Is... that possible? I thought the whole point is that those were a challenge-response specifically to avoid ever them disclosing over the air the material necessary to impersonate one.
I don’t know a whole lot about RFID, but some of the most basic cards can be copied very easily. When scanned, the reader always reads the same bits.
I believe there are some more secure cards, like Mifare DESFire EV3 that do provide some security. You’d be shocked how insecure most RFID readers for security cards are.
Keyfobs absolutely should use a secure challenge-response protocol in order to prevent cloning. Unfortunately, it's extremely common for RFID devices to simply use the tag ID which is trivially cloneable. Many of the systems that make some attempt at security still fail by using a broken protocol or a flawed implementation.
Oh yeah that’s how you’re supposed to do it. But it’s entirely possible to set up a system that uses RFID key fobs that uh, doesn’t.
In the case where it was most useful to make copies they did eventually replace the system with one where the keys weren’t copy able. Which was better!
Some cards don't have any form of security. For example Konami "e-amusement" cards are just an ID number, which is also written on the back of the card. It is a username so to speak, the password is the PIN you enter when you start the game.
Some cards use some kind of challenge-response but are weak and are easily crackable.
Some cards have an anti-copy protection based on rolling codes, be careful with these. The idea is that when you use it to, say, open a door, the card sends a code to the reader and if correct, that code is burned and the reader replies with the next code, which is stored in the card for the next time, making every other copy (possibly including the original) unusable. If the card emulator doesn't store the rolling code, you are completely locked out.
Some cards have a proper challenge-response mechanism that works and can't be easily copied.
Many RFID cards are literally just an ID number, and will happily allow you to copy that number to your own RFID card (look up "blue cloner guns", although they have their own downsides). Basically just security through obscurity. Cards that do fancy crypto stuff exist, but odds are your workplace badge, apartment fob, or hotel room key is the simple kind (because those are cheaper)
For a lot of applications someone being able to clone the card is also not that big of a problem. E.g. a hotel will invalidate the code on the card anyway when you check out so it doesn't matter for security whether a past guest has cloned the card.
In my old apartment I was able to copy my fob from my apartment office. In my new one I had to record the interaction with the door and was then able to open the door
You're thinking of NFC, not RFID, and with NFC the owner might not have changed the default keys.
It's a common mix-up (people barely differentiate between the terms anymore, though I'm surprised nobody in 2 hours mentioned it yet), basically RFID is (historically) an ID; a username. Like an ID field in a database. NFC is near-field communication: bidirectional. It does challenge-response and typically runs on hardened chips. But yeah people will call NFC chips RFID and RFID chips NFC all the time. Both are waterproof devices doing radio transmissions on wireless power and you can't tell them apart without using some equipment to try and read the chip type (even if most phones can do that nowadays), so I can understand the terminology generalisation
> and with NFC the owner might not have changed the default keys
Or the use case doesn't depend on any protected bits. A lot of NFC chips are being used as glorified ID tags even if the hardware could do more. And what actual security the hardware provides varies a lot - it's more like a gradient from dumb ID to full java card than a clean distinction.
Is this something you do often? I could see a few use cases and also for copying garage keys. But I don't think I would use it enough to justify the investment
> I don't think I would use it enough to justify the investment
This is not a rational purchase - most of the rule breaking done with the zero is for fun or convenience, rather than being truly illegal.
It used to be more fun before the hotels started handing out NFC unlocks with your phone.
Still, being able to send each other a key for a hotel room on Signal is a nice trick if you are traveling with a sufficiently tech savvy group of people.
If you just want to clone a typical garage door remote, you're way better off buying a generic $5 fob. Almost all the 433MHz garage fobs I've seen are designed to easily clone each other. And if cloning doesn't work, it's probably because you need to access the door controller and hit a few buttons to pair the remote directly. Also trivial, and also often pretty physically insecure. In the smaller apartment buildings I've lived in, the boxes containing these control units have usually just been hidden behind by a couple of screws and a "danger electricity" sticker.
If your current remote has multiple unused buttons on it as they often do, you can already try this out.
