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NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives

blog.adafruit.com

11–20 of 236 posts

Re: NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives

#11

isn't "weapon" already general enough by definition? also why not disallow laptop then?

NYC (and other jurisdictions) have a long history of categorizing things as "not a weapon" so they can more strongly restrict them without 2A challenges.

Re: NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives

#12
post #8
post #3

How are they going to enforce this? "No officer see this is an orange pi"

They’ll say “that’s banned too”. Their language here is imprecise and that’s crappy but the intent is clearly to ban little microboard computers, they’re just using “Raspberry Pi” to describe it.

This will be interesting because Adafruit is based in NYC and they have pretty much every variety of microboard computer you can imagine

Re: NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives

#14
post #4

Lots of products come with integrated rPis since they're so easy to work with and have good vendor support. I guess all those products are banned too lol.

No, they won’t be. They’ll just stop anyone carrying a Raspberry Pi sized circuit board computer type thing.

Re: NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives

#17
post #3

How are they going to enforce this? "No officer see this is an orange pi"

I feel like programmers model the law as a programming language, while it only works like that in very limited contexts.

They said Raspberry PI, but the spirit of the rule is "electronic looking thing that we can't immediately determine the function of". You could probably show up with an unpopulated PCB and get turned away because it's green.

Re: NYC Mayoral Inauguration bans Raspberry Pi and Flipper Zero alongside explosives

#18
The reeks of someone new being in charge (at whatever level approves this list), and feeling compelled to "prove" themselves via a show of power - in this case, adding items to a prohibited list. As such behaviors go, this one is petty.

Adafruit's point on the banning of specific devices stands out as being particularly foolish. I doubt security would react well to any obvious cyberpunk cyberdeck build, regardless of the hardware inside.

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