Canada walks back ban of Flipper Zero, targets 'illegitimate' use cases | Hacker News Reader

Canada walks back ban of Flipper Zero, targets 'illegitimate' use cases

pcmag.com

58 pointsnickthegreek14 comments

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Oh goody! So, what, security licensing, 'lockpicks for certified locksmiths only' instead?

Gosh darn, thanks government for giving me permission to execute my freedoms. Sure nice of you!

As a Canadian this was pretty embarrassing.

Yeah. Especially coming from our "Ministry of Innovation".

FTA > The intent is to move forward with measures to restrict the use of such devices to legitimate actors only

So, what's going to define a "legitimate actor"?

The Canadian government should make stealing cars illegal. Oh wait.

They’re literally advising people to leave their car keys by the front door so when thieves break into your house to steal your car, they can do so without any “violent confrontations”.

By using the pronoun "they", you're implying the same person ("the Canadian government") as the post above. Per your sources, the statement was made by a single officer, with the actual police services quoted as advising differently. Your comment is inaccurate.

They also could simply not know the gender of the officer. There are many reasons beyond even these.

Grammatically, pronouns are used when it's already clear who is being described. In this thread, the Government of Canada was the only body mentioned. Using "they" to refer to a singular officer who had before then not been referenced would not be grammatically clear.

It wasn’t just an individual police officer speaking for himself; he was speaking to the public in his official capacity at a town hall. The department walked back the statement after all the negative press came out but it was very much an official statement when it was made.

And yes, I’m aware that even the Toronto police department doesn’t represent the entire Canadian government, but the word “they” can be used much more broadly and vaguely than you’re suggesting. For instance, there are widespread reports of human cannibalism committed by Haitian gangsters following the most recent collapse of the most recent Haitian government; one might colloquially say “they’re eating people in Haiti” to indicate that there is cannibalism going own without ever precisely specifying who is committing the cannibalism.

I'm replying to this dead comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39780800

> That was a faketext meme.

> Don't believe everything you see on the Internet.

I found a video of Toronto Police officer giving that advice in a town hall: https://toronto.citynews.ca/2024/03/14/leave-car-keys-at-fro...:

> At an Etobicoke safety meeting last month, Cst. Marco Ricciardi advised residents to leave their key fobs in a faraday pouch in a convenient place for thieves as a way to lessen the risk of violent confrontations.

> “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs at the front door because they are breaking into your home to steal your car; they don’t want anything else.

> “A lot of them that they’re arresting have guns on them and they are not toy guns,” he ominously added. “They are real guns. They’re loaded.”

Assuming this is true, and circling back to the original Flipper Zero controversy, if the Canadian government can’t keep “real loaded guns” out of the hands of home-invading criminals, I’m not sure what they expect to accomplish with regard to the Flipper Zero.

You have discovered why our government is so clueless. Instead of funding agencies to prevent gun smuggling primarily through native reservations the government bans law abiding citizens from owning guns. Similarly with flipper zero, instead of funding law enforcement to inspect outgoing cargo for stolen cars and cracking down on organized crime rings they ban the flipper which does basically nothing to fix the issue of cars being stolen and shipped to the Middle East or Africa.

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