Everything you can capture with Flipper has off-the-shelf cheap simple components you can find in your DIY electronics/maker store: IR leds, 433Mhz antennas. Seeed xiao is also small enough that you can stuff it and a relay into appliances and simulate button presses.
What a great tool and community they have built. I find my flipper0 is like a computer Swiss Army knife. It’s so fun to carry around a tool of my own trade.
It is. As the article says, all development goals for FZ had been achieved and even overachieved - providing solid and feature-rich firmware, powerful SDK and developer tools. With that and development shift towards new products, updates to core firmare became infrequent - and we tried to address that.
Src: I'm one of the developers behind Flipper Zero.
> We need to normalize declaring software as finished. Not everything needs continuous updates to function. In fact, a minority of software needs this. Most software works as it is written. The code does not run out of date. I want more projects that are actually just finished, without the need to be continuously mutated and complexified ad infinitum.
To be fair, some software does rot. But when you have control of the hardware and the software, rot is pretty uncommon.
Honestly, I thought the whole point was to make a popular unified platform where the community could come together and expand on it. I really can't imagine a centralized player can predict nor create all features that users might want. But it seems like Flipper did the right thing: make the software flexible and easy to expand upon.
I'm curious if the agentic-based code flows will start to optimize higher-order programming goals in future evolutions.
1. Code works
2. Code works in all situations
3. Code uses defensive practices for unanticipated situations
4. Code is maintainable
5. Code is well architected
6. Code minimizes impact of rot
Right now, it feels like AI coding is ~2.5, if left to its own devices without human guidance.
I think you're over generalizing. Software rot happens for a multitude of reasons
- hardware changes
- firmware changes
- operating system changes
- dependencies change
- bits flip, thanks cosmic rays!
> Right now, it feels like AI coding is ~2.5
A lot of people would argue that it's not even 1. I'd argue it sits between 0.7 and 1.2 given the task.
I don't think it's close to 2. It's hyper fixated on task implementation. It's really bad at abstractions, even when requested. You have to be pretty precise over these instructions. I've only seen it develop well, even with explicit instructions, a handful of times. But hey, that's true about a lot of people too. Though people will not claim to have solved the proper generalization, people will just say "I just care that it works", which is kinda why AI is trained that way. It's not being programmed by your Knuths, it's being programmed by your Zuckerbergs.
In the case of Flipper, we're talking about fixed hardware (granted, eventually parts may need to be substituted) and firmware as the rotting target, so no OS level above that.
Which makes it a simpler problem.
I'd say SOTA AI coding systems are better than 1 and still improving. They often build better code than junior engineers. And with prompting and feedback harnesses, they're starting to grok architectural alignment.
> I'd say SOTA AI coding systems are better than 1 and still improving.
I'm including Fable. I use agents every day. They still are very sloppy and hyper fixated on tasks and are poor at making code flexible and maintainable in the long run.
But again, I'm not surprised because that is the modus operandi of the typical Silicon Valley programmer (irrespective of seniority). They leave in their wake bugs that are avoidable and unnecessary and significant amounts of tech debt.
But then again, no one ever gets credit for squashing bugs before they exist. The agents are just as myopic as we are
Especially since, as that article describes, the "firmware" has a much more limited scope that it used to, now being mostly a loader for app rather that providing user functions.
Worrying about firmware development resources for a Flipper Zero seems a bit like concentrating on your bios instead of ongoing updates to Linux and the applications you use. Yeah, it's important, but it's probably exceedingly rare for the firmware here to need to change much.
That's because we haven't yet started to laugh people out of the room that get uneasy and complain when the rate of updates of something starts slowing down.
I heard a graybeard story about a manager who walked into a new ~90s sysadmin shop and was immediately horrified that everyone was calmly and slowly working.
At his old company, the sysadmins had been constantly putting out emergency fires!
... seeing how the "used to infinitely patched software" generation is unable to parse "done" is interesting.
Why would you need any support for things that are fully open source and flashable yourself?
Most everyone who has a flipper runs something like Unleashed firmware, and most of the functionality is in the apps that people built, not in the actual firmware.
