Smart gun beaten by dumb magnets | Hacker News Reader

Smart gun beaten by dumb magnets

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37 points0xbadf00d65 comments

There's a very simple technology for this.[1] It's a purely mechanical gun lock operated by a magnetized ring on the user's finger. Some cops use it, in case someone grabs their gun. It's useful to cops who have to work in dense crowds, like transit police. About 10% of cops who are shot are shot with their own gun.

[1] http://www.smartlock.com/smartgun_detail-r.htm

Sources, please, on the claim that "some cops use it."

I know a lot of cops, and none of them would get close to something like this. Too many ways for it to fail and get them killed.

Are there any gun- and tech-literate people who actually think smart guns like this are a good idea? Anytime someone (cop or civilian) pulls a trigger in self defense, they do so as a last resort. Not a time when you want to be worrying about whether you have your smart watch or if you changed the batteries in your firearm.

How about hunting and shooting range practice guns?

Hunting is often done in the cold, wet environment. Dead batteries and electronics that doesn't work because of the condensation are pretty common.

You really don't want to waste that one-in-a-season opportunity because some $0.02 electronic part has failed in your "smart" gun.

Especially since it's not buying you any safety. You have to follow gun safety rules anyway, and if you do, you really can't shoot yourself. The latter argument also applies to the practice guns.

You're right.

One of the most successful guns, the AK-47, was successful largely because of its simplicity.

Are there any gun- and tech-literate people who actually think smart guns like this are a good idea? Anytime someone (cop or civilian) pulls a trigger in self defense, they do so as a last resort.

Have you honestly never heard of an accidental shooting occurring? Heck, it seems like at least once or twice a year we hear about a parent being shot by their own toddler...

Trigger locks and smart guns are specifically intended to prevent these types of accidents.

The same parent who gets shot by their toddler is also the same parent who will never have this kind of gun. We have very very effective toddler thwarting technology; low tech, very cost effective and easy to impliment, its called "keeping it where the toddler can't get it". Its worked fairly well since the inception of the firearm.

We have very very effective toddler thwarting technology; low tech, very cost effective and easy to impliment, its called "keeping it where the toddler can't get it". Its worked fairly well since the inception of the firearm.

To which the inevitable reply is: If I put my gun in a safe place, it won't be where I need it when I need it. A similar argument is frequently used as an objection to manual trigger locks, which have also been around for a very long time.

An effective smart gun eliminates that objection by allowing a firearm to be stored somewhere accessible while still preventing accidental discharge.

I understand there are enormous technical challenges to achieve that goal, and I'm not claiming the current generation of technology is effective, or heck, even that an effective solution is possible.

But I think it's absolutely disingenuous to claim that all firearm discharges are done under deliberate, life-threatening circumstances, or that this kind of technology does not have the potential to save lives while still providing an effective tool for self-defense.

Speaking of disingenuous... there are other places besides a safe that toddlers can't reach. Like say, any shelf more than a few feet above ground.

Source: Once was a toddler.

I think you're maybe taking my example a bit too literally...

There are tons of ways to safely store a firearm that mitigate the "where is it" objection, all of them cheaper and safer than buying a new gun of debatable reliability.

I have yet to test this but I believe the grip safety of a 1911 or the standard safety lever on a modern pistol would thwart a toddler as well. Teenager not so much.

Again, this is a solution in search of a problem.

>I believe the grip safety of a 1911 or the standard safety lever on a modern pistol would thwart a toddler as well.

Counting on either of those alone to stop a toddler would be grossly irresponsible.

As is on the smart electronics, which are liable to fail when they shouldn't and won't stop a criminal either way.

See, there is a reason why a dead man's switch is as simple as possible and completely not remote. Anything remote can and will fail sometimes.

If it would be a local switch it would be way more trustworthy in my eyes.

I take issue with your hypothetical "inevitable reply". All responsible gun owners will tell you that the first rule of gun ownership is that you always handle the firearm as if it is loaded. That includes how you store the firearm. There is absolutely no sensible way to argue the gun must be stored in an unsafe location in order to keep the owner safe.

The technology absolutely has the potential to save lives. Well, an even stronger statement is true -- this technology will save lives. That's not the objection though -- it's will the technology cost lives?!

For home defense, it is possible to keep a gun in a safe space that is both toddler-proof AND accessible when necessary. I'm talking about bedside electronic safes, commonly available with combination [0] or biometric [1] locks, always with a physical key fallback. These solutions reduce unnecessary coupling between access control technology and the gun itself. At the very least, this means the (well-maintained) gun will 100% go "bang" when you pull the trigger.

[0] https://lowes.com/pd/Barska-Compact-0-36-cu-ft-Electronic-Ch... [1] https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/biometric-gun-safes

There's no such thing as a "smart gun" that's actually useful in the real world. There are too many failure modes that cannot be tolerated when a gun is needed to save your life.

