it in the newspaper” seems to be the main ‘evidence’ most people give because everyone knows “they wouldn’t be allowed to say it if it wasn’t true”
Combine that with the relative dearth of educational related media released about it. Yes you can find videos and guides on printing guns with 3d printers. ..but go to any platform and search for 3d printers and you’re going to find an avalanch of practical, silly, and educational material based on the topic before or at least concurrently with the firearms based content.
It could be logical inference to personal experience. When I was in high school kids would bring in their home TV remote or a wireless device to turn off the school room’s TV during announcements, videos, etc. Again, random PITA teenagers doing it for the lulz or to cause minor disruption in public/class.
It’s not a far reach to say that same type of person/mentality that creates prank videos on youtube or tiktok today. I have a step sister who teaches at University of Washington. A few years ago someone walked into her classroom (a university student, but not in her class), and had their laptop’s text to speech function read off, “There is a bomb in this room, evacuate now.” Again, for the lulz, and then told everyone to calm down it’s just a joke. They get super upset when the cops show up or some prank victim retaliates, but it seems society’s empathy goes only so far.
If you’re capable enough to build your own flipper device you should absolutely be allowed to own one, but if you’re just buying one to generate chaos around you then you’re no better than a script kiddie.
Imagine a society without such pranksters, where every bomb threat was taken absolutely seriously and security/safety was based on people always obeying the law.
It would be like visiting Germany. I have fond memories trying to discuss the possibility, that one might consider crossing the street on a red light, in the middle of the night, when there’s nobody else on the road – rather than just standing there like an idiot for two minutes waiting on green. We got to the point that it might be morally permissible on a personal level, but you still shouldn’t do it because there might be children watching (at 2 AM etc.) and it would be bad influence…
The problem is not that you might be seen by children, the problem is that you train your subconsciousness to ignore red lights. The catch is, that your fallback action profile is dangerous: it may well make the difference if you after a long day and all night of debugging get to bed very tired or very tyred.
That said, I know a pedestrian light that regulates the crossing of a pedestrian area…
The solution would not be to ignore the rules, but to make the rules and utilities reasonable and lightweight (and we fail miserably at that almost all the time). So how should I argue?
stupid rules are meant to be broken.
At 4am an old woman yelled “child murder” at me for doing it.
Had an old woman in Switzerland chew me a new one for doing exactly that. The Swiss are more German than the Germans.
> the problem is that you train your subconsciousness to ignore red lights
No you don’t. Nobody was suggesting you’d just blithely walk into the street without checking first.
Point being, when you’re out at night walking and stop at the red light, and the light doesn’t change for reason X – it may be broken or on an unreasonably long cycle – do you just stand there like an idiot for minutes, or do you simply look up and down the street to determine that there is indeed no traffic and then cross the street.
A variation of the question is, if there are no pedestrian crossings along a street, and you need to go somewhere that is right across no more than 10 meters away, do you take a half-mile detour to find one? Assuming a similar case, at night with no traffic around.
The “right” answer of course is that there should be a pedestrian crossing on that street, but there just isn’t. Maybe they just re-paved the street and haven’t painted one in yet. The world isn’t perfect, but the rules assume it is.
>The solution would not be to ignore the rules, but to make the rules and utilities reasonable
You cannot do anything about that in the moment, so you’re stuck?
(max reply depth reached…)
So what happens if you just ignore rules?
1. You become used to ignore rules
2. More rules are implemented
That is a runaway circle leading to a society with the rule of force as the only one being obeyed.
And you *do* train your subconciousness to ignore red lights when you regularly ignore red lights. It is one of the cases where you can make your habit your best friend or your worst enemy, depending on what you choose to do on a regular basis.
To evaluate this, check for every habit “What happens, if I somehow miss a case where I should not do it as always?” It is wise to choose each habit so that the answer is “nothing too bad”.
The worst part was they still weren’t happy after I crossed back and waited with them.
I expected it in Germany in general. Had been led to believe that Berlin was different. Nope: Still rules crazy, just with ‘discipline’, leather, cocaine and awful disco music.