Anything you might want to do with a radio or IR device but don’t have specialized hardware for. It’s kind of a swiss knife/leatherman tool for short range communications standards.
I think of it as the browser dev tools of radio. Most people will have no use for it but it brings visibility and interactability in to an otherwise invisible world.
Logical NAND of a laptop featureset. Has things like IR, a subghz HDR, NFC+RFID, USB device support, iButton, and the like.
Some people get a lot of use out of it, but if you just saw that list of hardware and couldn't think of one area you'd apply it in, it's probably not going to be a useful device for you.
Yeah whatever. I abandoned the "official crap" when they purged legit pentesting tools and silenced loads others. Momentum and extreme were so much better, and didn't play stupid games. They included everything.
And if you mention ANY of the alternate firmwares on their discord, and you get banned. Just fuck'em.
They may have created good hardware, but their software and discord community just sucked.
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 you had to deal with cranky netops, but they mostly left you alone.
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.
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).
Why does their header image feature multiple furries, one at each station? One making a feature request, another presumably approving a pull request, and a third ostensibly submitting an app?
Is the Flipper Zero community tightly intertwined with the furry community? Is this a connection I've missed?
Hi. Last I checked, one of the Hacker News rules isn’t “only have serious discussions regarding technical assessments. Failure to comply hereby entitles random people to fly off the handle and get very defensive”.
- Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
- Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
- Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
- Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
- Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Which, let's be honest, the top comment and majority of the responses violate these guidelines. I was quite surprised to see that that was the top comment. I would have never noticed until they pointed it out. Personally, I don't care and I'd rather read comments about the actual content of the article than talk about furries. They don't live rent free in my head.
They've existed since the 80's. Usenet, alt.cult.furries or alt.cult.otherkin and they dig their own holes. It's not a pleasant fandom as they make out to be.
Ex fursuiter, ex con host, ex furry who wishes they would just fucking exist off the internet. Fucking Furries. I was groomed by folk in the fandom when I was 21.
I understand you have personal reasons for having strong feelings about this. But the guidelines still apply, otherwise there'd be no point in having them. The particular parts of the guidleines we need you to pay attention to are:
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
It's a reference to the dolphin in Johnny Mnemonic, and more broadly, dolphins were a forced trend of the 90s. Marketing was just as much of a hive mind back then as it is now.
The drawing including a couple of anthropomorphised animal characters hardly seems surprising or even noteworthy.
The project/product has always had a heavy emphasis on being "fun", including its dolphin mascot/theming/naming.
From the home page[0]:
> Flipper Zero is a tiny piece of hardware with a curious personality of a cyber-dolphin.
One assumes that that "curious personality", the creator's attitude and the styling/presentation of the product/project is part of the reason for the success of the product.
The "furries" (as you call them) don't seem like the primary focus focus of the picture anyway -- there's a wide variety of characters doing a bunch of stuff in the drawing. There's also a dog, a shady-looking person stick up a poster, someone with pink hair, a cyber-dolphin, and I think there might even be more than two genders being represented.
Would there be a problem if the Flipper Zero community was "intertwined with the furry community"?
It's slightly funny that the post says firmly that they aren't doing any form of real time engagement with the community anymore, then ends by announcing an AMA date and time.
It's sort of a self imposed problem as well because the community produces a bunch of pull requests, but only the corporate staff members can approve and merge them into the official firmware. It begs the question why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.
> why have an official firmware if it's not at least slightly maintained.
Because it's still useful to have a blessed child so that people getting into the space have somewhere to start. You could accept zero additional PRs and it would still be a useful thing to have.
The hardware is static so the rate of software rot is pretty low. It can effectively not be maintained as long as it's already in a stable state. Adding new features is cool and all but it also adds more bugs.
But the great thing is that there's a community, all using the same hardware, and people can fork. So people can still get those updates that they want. Maybe the only thing to do is create a community fork that is much more open but doesn't come with the same stability promises. But that can still be a lot of work, even if you get community maintainers
That's basically a variant of a subscription, but one where the end user churns aggressively.
