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Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

canada.ca

181–190 of 341 posts

Re: Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complete utter nonsense - I'm an Australian gun owner, all legal. My neighbour here in the Australian wheatbelt enjoys ULR shooting at 5,000 yards. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7owwTz7Z0OE Perhaps you might like to do some actual fact checking before being utterly wrong in public? W.Aus Firearms Act 1973 (current): https://www.legislation.wa.gov.au/legislation/statutes.nsf/l... W.Aus Firearms Regulations 1974 (cur…

I think his point was that Australia does not specifically enumerate a right to bear arms. That makes it much easier for politicians and judges to erode liberties in the name of safety or "think of the children". Eg. Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have done mass firearm bans or confiscations in recent years, while the US has largely resisted similar efforts to restrict civil liberties.

The 1973 Act is the part in which we the citizens of W.Australia grant the right for our elected and employed politicians to form regulations wrt firearms.

That can be repealed, if so there is no right for our government to make firearm regulations.

The 1974 Regulations are the evolving regulations, the fine detail about what the licence requirements are, the purchase and sale requirements are, the various classes, storage requirements, and conditions for disqualification.

These can be changed.

Their point was nonsense.

We have a "Washminster" system of government, it's a bit like the UK Westminster system and a bit like the US Washington system .. only it was formed after looking at the shortcomings of both.

> Australia [..] done mass firearm bans or confiscations in recent years

Awww, you read the US NRA dot points on Australia then?

Twenty eight years ago Australia took out the (then) mass shooting world record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australi...

The response here was to unify gun regulations across all states and territories. At the time the bulk of the Australian population had gun regulations .. Queensland (then low population), Tasmania, and Territories (low population) did not.

Once regulation was uniform and gun licencing was taken seriously there were a lot of guns that people didn't want to licence ("we have the three we mainly use and another three out the back that grandad used in the war") - so there was a federally funded buy back scheme "cash for guns" to encourage handing in unlicenced weapons for cash, this resulted in pictures of skip bins full of "confiscated guns".

There are still semi automatics being bought, sold, and used in Australia - these are licenced for feral pig control use.

You cannot get a semi automatic to barrel polish and strut the street in the city with, you can get one if you're going to kill a lot of pigs.

You can get a licence to drive a three trailer prime mover (road train), you are still not permitted to drive these fully loaded on a large number of urban roads.

Re: Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

#182
In theory, a representative democracy keeps checks and balances by the people still routinely communicating with each other as if it were a direct democracy and if the representatives are not acting in accordance with the direct findings, then it's off with their heads.

But in practice that's a lot of work. The reality is that most people don't want to be involved and are happy to have some figurehead do the work for them, even if that means complaining about it later.

Re: Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

#183
post #57
post #10

The Flipper Zero is a general-purpose tool and STEM educational device. By banning the device, a country would be setting back their workforce of engineers and scientists a bit. How can you use a Flipper Zero to steal a car? Flipper Zero can't crack hard encryption. Is the real problem that cars were made with security that they already knew was negligently weak at the time? If so, is a recall of those cars more appr…

Nah fuck this. Someone on the plane I was on kept triggering it to do bluetooth attacks ('not your airpods') while I was trying to read (and have my earphones on connected via bluetooth so fuck me right?). There's hacked firmware's you can install [0]. I understand that there are probably tons of other devices like this out there but this one was SO fucking popular and easily accessible. I've already seen this thing…

You don't need a flipper zero for that. A simple esp32 (also the base of a FZ) can do it and even an android phone can.

It's a dick move but banning the hardware doesn't do anything because you can port such simple hacks to any platform. It's the action that should be policed.

Re: Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

#184

I was under the impression that cars and garage doors are essentially 100% immune to replay attacks. How could they possibly be susceptible to something to rudimentary? Or am I not understanding some context?

In theory, yes.

In practice, you could start a Hyundai with an USB key, because the manufacturer did not bother to implement any security measures (it's cheaper that way).