The problem with rules crazy people is when an asshole gets charge of the rulebook. That’s when have a ‘subconscious trained to follow rules’ (like a sheep) bites you and your neighbors.
To quote a German from ‘Clarkson meets the Neighbors’: ‘Germans do as they’re told. Lately they’ve been told to be nice to people, so they do. If they were told to run prison camps in Poland, they’d do that.’
My whole extended family are German. The American branch is the only one with a healthy attitude to rules.
My fault. When I was 2 my mom was taking me to the relatives for ‘kinderinspektion’. Some upper class Von(femaledog) failed to respect my mom’s authority. I took the high ground and pissed on her (literally). Mom perceived I would end up in German prison, so back to the USA (yeah).
The B wanted me arrested, but I was 2. Reports are I thought she was funny as F. I kept laughing like a 2 year old Bond villain when expected to apologize.
Mom denied me this story for most of my life. But she had told her sister, who eventually couldn’t keep the secret any longer. Mom is still mortified…Germans!
One of the greatest moments of my life (wish I remembered it).
My happy place. On the luggage rack in a train compartment, peeing on a very angry rich lady wearing couture and fur. Imagining a beach never worked, now I know why.
HaHa: following rules blindly is one of the habits you should avoid. Instead check every rule with your conscience before following. If regularly waiting on a red light is against that, check the training set of your conscience.
Rules were made to be broken. The exceptions are never codified.
Crossing against the light? Depends.
If no traffic, on foot or bike, then no problem, at all. Not even hesitation.
If six lanes of urban autobahn, nope. No frogger.
Here in California, in dash GPS systems are called ‘German killers’. Because more than one car full of Germans followed the GPS ‘shortest route’ to a 4×4 road in Deathvalley. Eventually the bodies are found with the rental car (which is missed). Except the fathers, they typically try to walk out…Should have selected quickest route. Anyhow, doing what they are told, even if it’s a GPS telling them to go down a rutted dirt road.
Anyhow, rules schmules. No cop, no stop. Crime is the spice of life.
I was amazed how afraid of a traffic ticket Germans are. Fines are low and tickets don’t affect insurance IIRC. German goes by a lowered speed limit sign, he doesn’t let off the throttle, he jumps on the brakes.
That said, I’ve gone decades without a ticket/accident. But CA, I’m on the road with Russian, Chinese, Indian and Mexican drivers. My old doubled up power V8 (no traction control) toy doesn’t draw a glance (not even 500HP, motor was kind of EPA lame to start, doesn’t even try to kill me under 3kRPM).
Long as I’ve spotted the cop first, unwound the motor…I’ve got a ‘sense of cop proximity’…Comes from decades of growing illegal plants. I can spot a cop car from 10 cm of bumper a half km away…In person, it’s the shoes that give them away.
I made my cousin a set of electrified trucknuts for his benz. LED lights…auxiliary blinkers and brake lights (trailer hookup). If you see him give him a wave.
You should make one for yourself. Applies to any Germans reading this. Especially women.
I’d put up a project, but don’t know any decent web sites for such things. Maybe github. Who would need instructions for this though?
Connector, wires, LEDs, resistors, trucknuts. There.
Germany. Of course. There’s a tale from Bismark’s time that some outraged students wanted to take over a building. University or government I suppose. The authorities put up signs, “KEEP OFF THE GRASS!” The students were stymied and gave up.
There’s no way to take away all necessary supplies for causing harm, but the more you take away, the less that innocent people can actually do, until at some point people aren’t allowed to have the supplies for making toast because they might grease the floor with butter and make someone fall into the bath with the toaster. The laptop is a good example; obviously you can do a lot of harm that way, but it’d be silly to ban them because it’s not really about the laptop, any number of devices could be made to play back a voice clip on demand.
What you can do is what it sounds like you also agree on – don’t let people form the expectation that they’re untouchable if they say it’s “just a prank”.