It's worse in many ways too - it's a lot harder to gauge interest as the developer to understand how well any update will sell, and if the updates "stack", then a user only pays for the newest update to get all older features free. It's also worse from a cashflow perspective for the developer (but better for consumer) since they have to pre-build the update before any chance of getting paid for it.
The principal difference is that things keep working if I stop paying. All if the rest is secondary.
And generally speaking there is a lot of options that are excellent for developers but complete shit for the users. That's obvious, but it's off the point in the context of fairness.
What's funny, or maybe sad, is that this used to be a solved problem back in the CD-distribution era of software. You buy the software once (or in this case the hardware that comes with a software license). You get bugfix patches and minor updates for a year. Next year the next version releases with major new features, and you either pay the price of an update or you stay on the version you are on. Good incentives for all sides. Development stays aligned with existing users, because otherwise they just stop buying updates. And in return the developer gets predictable revenue.
Then Minecraft pioneered the model of users paying once and getting free lifetime updates. And shortly thereafter various SaaS pioneered the model of the user paying monthly while the software barely changes.
And somehow we pretend like those two business models aren't both broken, and like the first one somehow doesn't work anymore
Maybe popularized is the better word. It probably wasn't the first software ever to do this; free lifetime updates became viable with the internet sometime in the nineties and Minecraft only started doing it in 2009. But at the risk of being proven wrong I'm willing to claim Minecraft was the first software to do this and go mainstream, being recognizable outside its niche
I know Guild Wars had original idea in the era of "lets make new world of warcraft and get rich from subscriptions" to release mmorpg without any subscription, you only buy it once and you can play forever.
It was 2005.
You have your timeline slightly wrong because GW1 (if we take dev time into account) basically launched at the same time as WoW - and WoW wasn't the first subscription MMO. I suppose if this was a major reason, EverQuest would be the one to inspire it.
I don't remember minecraft being a driver of this - I do remember Patio11 on here being very influential in start ups doing subscription software instead of "finished" desktop applications.
That is not to blame him, but I remember his writing being very influential with start up founders.
What makes it a Russian company? The team is allegedly spread across the globe, the company (Flipper Devices Inc.) is registered in DE, USA and there's a London office.
They are registered all over the place yet somehow comply with neither UK nor EU warranty laws, and are unable to provide normal legal B2B documents in EU/UK (https://flipper.net/pages/b2b-and-tax-exemption-policy). Company is run by russians, for a long time they tried hard to hide the fact their servers were still in russia after they claimed to move out.
yeah in the crypto space there is never consensus on what a developer costs, the donation pools and bounties are priced for a passionate developer in Malaysia as there are very few speculators from the few High Cost of Living places that the builders get opportunities from, in comparison to the rest of the of the world
developers all end up launching their own things and getting all the money up front in some way or another
I would love to contribute towards getting Bluetooth keyboards working on freebsd. They have the drivers and most of the core working, even BT mice work, but keyboards aren't there yet.
In my experience this doesn't work because people in large groups usually demand maintenance for free and donate explicitly for features they personally want.
You usually end up with insufficient donations to move anything, but now gained a bunch of users who think they own the devs and complain about every change which isn't that one thing they donated for...
Much easier fix:
They already open-sourced everything, the official branch is sufficiently stable and feature-rich. People are free to fork and create something new, decoupled from the Flipper team and maybe even financed by donations if they want to.
I wonder whether that future includes sending me the device I initially backed on the very first kickstarter. It's been >4 years of back-and-forth with support.
1. They open sourced the entire Software under GPL from the start, and always pushed all their changes to that public github.
2. They supported the first-party firmware for years, including huge rewrites of the interfaces used by applications, etc.
3. They actively involved the community on many topics around the product and were always responsive.
They did their job very well, financed ONLY by one-time sales of hardware. NO subscription or additional licensing fees were ever charged.
There is still alot of potential in the hardware itself (e.g. Bluetooth/BLE, NFC Tag writing,...), and the Community is working on alot of different topics.
Tl;DR: The Flipper team is free to go and invest resources elsewhere now. Thanks for your support, keep up the great work!
