The flipper is just some common off-the-shelf radios and microcontroller, albiet in a nice package. That's it. Like common radios found in your everyday stuff, like say a garage door remote.
Would regulations affect every product using these? I assume they'd have to in order to have any teeth? Would this impact a developer who wants to buy an cc1101 evaluation board for development?
Also, banning it is not going to actually make it unavailable to bad actors obviously. It will just hamper white hat security researchers.
But maybe discussion about banning it will push creation of some alternatives?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/monstatek/the-m1-a-comp...
What do we know about the company behind this?
And deter at least some script kiddies.
I'd wager far more script kiddies would be turned away by this move than white hat security researchers.
it's the classic "we must do something" problem, where the definition of "something" isn't the important bit.
We must do something
This is something
Therefore, we must do this
I also love the touching naivety of legislators who seem to think that to stop bad people doing things all you need to do is pass laws making the bad things they do illegal.
This is something that always frustrated me for hot button political issues. One side wants to make the thing everyone already agrees is bad double illegal, and the other side wants enforcement of existing options.
Or if we're talking about something that ought to be done. One side wants to throw money at the problem; the other side suggests that people should just try to not have bad things happen to them.
Ultimately, the refrain endlessly repeated is that people who want something to happen or don't want something to happen both want someone else to fix it. Somehow.
Lets make flipper zero illegal. Huh, someone stole the car again. Using a (now illegal) flipper zero (I mean technically it sounds like this isn't being facilitated by flipper zero, but use some imagination for a sec). Now what are you going to do. Make flipper zero MORE illegal? Stealing a car is already pretty high up there in terms of things that people don't want you to do.
The neat thing about automation and consumer electronics is that I can fix things myself. I don't have to influence a policy that is going to harness the efforts of potentially millions of other people (taxes, more laws, enforcement).
This is the core flaw in laws like this and DMCA 1201.
You have something which is already illegal, people are breaking the law, so you pass a law to make it illegal to have shoes because the criminals were wearing shoes while breaking the law. Obviously this needs to be prohibited because it helps them to run away.
Then criminals continue to both commit crimes and wear shoes and all you've really done is force people who obey the law to go barefoot.
The real problem isn't that you can't make things harder (certainly we could cross the threshold "can't sell off-the-shelf products that make car theft easy"), it's how far you get into making things harder before you hit tradeoffs making entirely innocent things harder.
And where that tradeoff stops being worth it isn't always clear. Personally I'd like the convenience of a device like Flipper Zero but it's hard for me to say that my right to have someone else make me something turnkey trumps people's rights to maybe not have it quite so easy to have their cars stolen.
And yes, I absolutely get it that people will still make/have them. That's not the point. The point is that fewer people would, the fruit gets higher hanging and that changes the statistics. Worth it? Maybe, maybe not, but it's not a ridiculous position.
My frustration is that this is just kicking the can down the road for someone else to handle.
In the case of the Flipper, this is asking manufacturers to stop making the Flipper. It's asking Retailers to stop selling the Flipper. It's asking the producers to end their Flipper product line. It's asking regulatory entities to checkup on all of the above to make sure they're complying. It's asking police to keep an eye out for these devices. And it's asking the public to surrender their property.
In short, someone has a problem and their solution is for EVERYONE else to do all the work.
In this instance, if you hold an important government position and your car keeps getting stolen, maybe you could pay to have someone watch your car. Or pay to have a better security system installed.
If think that if you want the world to change, then you should put in the effort to make it different. However, very often what I've been seeing is that people want the world to change and their contribution is to figure out how to compel other people to do the work for them.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/eu-commission-p...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/27/a-wolf-k...