Most drone kits ordered in Ukraine are for exploring flight dynamics and control theory. In areas where every 3rd person walking around is casually checking for unlocked or desirable cars, Flipper Zero’s are bought for exploring RF and communication theory. It only makes sense.
WireShark and Flipper are not really comparable at all. It’s prime functionality is with things in the realms of RFID/NFC, IRDA, and sub-GHz RF. I have no sources to cite either, but I think *most” people buying the F0 are using it to clone an Amiibo or two, then take up space in a drawer.
My wife and kids play Switch games fairly often, so I’ve used my F0 to do the Amiibo thing on occasion.
That being said, I’ve long been intrigued by NFC and RFID, and use my F0 and a ProxMark3 EZ clone to explore that space beyond Amiibo usage.
I’ve used it to explore the type of information stored on single-use NFC (typically MiFare Ultralight) cards, like those utilized by the NS and GVB train services in the Netherlands – with a family of four in NL for a week, it became pretty easy to identify which blocks tended to change on cards used by both services (and intriguingly, it appears that NS and GVB might use similar information, but with the block locations swapped between the two, so that cards for one aren’t valid on the other). While getting off a GVB train in AMS during rush hour, one of our cards failed to scan at the reader, too – a fact I was able to verify later with the F0, looking at those same blocks, with nulls written to places data should be.
I’ve successfully used my F0 and PM3 to clone my work badge (HID Prox) too – while I’m not nearly stupid enough to hand a clone of my badge out to a coworker with RTO orders in force, it’s interesting to see what information is on the card, and to verify that I can use the F0 to let me into the building at work.
I’ve even found that my local library uses ISO15693 nfc stickers on some books for inventory control, too – no security bits are set, so they likely just store the tag id in a db. Interestingly enough, merely checking a book out seems to tell the security system at the door to ignore the tag, as I’ve never seen it go off when I take a properly-checked out book w/ a tag out of the library.
It’s amazing what one can learn about the systems hidden in plain sight all around us with a tool like the F0.
Ah, yes, installing wireshark magically turns your desktop into a pocket size device capable of bidirectional infrared, nfc, and other wireless communications.
Anyway, most of what this thing seems to be really used for is more like a supercharged universal remote than a lockpick. It can sometimes help you find glaring holes in your security, if you’ve got authorization to use it and you’re using something that’s vulnerable to such basic attacks as “let’s try typing every possible pin code” or “let’s send unwanted messages over and over” or sometimes “let’s listen for the password and then use it ourselves”. And people enjoy doing that, it can be fun, but it’s not even the same as a lishi tool in terms of how focused on unauthorized usage it is. And even a lishi is good if you want to know the numeric keying of a lock or, of course, if you’re a locksmith.
Darn, if only my phone was a pocket size device running Wireshark with infrared, NFC and other wireless communication /s
You can run Kali versions of Linux on some smart phones. Wireshark succeeded in being a kickstarter fad. And for a hacker its a lot of money, if you know what you want to do there are other ways of getting there.
My phone doesn’t have most of the comms that the F0 has, no regular phone does. Maybe a few have infrared, or maybe via adapters. The flipper is notably cheaper than the proxmark, which only does NFC type stuff, even if it’s the best at it and is more of a real alternative.
… here we have an example of someone saying a word they heard, “Wireshark”, but yet have no fucking clue what it means. Thanks, Mike.
Honestly this just sucks. I was hoping to save up and purchase one but it looks like it will be a pipe dream. I am learning C++ and was hoping to branch into telecommunication/ wireless communication. Obviously still can but the flipper seems like a fascinating tool to learn from.
Better than an SDR USB dongle? Flipper is 4 times the cost.
If you are referring to an rtlsdr, those are receive only. A GSG Yardstick One does Sub-ghz rx and tx (no ir, no nfc, no rfid, no bluetooth). and is ~$120. I love my YS1 though.
Flipper is a great all in one, but I spend far more time writing YS1 code.
Don’t worry, I’m sure you can get one online, customs won’t catch it.