Yes, this is the way things should be, imho - let the company building the hardware have the say on the base OS, but then let there be forks/contributions from the wider community, which will keep the hardware alive long past the cutoff valve on the production line.
There are many good examples of this working out great for the community, one that I am playing with recently is the community firmware for the Synthstrom Deluge music production workstation, where the community is just taking it into the stratosphere in terms of capabilities beyond the original factory firmware.
There will always be folks who want to share their work.
Another good example is the pwnagotchi scene, where the project is kept alive by its users due to the open source nature of the original firmware images.
How do you know they are furries? The illustration could be set in a world where humans and anthropomorphic animals coexist, like the fictional worlds in movies such as "The Bad Guys" or TV shows such as BoJack Horseman or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Another possibility is that it is a medical and/or supernatural condition. They all appear to be canines. They could be werewolves, in a world where medicine and/or magic has developed a way to allow the change to just affect the body leaving their mind and personality intact.
144 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 58.3 ms ] threadI believe there are some more secure cards, like Mifare DESFire EV3 that do provide some security. You’d be shocked how insecure most RFID readers for security cards are.
Some of that can be trivially cloned.
In the case where it was most useful to make copies they did eventually replace the system with one where the keys weren’t copy able. Which was better!
Some cards use some kind of challenge-response but are weak and are easily crackable.
Some cards have an anti-copy protection based on rolling codes, be careful with these. The idea is that when you use it to, say, open a door, the card sends a code to the reader and if correct, that code is burned and the reader replies with the next code, which is stored in the card for the next time, making every other copy (possibly including the original) unusable. If the card emulator doesn't store the rolling code, you are completely locked out.
Some cards have a proper challenge-response mechanism that works and can't be easily copied.
But I'm guessing that's for serious security, where going to the guard shack is preferable to letting anyone unauthorized in?
It's a common mix-up (people barely differentiate between the terms anymore, though I'm surprised nobody in 2 hours mentioned it yet), basically RFID is (historically) an ID; a username. Like an ID field in a database. NFC is near-field communication: bidirectional. It does challenge-response and typically runs on hardened chips. But yeah people will call NFC chips RFID and RFID chips NFC all the time. Both are waterproof devices doing radio transmissions on wireless power and you can't tell them apart without using some equipment to try and read the chip type (even if most phones can do that nowadays), so I can understand the terminology generalisation
Or the use case doesn't depend on any protected bits. A lot of NFC chips are being used as glorified ID tags even if the hardware could do more. And what actual security the hardware provides varies a lot - it's more like a gradient from dumb ID to full java card than a clean distinction.
Recent UL-C/AES disclosure too IIRC
This is not a rational purchase - most of the rule breaking done with the zero is for fun or convenience, rather than being truly illegal.
It used to be more fun before the hotels started handing out NFC unlocks with your phone.
Still, being able to send each other a key for a hotel room on Signal is a nice trick if you are traveling with a sufficiently tech savvy group of people.
Flipper Zero and its clones have always been pseudohacker nonsense. Fun little party trick I suppose.
I still use button on the wall and if you actually park in garage you can keep using fob.
If your current remote has multiple unused buttons on it as they often do, you can already try this out.
Is that the tldr? It sure sounds like it's still on minimal life support.
Src: I'm one of the developers behind Flipper Zero.
You've surely launched a generation of perhaps-someday-responsible hackers into the world.
https://infosec.exchange/@millie/115719943870742405
> We need to normalize declaring software as finished. Not everything needs continuous updates to function. In fact, a minority of software needs this. Most software works as it is written. The code does not run out of date. I want more projects that are actually just finished, without the need to be continuously mutated and complexified ad infinitum.
Honestly, I thought the whole point was to make a popular unified platform where the community could come together and expand on it. I really can't imagine a centralized player can predict nor create all features that users might want. But it seems like Flipper did the right thing: make the software flexible and easy to expand upon.
I'm curious if the agentic-based code flows will start to optimize higher-order programming goals in future evolutions.