Re: Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would be okay is to ban the use of an F0 to steal a car. Ban carrying them. If it's truly an educational tool you don't need to carry it around with you. Same as (in the UK) carrying a set of lockpicks is grounds to be arrested for 'going equipped' unless you're a locksmith.

> Same as (in the UK) carrying a set of lockpicks is grounds to be arrested for 'going equipped' unless you're a locksmith. That's interesting, here in the Netherlands I believe you can carry them about and use them, but of course only with permission of the lock owner.

It makes no sense anyway. Burglars don't use lockpics. They don't care about doing damage and do care about speed so they just use a crowbar which even doubles as a weapon if someone's home.

Banning lockpics is just security theater and does nothing to reduce burglaries.

Bump keys are also much more effective by the way. And look like normal keys to the uninitiated.

Re: Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

#186
post #70
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah fuck this. Someone on the plane I was on kept triggering it to do bluetooth attacks ('not your airpods') while I was trying to read (and have my earphones on connected via bluetooth so fuck me right?). There's hacked firmware's you can install [0]. I understand that there are probably tons of other devices like this out there but this one was SO fucking popular and easily accessible. I've already seen this thing…

A person messing with RF while in an airliner should probably be arrested, I agree with that part. Probably best not to have the tool in carry-on, even powered-off, and I'd understand if TSA didn't permit that (like they wouldn't let a chef carry-on their knives, another tool with very legitimate purposes).

Messing with bluetooth on an airliner isn't going to do anything at all. If they were attempting to spoof GPS or playing with VHF signals that's another issue but the flipper isn't capable of that.

The TSA also doesn't care, they don't look for, and don't remotely have the training to detect suspicious electronics. Even if they did the flipper looks very innocuous unless you know what it is. You can reliably get much more entertaining things onto airplanes without them batting an eye.

Re: Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> immensely popular Numbers? I see in 2023 they did 80m rev which is what, half a million devices sold worldwide? That’s very niche. % wise close to 0; it’s a geek tool. Nice but not immensely popular.

You'd be surprised how much 500K means if you're not Samsung or Apple. There's recent products you'd say were clear hits and sold an order of magnitude more than that, but in actuality, it was exactly 350K.

It’s a great achievement by the company; I am not refuting that. It’s still a niche product no one but a few tech people heard off it or would buy it.

Re: Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

#188
post #102

So if I'm reading this right, they're banning something that is too underpowered to run the exploits people are using to steal cars (which are only possible in the first place because car companies' threat model is mostly about their customers rather than thieves) in order to pretend to do something about car theft I've been pretty happy on balance with measures introduced through direct democracy in recent years (mo…

The main problem with direct democracy as performed in the US is that it's trivial to manipulate with sufficiently large ad campaigns, because the average voter is not super well informed on most topics and is usually not motivated to dig deeply when i.e. a ride-sharing company spends a cool hundred million to get the legal outcome they want. This is not to say that the alternative is immune to these problems, but as…

Prop 13 is far from being agreed on as a problem amongst Californians. When your property tax could reasonably exceed your mortgage, something must change.

Re: Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A-PNT type stuff? Can I ask what the commercial application is?

PNT in GPS-denied areas, and office campus wide time sync.

Very cool, thanks for indulging my curiosity

Re: Canadian government banning Flipper Zero to combat auto theft

#190
post #10

The Flipper Zero is a general-purpose tool and STEM educational device. By banning the device, a country would be setting back their workforce of engineers and scientists a bit. How can you use a Flipper Zero to steal a car? Flipper Zero can't crack hard encryption. Is the real problem that cars were made with security that they already knew was negligently weak at the time? If so, is a recall of those cars more appr…

This is great. I rewrote it in my own words and sent it to my local Canadian MP, as well as Dominic LeBlanc who is the Minister of Public Safety. Here's my template: I am a Canadian citizen in your riding (A1B 2C3) and multiple business owner in the technology sector. As an expert in the field of electronics and information security, I am concerned about the ISED’s initiative to ban Flipper Zero and similar devices,…

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