When will Canada ban crowbars? … *sigh* ignorance … Lets hope the plan doesnt go through as this is just stupid. Alsof Ali express delivers to ca, no?
Yeah, I have a bag full of wireless tools that I can use to bypass the security on many devices. Hammers, screw drivers, chisels etc.
Sheesh, don’t give them any ideas.
After spending a weekend in the states it’s already depressing to come home. Our government is the master of using fear, and then control of supposed bogeymen, to keep us all grateful for our bread and circuses.
Criminal Code of Canada S.351(1): Possession of Break and Enter Tools. “Every person who, without lawful excuse, has in their possession any instrument suitable for the purpose of breaking into any place, motor vehicle, vault or safe….” https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-351.html
I bet they won’t let you within 100 feet of the prime minister with a crowbar in your hands right now.
Which is a good choice…Don’t want the moron to be a martyr…Best to leave him twisting in the wind as long as possible…Perhaps put him in front of a ‘human rights commission’ or three…ahla Robespierre.
Classical political bimbo that doesn’t know anything about the object of the ministry he’s leading.
According to the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois-Philippe_Champagne) and corroborated with his LinkedIn profile (https://www.linkedin.com/in/fran%C3%A7ois-philippe-champagne-262857212/) he studied law, been in political positions since 2015 (sometimes for barely one year) and ended up at the helm of the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry via a “after a cabinet reshuffle”.
In Dutch we have an expression for this. We call it falling upwards. We had a elementary school teacher leading the handling of the pandemic and now he is leading the handling of the housing crisis after a cabinet reshuffle.
Falling upwards, negative growth, even cabinet reshuffle (getting rid of an indesirable person but make it look like its just a minor inconvenience, but _we_did_something_more_important_there), all this male cow byproduct is called politically corectness.
In the USA it is the “Peter Principle”. In business people are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. In government there is no limit.
I’m from the US, and I’ve heard it called ‘falling upwards’ or ‘failing upwards’ as well.
They’re not exactly the same thing.
‘Falling upwards’ means there are invisible incentives at play. The person falling upwards has power of some kind, simple as that. ‘It’s not what you know, but who you b…’
I’ve seen the term ‘promoted to a position where they can’t do any damage’ used.
In California we have the ‘General Services Administration’ (not the federal one). It’s a state department with no meaningful responsibilities. Exists to park unfireable state employees until retirement (getting in each other’s way). Building is one city block, six stories, just south of Broadway in Sacramento. Likely the cheapest way to deal with them. Area is a freakshow at lunchtime. Unemployable.
Everybody that works or has contracted for the state in Sacramento knows this, but it’s never said out loud in public. Like discussing which Mexican gangs control which Mexican political parties in public places. Danger Will Robinson!
It used to be called “Peter Principle”.
It was a book:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
nah, been replaced with the “dilbert principle’ ie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
The Dilbert principle is just one of many corollaries to the Peter principle.
The one that I’ve found useful is the observation: ‘Once a person has reached their level of incompetence, they at some level know it. So they surround themselves with even more incompetent people, to better hide’. (para, name escape’s me)
Incompetents are like Vampires, you need to find the top one. e.g. No point in firing Kamela Harris.
Not a single link to what the hell a Flipper Zero is
You must be living under a very large rock to have missed that.
That makes for two of us….
Three of us…
four
Patrick? Patrick! PAAATRIIICK!!!
In fairness I’d entirely forgotten it existed. I know I didn’t miss it, it just wasn’t memorable enough to recall without the prompting, at which point I did then have to look it up to differentiate it from all the many other projects that have similar capabilities and design intent.
Is google down again? I hate it when that happens.
🤣
This is akin to burning books. Make people unable to understand how poor the security of their devices is, which leads to maintaining poor security, while the true criminals still have access to these advanced tools. Meanwhile auto makers have known about many of the security flaws used to steal cars, sometimes for over 20 years, yet they do nothing because they are not obligated to. The S in IoT is for security… The S in car is for security.
