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Comment by nekusar | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Given they’ve had several skirmishes with customs and law enforcement agencies around the world, this always struck me as similar to the “don’t talk about installing retail Switch games on the Switch modding Discord” type of deal - everyone knows you can do that, but allowing mentions in official channels opens us to liability and causes nothing but headaches for both us and for customers, so if you’re going to do that, you need to talk about it somewhere else. I freely admit that’s an assumption on my part, though, and I don’t know if there’s something uglier there…?

Its one thing to have a skid come in going "I wanna hack the RFID on the gubbmints's doors how can i do that?"

Versus "we forked the firmware to include a wide range of pentesting tools"

And then get banned for even saying the alternate firmware.

And seriously, this little thing is a wonderful hacker multitool. You can seriously fuck shit up with the hardware they included. For fucks sake, thats WHY they created it.

That's how you have to be on Discord, or else your guild gets banned from Discord. I wish we weren't using this crap. On IRC, sometimes you had to deal with cranky netops, but they mostly left you alone.

Any advice on good communities or sources of (reliable) information on alternative firmwares and pen testing type tools?

IRC is still alive and there is bunch of communities around that are a bit more lax, probably because they're half-dead compared to what they used to be. Today probabably Libera.chat would be the best introduction if you haven't touched IRC before.

Absolutely nothing you said refutes anything in the comment you’re replying to. You are just reiterating “I’m angry and this is stupid”. Go write in your journal or something. It’s impossible to engage with someone who isn’t engaging themselves.

“Furries Forking Flipper Firmware” sounds like a promising and/or true and/or Garden-Path headline

I can understand why that happened at least remotely. If you do all those things they refused 'officially', it might be easier for stupid government idiots to paint it as a dangerous illegal tool.

Adding the necessary hardware while refusing to support arbitrarily iLLegAl things is the best of both worlds.

This. Many legit, but questionable features blown out of proportion already caused many issues with regulators who just don't want to get into details, but just delist from sales/ban the device.

And once you start talking about "jamming" and other 1337 h4x0r stuff - which is straight up illegal and can get you into trouble - on official platforms, don't get offended when that gets removed.

Sure. I get why you don't want the skids jamming. But hell, it is still in your github commit history. Your all historical work was that of a attacking hacker toolkit. Jamming proves that.

Now, that absolutely does NOT excuse Adkins on the discord from people asking how to get the PSK for garage door openers, and emulating the buttons. And especially since it was being asked by owners of said doors.

But you banned people with legitimate and legal uses too.

Good riddance to you all. I've stayed with 3rd party and steered others towards better actors than yourselves.

Agreed 100% - they bricked the thing with official firmwares, and the "community" is the meanest most awful group of so-called hackers I've ever interacted with. It's more than just COA, they're actively aggressive and insular, not just on discord but reddit and less-known places too (which you can't know because you'll be banned for asking where you could find out).

What is the current go-to unofficial firmware? Mine had extreme but I think that one’s dead?

I'm currently using https://momentum-fw.dev/

Works well, and compiling modules like the epaper hacker tool is easy.

https://github.com/i12bp8/TagTinker

Thanks for the suggestion!

I would be interested in the names and descriptions of these legit pentesting tools.

are there any chinese knock offs of the hardware? i've yet to find something that integrates all the features this well

On aliexpress there are but I can't vouch for their quality

> mention ANY of the alternate firmwares on their discord, and you get banned

Does it surprise you that a Russian product team would use these tactics?

Nyet.

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