To your point about toddlers - safe storage and safe methods of carry solves that, and they work with every gun in circulation already.

1) Lock up your gun if it's not directly under your control (i.e., in a holster).

2) Carry your gun in a proper holster, on your person. Not in your purse in the shopping cart, but on your hip.

These two, together, would prevent every case where a toddler shoots somebody.

It's not appreciated outside gun circles, and sadly even in gun circles a lot of people don't get it, but good holsters are the most important investment you can make. A huge fraction of gun accidents trace back to cheap holsters.

I'm going to play devil's advocate, here:

1) Lock up your gun if it's not directly under your control (i.e., in a holster).

"But then it's not available when someone breaks into my home!"

2) Carry your gun in a proper holster, on your person. Not in your purse in the shopping cart, but on your hip.

"How does that help me when I'm in bed and someone breaks in in the middle of the night?"

I'm going to be blunt: while I recognize my own reply is somewhat simplistic and idealistic, yours is no better. There is simply no technology, today, that makes gun ownership in the home both safe and is perceived as 100% effective in circumstances where a weapon is needed for self-defense in an emergency situation.

This type of technology is a search for a solution to that problem. Is it the solution? Or a perfect solution? Clearly not.

But to imply there is no solution, or that it's a solution in search of a problem, belies a profound cynicism.

This is Hacker News. Folks, here, believe technology can solve everything, from world hunger to poverty.

But for some reason, apparently it's impossible to improve on the firearm.

it's baffling.

It's not impossible to improve firearms - tons of innovation happens in that space. At the same time, anything that decreases reliability is a deadly liability that cannot be tolerated.

To your counter-examples. Carry your gun at home if you're worried about break-ins. Put your gun in a quick-access safe when you sleep. Problems solved

So, suppose we live in a fantasy world where a smart gun is developed that has extremely high reliability. Would you agree that would represent an overall improvement in firearm technology?

I'm trying to understand if the objections are rational, or religious.

I honestly can't tell.

Have you ever fumbled around unlocking your phone? Can you do it instantly every time you pick it up?

This would be unacceptable for most gun owners if it happened even every thousand rounds.

It's rational.

You're already making a ton of assumptions about the entire possible solution space (specifically that it requires an active effort to unlock the gun that necessitates "fumbling").

How is that rational?

The only people touting "smart guns" as a solution are people who seem to think that firearms are the actual problem. Let that sink in for a moment.

The same argument could be made for child safety caps on bottles of Tylenol or bleach.

That's not a rational argument. It's an appeal to emotion, and a bit of a dog whistle.

Lol. As a parent, you are incorrect.

Unlike guns, bottles are meant to be left unsupervised. Guns and other deadly implements? Not.

See, the original gun safeties are designed to prevent misfire by accidental trigger pull and/or during maintenance.

Understood.

My point, which seems to be getting misunderstood, is that exploring additional safety features is not "blaming" guns or somehow diverting attention away from societal issues.

Mandating seatbelts, smoke detectors in residential homes, safety features on power tools, etc, etc... there's countless examples where technology has been used to increase safety, not as an excuse to avoid solving societal issues, but as a complementary tool in addition to education.

So the following statement:

The only people touting "smart guns" as a solution are people who seem to think that firearms are the actual problem.

Is just not an honest argument or debating tactic. It's an appeal to emotion, an ad hominem attack on those who disagree, and I maintain a dog whistle for those who think it's just Big Government yadda yadda yadda.

Of course, given the maturity of the technology, mandating it now is likely the wrong move. I get that government wants to pressure industry to push this technology forward, but there are alternative ways to incentivize that without government regulation.

Still, IMO, having government pushing for this kind of technology makes plenty of sense. And believe that does not require thinking that "firearms are the actual problem".

If you can make a smart gun that is as reliable and foolproof as a Glock, without destroying the ergonomics, you'd have something.

Failure is not an option. 5 9's isn't good enough, and we can't manage that in software with redundant systems. Beating that, in the meager amount of free space a gun offers, is a pretty tall order.

I'm not being religious, I'm being realistic about just far away "good enough" is for a smart gun.

Thank you! I appreciate that you took my comment seriously and decided to respond in kind.

I totally agree with you. It's an extremely difficult ask, and I'd never claim that the current iteration of this technology is anywhere near workable.

Another commenter, here, used the analogy of self-driving cars, and I think it's an apt (if imperfect... the problem spaces are profoundly different) one, though perhaps not the way they were intending.

In both cases, the technology problems are enormous, and the failure modes could result in the loss of human life. So it better be pretty damn foolproof if it's to gain any kind of widespread adoption. Yet, you don't get the same level of negativity levelled at efforts to build self-driving cars... that it's impossible and car companies should have never tried.