Rather than banning the tools, they should force manufacturers to resist the attacks by improving and patching the security. Criminals don’t care the tool is illegal, this only punishes security researchers and the everyday citizen.
They did supposedly work with police forces, but I’m concerned that even they don’t know how these tools work and how cars are actually being stolen. After all, all it takes for some is to connect to the wires behind the headlights.
Someone needs to make an open hardware and open source car, but sadly the hacker crowd isn’t numerous enough to be worthwhile on that aspect. Prove me wrong 😉
If a person is a crook, then the Flipper would still make it into their hands. Yes, it might keep it out of a casual lawbreakers hands…
And that is contingent of the Flipper being able to do everything they imagine. But even if it was able to do all of this, the only person who would not be able to get one would be me.
G*n Control has proven that principle time and time again. The thing these people can’t comprehend is that words on paper will never stop bad people from doing bad things to innocent people. Period. That is just how the world works, and there does not exist a thing in this universe that will change that fact.
But gun control works extremely well, areas with strict gun laws have, demonstrably, less gun violence.
Yeah, those “gun free zones” sure are effective at stopping shootings in them. Then there is the entire city of Chicago…. Oh, I forgot. That’s Indiana’s fault. *eye roll*
Only if you cherry pick your data.
Usually done by saying ‘advanced countries’ and excluding deaths by out of control government in the metric.
Ask yourself: ‘Did greater percentage of people die of gun violence in Europe then the N. America in the 20th century?’ ‘Guns’ are technically artillery, but same answer if you use the common definition.
Cambodia under Pol Pot had very strict gun control laws. Arbitrary, but strict. etc etc etc
‘Would you prefer if he had been pushed out a window?’ (A wise man.)
As a Canadian with a shiny new car my first EV, I’m legit concerned it will be stolen. The insurance premiums for a comprehensive aka theft insurance are astronomical. Canadian law states, if a thief request our car keys we have to hand it over no questions asked, any physical resistance or harm comes to the theif we can face jail time. It’s socialism.
This is why I ordered a $700 key fob replacement from Toyota (yeah that price is true) just so I had a 2nd set, my new Toyota only came with 1 (also true).
I had originally planned to have an aftermarket disabler installed but Toyota made it very clear that would void the warranty and it would cost $20,000 to replace the wiring harness (google it).
Then I heard the Flipper zero could unlock my car and cost only $300 but Justin banned then.
Oh darn, I guess I’ll have to buy a Autel KM100 phone size professional wireless key programmer and key emulator from Amazon for $500. I don’t even need keys to use it! And it’s cheaper that a key fob from my dealership.
Thankfully it’s illegal in Canada for criminals to buy the Autel KM100 and other similar profession locksmith key programmers. Thank you Canadian government for baning harmful dangerous hacker tools like the Flipper Zero.
Car manufactures should not be responsible for selling you a ‘secure’, expensive (and subscription) product which can easily defeated in less than 2 mins by a inexpensive professional locksmith device. Seriously, my car has a cellular modem uploading GPS coordinates to AWS severs and will tell me where I last parked, but if it’s stolen Toyota won’t track it.. says right in the manual, in case of theft don’t call them they can’t help. The manual also say my EV produces carbon dioxide emissions and should not be left running in an enclosed space….hmm.. maybe I should have bought a Tesla.
wellll have I got a boring little beige box with buttons and a screen ,just for YOU!
and let me tell you this baby does,umm?stuff
wow!,ALL the stuff
yup this blbb is what you need
I guess I’ll just build my own. The parts aren’t illegal and it’s open hardware and open source.
Exactly.
” parts aren’t illegal ”
Yet.
Wait until they learn that smart toothbrushes with AI inside plan to take over the world.
To understand that, I think we only need to look into drive theory by Sigmund Freud[1]. There are some politicians that discovered something, only understand (at best) half of it, and now run around showing off their new knowledge and try to impress their constituents by rescuing the world from that evil (while sitting at home and playing around with their new toy because they learned it could do “things”…)
Same as it ever was, same as it ever was. [2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_theory
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IsSpAOD6K8
Canada moment
Not Canada, but politics moment.
