Bad news: US Customs have seized a container with 15k Flippers Zero | Hacker News Reader

Bad news: US Customs have seized a container with 15k Flippers Zero

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17 pointsaphroz13 comments

Let's have a look at the homepage... oh look, it's a Russian-based group. That's probably the exact same reason PayPal closed their account with $1.3 million. You'd think that would have got their attention but here we go again.

Im sure its based on the idea of them being used by bad-actors?

Or the feds were like "LOOK I MADE THIS" and want them for themselves in a more insidious reasoning...? Thats ~$6 million they dont need to pull from their budget...

Imagine how many boxes are going to "fall off the truck"

FLIPPER Zero (company) hopefully doesnt have remote disable, except in cases like this... (meaning "the device must be registered with [DATABASE] before its activated. -- this is the double edge for devices of this class.)

Ill never forget my first meeting as Dir of IT for Lockheed where I was inquiring of frquency encryption/security across all military RFID tags... That was not a fun meeting.

It’s hard for me to assume malice here. I order tea pretty regularly from China and the customs process is a dice roll every time, with random delays / holds / reroutes being common. And that’s for a box full of dry leaves.

The only access control system hacked by Tea Leaves was the Boston Tea Party who used that to grant access to the US from the UK by force.

Plenty of plants are illegal in trade (endangered species etc) but traded as Chinese medicine etc. I'll not be surprised if disguising them as tea is common.

wow, I am discovering this wonderfull little piece of hardware.

The only thing which is not clear to me is how ez it is to customize the firmware, for instance a public git repo (okay, I just skimmed their web site quickly, lazy I was...).

oh... it is russian... doh!

It's pretty easy to build, and flash your own firmware based off of the factory firmware. They talked about having a plugin system at some point so you can, say, add a "calculator" app by just building a calculator binary and sending it over (instead of having to build an entire firmware with the calculator app built in to it) but I don't think that's implemented yet

The goal would be to have the full source in order to build a heavily modified firmware.

https://github.com/flipperdevices/flipperzero-firmware

Just be careful because it's easy to accidentally create something illegal by editing certain constants in the firmware. There's also a number of alternative forks here: https://github.com/djsime1/awesome-flipperzero/blob/main/Fir...

I think it is illegal if it reaches some emitting power.

Below those limits (certainly dependent on the frequency spectrum), it is not.

Open source NFC will happen so better start now if not already done.

oh no

I hope they're keeping each other company... it must be lonely in there.

Unfortunately they ship in a deep sleep state where the P2P Tamagotchi/Streetpass style features won't work

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