The original question was: "Are there any gun- and tech-literate people who actually think smart guns like this are a good idea?"

I think the nuanced answer, here, is: Not yet. But perhaps some day.

It seems we might agree on at that!

There are two failure modes of "smart guns":

1) fails to unlock: "wild animal or another human killed me first"

2) too easy to unlock: "a child undid the lock and shot another child"

Just like self-driving cars, even if you get a 10x or 100x net reduction in deaths, the first time someone dies because your "smart gun" failed, there will be a huge press cycle and mass hysteria. And probably lawsuits.

>>> "How does that help me when I'm in bed and someone breaks in in the middle of the night?"

There are holsters for bed.

People get pissed off about smart guns because state such as New Jersey want to shove them down everyone's throat, regardless of whether they have children present in their homes, whether they already have a safe they're happy with, or whether the guns are affordable or effective.

>2) Carry your gun in a proper holster, on your person. Not in your purse in the shopping cart, but on your hip.

Even then, a proper retention holster that covers the trigger would solve that problem in 99% of cases. Sure, a particularly strong and determined toddler might be able to figure out the release after a few minutes of trying but nobody leaves their child completely unsupervised (not even taking a glance at what they're up to) for several minutes at a time.

Negligent discharges happen because people break gun safety rules. In the entire history of USPSA there were only two fatal accidents. If you think it's a lot, compare to other sports.

Besides, the device in question won't help in the cases you mentioned, as the parent with the watch would still be within the range of the transceiver, and the gun would fire anyway.

If you're looking to reduce crime and/or deaths, there are many many more things to do before this will ever be relevant. Community outreach is far more effective in reducing violence than technology is.

Absolutely not. Any tool used in a life or death situation should be as simple as possible. Panicked people, where every millisecond counts, require a simple tool. I can make a case against every "smart" gun system developed.

Not really. There are better ways to deal with this problem, e.g., retention holsters and quick access pistol safes.

Yes, holsters. Unfortunately even among "gun people" quality holsters are not appreciated.

Nearly all accidental shootings can be prevented by a quality holster.

This could have been prevented if they had hired someone to test designs against potential hacking during prototyping but I don't believe that it would have been worth the money. Unless someone knows exactly how to put the magnet against the gun, they can't beat it. Everything is vulnerable to some risk and I believe that this gun is sufficiently well designed to prevent most if not all would be threats.

This gun is extremely poorly designed in the case that it doesn't fire when the person using it can't fire it when they need to. This is a solution in search of a problem because the number of deaths it will prevent is likely zero.

This is a problem with all smart guns. They necessarily have a non-zero failure rate associated with the electronic interlock. An integrated physical key operated lock would be more reliable.

Good point, having a key instead of a watch, and inserting the key into the gun to make it work, sounds far more reliable and only slightly more difficult for the user.

"But the criminal could steal the key." Yeah but they could also steal your watch...

But the delay could mean the difference between life and death. Which would encourage users to draw and arm the gun before there's immediate danger, "just in case"...

Given today's climate, that would be terrible.

Good point, that's an actual positive difference in the watch system that I didn't think of at first. The watch "key" is always "in" for you and "out" for someone without the watch on.

Even in the "watch" case, it's not good enough.

What if you need to shoot with your left hand and the watch is on your right? If you make the range long enough for that case to work, it's long enough to have your gun used by someone else close by.

But if one is going the "insert a key" route, could one not go for "insert the bullet" instead?

Brilliant. A gun without the bullet inserted, guaranteed 100% secure.

Next week, "A hacker has demonstrated this lock-out system can be bypassed simply by the criminal carring one bullet of each type."

It's immensely more problematic. Getting out a key, inserting it into a gun, and operating it under tremendous stress (likely the most stress you've ever been under in your life) requires an amount of fine motor control that most people simply won't have.

It'll also completely removes the element of surprise - you can't draw your gun and fire in one motion, you have to draw, fart around with a lock, then fire. Which is all the opening the bad guy needs to use his against you.

I suggest taking a class, or even watching youtube videos of classes, about active self protection to understand exactly how much stress and how little time is involved in these situations.

And that would help in situations where you KNOW you might use your weapon, but if you had a sudden need to use your weapon and it wasn't already unlocked it would be the kind of failure law enforcement is very afraid of.

And if you're non-law enforcement - if you know ahead of time you might need to use your gun, you avoid the situation altogether.

Defensive gun use is about terrible surprises, it's not something people can plan for.

The persistent problem seems to be that people think the interlock is going to solve a societal problem, it isn't.

Considering the largely accepted belief that a knife wielding attacker can cover 20 feet more quickly than an average trained individual can draw and fire a pistol (it is - at best - very close), it would seem to me that the jammer is the mostly problematic exploit. It firmly tips the engagement in favor of the knife wielding attacker without the pistol wielding defender understanding their weapon had been disabled until it is far too late to change tactics.