In Brazil Flipper Zero is kinda banned: you cannot import because customs will confiscate them.
Small tangent: in lots of cities in Brazil is illegal to use your phone at the gas station because explosions. Someone some decades ago said a gas station exploded in Australia and a cell phone was somehow involved, so there’s this law.
And one of the senate guys tried to pass a law outlawing bras with padding because reasons…
News Flash: it’s illegal to put fingers in both ears, you can suffocate and go blind.
Should we tell them this is happening if you’re holding a big pot with hot water?
“In Brazil Flipper Zero is kinda banned…”
So is stealing electricity by tapping into overhead electricity cables. How’s that working out?
I asked a CTO at phone company about this and the logic was that there was the potential of sparks from replaceable batteries that could cause a fire at a gas station from phones with damaged cases
Didn’t the Mythbusters debunk that rumors many years ago…
If there’s enough gas vapor in the air to ignite with a spark, you shouldn’t be there and the gas station has other problems…
I hate this logic. Lets give them some huge concessions and assume that’s true.
1. Cars also have replaceable batteries. All of them.
2. Not using a device doesn’t make the battery disappear. Even turning it off would have zero effect on the risk claimed.
I think they rather were afraid of the phones interfering with the metering electronics when cellphones first appeared, and then never again thought about it.
Keep in mind that using a cellular phone can be also a distraction while pumping fuel into your car. You are supposed to pay attention to the nozzle and make sure the fuel doesn’t spill out onto the ground or back at you. There are mechanical things in place to help stop this, and they aren’t perfect, you should not rely on them 100%. Spills cause a lot of paperwork…
Canada is becoming the “Florida man” of laws.
I think once you tell people what they can and can’t say, it all goes down hill.
Car manufacturers build poor locks so the logical consequences: Bann the tools necessary to open a poorly designed lock.
Why did no one follow such a “logic” in the 80s? Every car could be opened with a piece of wire. So bann all wires.
All the scary stories about the Flipper Zero and I can offer something a bit more positive here.
My wife is friends with an elderly and disabled woman who recently moved into a new apartment complex built specifically for and intended for the elderly and disabled. It has an RFID key-fob to get into the building, but they only provide a single one to the resident and charge $50 for each additional fob.
Must be super secure and impossible to clone, right? Nah… bog standard T5577 RFID tags, no security whatsoever. So I pop on down to the old RFID tag store and get a pack of 20 or so cards for $15 and write a half-dozen for our older friend.
She wants to pay me, I tell her to tell ALL of her new neighbors and friends that if they need a new key-fob, well, she knows a guy who can get them for $2 a pop!
The F0 is open source, right? Should be possible still for Canadians to build one from the component list? Are there any components on that list which can also be substituted with generic components, incase the regime tries to ban the import of the specific MCU the flipper usually uses?
The good thing about open source is that projects can take on a life of their own, beyond the ability of governments to control them, because there becomes no central single-point-of-failure person or organisation upon whom governments can exert coercive pressures, see: https://dailysceptic.org/2023/09/27/the-coming-tyranny-of-smart-technology-is-worse-than-you-think-but-there-is-hope/
Politicians do research? That is a new one.
I thought they became politicians, because they have no other skills to offer society…
Politicians need to be replaced by citizen assemblies. And laws only proposed with petitions.
You’d change your minds if you’d seen some of the “Citizen Petitions” being circulated around here.
A democracy can only be as good as the average voter’s education. The alternative of electing supposedly wiser politicians who then turn around and override the will of the people who elected them is a recipe for democratic backsliding.
Bingo
OK, in theory I’d buy that. In practice, however, I don’t trust the average output of my local schools any further than I can toss the fries they serve me.
Look into liquid democracy if you haven’t heard of it before.
It sounds like the worst parts of direct democracy combined with the worst parts of representative democracy.
It would still have powerful populists that remain in power by their sheer cult of personality and group-think, and a constant struggle for the tyranny of the 51% only in real-time instead of every few years. It forgets that politics is not done through voting alone. One bad article in the morning paper, and people pull votes from their delegates.
