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Comment by anilakar | Hacker News Reader

> The specialness is how easy it is to use.

Citation needed.

Since the advent of cheap SDRs and TI CC1100 devkits it's been a case of "grab code off Github and go do shenanigans". The only specialness here is that it's battery powered, but even previously you could have been running a laptop and HackRF in your backpack.

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For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.

Wrong thread?

It's the top comment from Dropbox's announcement thread on HN, 15 or so years ago. It has become meta-commentary both about HN's cynicism, and that you don't need to do something novel to create a new product category, it's enough if you just make it a lot more convenient than anything before.

It used to be grab code, laptop and backpack... a modest barrier to enty.

Now any jamoke can dl a firmware and conceal this in a pocket and go wild. That's "easy to use."

The flipper zero doesn't require anything near as scary to a layman as downloading code of github, and tgen trying to run it based off a readme.md that was poorly written and aimed at people who know how to code. People who don't realize that a # instead of a $ means the prompt means you need root, who have no idea what a shebang on a script is, etc. For them 'just run some code of github' will be a hell of how does bash/sudo/apt/pip/make/chmod work?

The flipper zero has a screen and buttons, and a defined way to upload new 'attacks' on to it, aswell as a simple way to run those. To normal people that lowers the barrier sooo much.

This reads like the infamous Dropbox comment, with the Flipper Zero you don't even need to grab code off GitHub, you just have to open a menu and press some buttons.

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