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Comment by TehCorwiz | Hacker News Reader

I'm responding to the people saying this is still out of reach for most people due to requiring soldering. Less than 30 seconds of searching shows that I can buy an RTL-SDR USB dongle and kit for about $40 which can also analyze the 433Mhz band and more. This ban is ridiculous on its face.

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Absolutely agree the ban is ridiculous, but lets not now humbly hide the fact that FZ makes this way easier than the workflow shown in the video. Even ignoring the antenna construction you still need to record the data and post process it using a laptop and 3rd party software.

An Android smart phone and SDR dongle with antenna will fit in your pocket easily. No construction required. Apps already on the Android app store.

Here's the thing about easier; A determined car thief probably has access to purpose built devices and given the financial incentive will probably put more time into solving this "problem" than an amateur. I would argue that knowing this attack is possible is more than half way there because it opens up avenues of research.

It arguably would have been smarter for FZ to show a video using an SDR dongle/android phone than hobbyist antenna construction if they were trying to drive home the point of simplicity.

Advocating on behalf of the devil: ease of access for determined attackers is not the concern. It's more the undetermined attackers they are worrying about enabling. (again I do not agree with law as the solution to this)

That's true, and I agree to a point. But, I think they wanted to nail the "You don't even need a dongle" part of it. Because none of this is enabled by Flipper or a dongle. A handful of components you can get from a broken radio suffice. There's nothing magical or beyond reach making this attack possible. You don't need custom chips, or a long logistics pipeline to enable it. You don't even need a company to produce anything specific. The from-scratch demo they posted hammers home that working from nothing you can do this in an afternoon with tools you can get at Walmart and it's well within a high school student's abilities.

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