It also opens up avenues in very interesting forms of gerrymandering, since you can delegate your vote over particular topics to different people. If the same policy was presented in the form of farming subsidies, then delegate A might win B, but if the policy was drawn under the guise of national security policy, B could win A. It’s all just a matter of how the bureaucrats who prepare the drafts want to play the system, and whether the public has any time or interest to follow it up and figure out what’s going on.
Gang rape is a perfectly democratic process.
The problem is, no matter your constitution, when 51% are on the tit, it’s over. See also: England.
It is right up there with several city councils trying to pass resolutions banning DHMO
I have one still in the box from the original Kickstarter.
I wonder why so many cars are being stolen in Canada? Not.
So, when bad people use tools to steal cars Trudeau bans those tools. These same banned tools will still be used by these same bad people to steal these same cars. He should just ban bad people. But before he does that, he’ll ban cars. Another reason for 15 minute cities with turnstiles, AI and cameras on every corner.
Yikes!!!!! That wouldn’t work around some of them there parts where I’ve lived! ;-)
That’s Ironic, I bought a slim jim (flat metal that can unlock a car door) at a dollar store in new york, and flew it in my luggage back to CA. This Flipper business is just silly.
It is a “jack of all trades” kind of toy a pre-teen spy would be using on a kids show. Thieves will be using the cheapest device that does the ONE thing they need to steal the car. It will be 1/10th as expensive for them.
Just when you think things couldn’t get stupider the government says “Hold my beer!”.
>so much better than their predecessors. For example, one can demonstrate how contactless payment with a wireless device like a mobile phone or Apple Watch is more secure and exposes far less information
Except for the point that now Google and/or Apple knows all about your purchases and correlates it with all the rest of the information on your tracking profile.
It’s not that bad if an individual shop collects information about purchases, since you can always buy with cash or a different card. It becomes dangerous when ONE world-wide megacorporation knows everything about everyone’s purchasing habits. Then that corporation sells the same information to the individual shops anyways, and they charge the money out of you, so now you’re PAYING to have your privacy stolen.
+1. Google knows too much about everyone already.
If the Flipper Zero were able to broadcast outside the ISM bands or beyond unlicensed power limits, I could see an argument for limiting its sale. But it doesn’t look like it can.
Canada has already effectively stopped the sale of the HackRF, too. When I was working for an electronics distributor, we got a nice letter from Industry Canada saying that we were not to offer them for sale to the public. I’m sure that it was an entire coincidence that a Canadian government agency bought our entire stock the week before.
I told a co worker about this a year ago. He bought one and said don’t waste your money it’s not worth the hype
If you’re trying to use it as a script-kiddie style tool to cause mayhem, then he’s right.
If you like the idea of having an RP2040 based exploration toolkit with IR, GPIO, NFC, and Sub-GHZ radio hardware interfaces already packaged, a cool little LCD display, and a user interface, it’s AMAZING.
Honestly I’m quite impressed with it. But I didn’t expect to fire it up and cause mayhem. I expected to be able to write and run cool little tools for radio and IR stuff without having to cobble together microcontrollers and design project boxes &etc.
As a Canadian, I apologize for my government. They’re fine people, I guess, but they have a tendency to want to control people’s lives…
Tyrants gonna tyrant.
You can’t be a real Canadian. You forgot to say “Sorry”.
I did apologize…
Well, it can pull off something called Rollback attack: https://hackaday.com/2022/08/17/rollback-breaks-into-your-car/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEvSp8vrvrQ
So…as a Flipper Zero owner, here’s the thing…
It’s correct to say that the FZ can’t perform things like rolling code attacks. Out of the box. But half the point of the FZ is learning through developing it. With a fairly simple firmware change, app install, and maybe an inexpensive board to plug in, the Flipper Zero can certainly perform rolling code attacks and much, much more.
But as said before, it’s just a tool, like any other. It’s all about how you use it.