I don't see law enforcement ever adopting smart weapons.

The military has plenty of anti-jamming technology don't they? I'm guessing if they wanted to do this right there would be ways that are a lot more sturdy than something a simple RF jammer can stop.

> anti-jamming technology

Like what? SNR-boosting encoding tricks to get around high-power noise are not going to be fast like you want with a gun. The form factor needs to be omnidirectional. You don't have high power available in a portable device. You can't just change frequencies, because an attacker is likely broadcasting high-bandwidth noise. And you don't know whether the user needs it to fail safe (the bad guys got the gun) or fail hot (the good guys need to use the gun). After that, physics doesn't leave a lot of other options for technology to fix anything!

It's much easier to attack such a system than to defend it. Attacker only needs a short window of time, so can emit a lot of power. "Smart" gun can't do that, it has to work for years on small battery, so its signal must be weaker by many orders of magnitude.

The only effective "anti-jamming" technology is a radar/EM homing missile or some sort of artillery fired smart-shell acting on the same principle. There are technologies which work around specific functions of electronic warfare equipment but they are only effective in specific scenarios. There is no way to defeat a nearby spark gap generator without disabling the source itself.

The main threat is that the gun does not fire when it should. As soon as those "smart" guns are mandated (they can't win on the merits, as nobody is buying them), there will be $5 gun jammers all over eBay.

AKA spark gap generators. Take $50 worth of parts, connect it to a lightweight motorcycle battery, throw it in a backpack, and you've jammed all useful frequencies within several hundred yards of your transmitter. You can even jam military satellite communications with a surprisingly reasonable budget (sub-$10,000). The only defense is the fact that the signal source's location is incredibly conspicuous, thus easy for the military to blow up but civilians can't exactly rely on EM-homing missiles to keep their lines of communication open.

It's been done before. Colt tried to do it, failed, then announced that they have eventually solved all technical problems and invited a bunch of journalists for the demo.

The turned out to be perfectly safe - it did not fire during the demo, even when it should have. The story made headlines back in the day, and was pretty popular. Nobody has tried building "smart" guns for a while.

Looks like it's been largely forgotten now, and we're due for another cycle.

Edit: source http://www.npr.org/2016/04/07/473416699/how-an-idea-to-devel...

That was a really interesting read and watch, both high tech and low tech hacks.

Given that these guns mean life/death for people I hope this find is enough to take them off the market. So many chances for failure given all these holes.

Why does anyone think the magnet attack matters? The wireless safety is designed to defeat a child, or an assailant who manages to wrestle the gun away from you. The idea that they're going to pull out a big-ass rare earth magnet and fire it that way just doesn't make any sense in real-world scenarios.

The problem with the iP1 is that it can be jammed, and this should be a surprise to absolutely nobody.

So he hacked a smart gun and the result was.... a regular gun. How is this supposed to be dangerous? He can't fire it over the internet or anything, just disable it's lock. It's like "hacking" an elevator by stopping it: it just becomes stairs!

> How is this supposed to be dangerous?

He was also able to disable the weapon from a distance.

In weighing whether we should legislate whether the technology must be used and whether we fine or imprison people who refuse to use the technology, even forgetting for a moment about the ~300 million guns already in the US, it's a prudent question to ask... will this technology potentially cost me my life? Clearly the answer for the current state-of-the-art in "smart" guns is YES, this is currently dangerous and error prone technology which IMO should not be legal to sell in a gun because it makes it overall more dangerous not less.

But assuming we want to let companies sell these prototypes and let people buy them assuming they do so fully informed of the risk, and let the courts decide in the end if companies are liable when the "smarts" malfunction...

To the point about legislating whether guns must implement this technology, I think this is a constitutional question, and so I think the bar is much higher than questions like seat belts, airbags, speed limits, etc.

We have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have the right to bear arms. And I think that means we have the right to own firearms which are free from DRM, if we so personally choose.

Your laptop can be infected with malware and potentially further spread malware or participate in DDoS attacks. Malware and DDoS as a whole cause great economic damage and potentially loss of life. However, if we let government whitelist all apps and require all computing devices to implement hardware trust zones to verify apps are signed and trusted by the government, this technology could prevent certain malware attacks. Is it Ok for government to pass legislation requiring this? We have the right to free speech and so I think it's a similar constitutional issue and I think the answer must be consistent with the firearm question, and the answer must be NO.

Just because a technology will absolutely save money and save lives, does not mean that technology can be mandated when it would impinge on constitutionally guaranteed rights. Under strict scrutiny a legislative remedy must be compelling, narrowly tailored to its purpose, and the least restrictive means possible to achieve the desired policy outcome.

DRMing all guns, like DRMing all computing devices, doesn't pass the test in my opionion.

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