Right now, it feels like AI coding is ~2.5, if left to its own devices without human guidance.I don't think it's close to 2. It's hyper fixated on task implementation. It's really bad at abstractions, even when requested. You have to be pretty precise over these instructions. I've only seen it develop well, even with explicit instructions, a handful of times. But hey, that's true about a lot of people too. Though people will not claim to have solved the proper generalization, people will just say "I just care that it works", which is kinda why AI is trained that way. It's not being programmed by your Knuths, it's being programmed by your Zuckerbergs.
Which makes it a simpler problem.
I'd say SOTA AI coding systems are better than 1 and still improving. They often build better code than junior engineers. And with prompting and feedback harnesses, they're starting to grok architectural alignment.
But again, I'm not surprised because that is the modus operandi of the typical Silicon Valley programmer (irrespective of seniority). They leave in their wake bugs that are avoidable and unnecessary and significant amounts of tech debt.
But then again, no one ever gets credit for squashing bugs before they exist. The agents are just as myopic as we are
Worrying about firmware development resources for a Flipper Zero seems a bit like concentrating on your bios instead of ongoing updates to Linux and the applications you use. Yeah, it's important, but it's probably exceedingly rare for the firmware here to need to change much.
At his old company, the sysadmins had been constantly putting out emergency fires!
... seeing how the "used to infinitely patched software" generation is unable to parse "done" is interesting.
Eventually, competence means nothing to do.
Most everyone who has a flipper runs something like Unleashed firmware, and most of the functionality is in the apps that people built, not in the actual firmware.
Some people get a lot of use out of it, but if you just saw that list of hardware and couldn't think of one area you'd apply it in, it's probably not going to be a useful device for you.
And if you mention ANY of the alternate firmwares on their discord, and you get banned. Just fuck'em.
They may have created good hardware, but their software and discord community just sucked.
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.
Adding the necessary hardware while refusing to support arbitrarily iLLegAl things is the best of both worlds.
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.
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.
Does it surprise you that a Russian product team would use these tactics?
Is the Flipper Zero community tightly intertwined with the furry community? Is this a connection I've missed?
Note: am not furry, but have worked with several.
That is my conclusion. They are raising much-needed awareness about that underrepresented group.
They've existed since the 80's. Usenet, alt.cult.furries or alt.cult.otherkin and they dig their own holes. It's not a pleasant fandom as they make out to be.
Ex fursuiter, ex con host, ex furry who wishes they would just fucking exist off the internet. Fucking Furries. I was groomed by folk in the fandom when I was 21.
Eff the furry fandom, as someone from the fandom.
Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I love animals. I’ve never once thought: “these humans in this picture should be replaced with anthropomorphised animals”.
This is peak “I read it for the articles”.
From the home page[0]:
> Flipper Zero is a tiny piece of hardware with a curious personality of a cyber-dolphin.
One assumes that that "curious personality", the creator's attitude and the styling/presentation of the product/project is part of the reason for the success of the product.
The "furries" (as you call them) don't seem like the primary focus focus of the picture anyway -- there's a wide variety of characters doing a bunch of stuff in the drawing. There's also a dog, a shady-looking person stick up a poster, someone with pink hair, a cyber-dolphin, and I think there might even be more than two genders being represented.
Would there be a problem if the Flipper Zero community was "intertwined with the furry community"?
[0] https://flipper.net/
Its kinda annoying when you open a dev/cyb sec blog in the office and furry characters are scattered all over it.
I'm starting the think we should never have left the text only internet.
Which TBF, answering every monkey with a typewriter on the internet is a huge time commitment from any team.
The hardware is static so the rate of software rot is pretty low. It can effectively not be maintained as long as it's already in a stable state. Adding new features is cool and all but it also adds more bugs.
But the great thing is that there's a community, all using the same hardware, and people can fork. So people can still get those updates that they want. Maybe the only thing to do is create a community fork that is much more open but doesn't come with the same stability promises. But that can still be a lot of work, even if you get community maintainers
It's worse in many ways too - it's a lot harder to gauge interest as the developer to understand how well any update will sell, and if the updates "stack", then a user only pays for the newest update to get all older features free. It's also worse from a cashflow perspective for the developer (but better for consumer) since they have to pre-build the update before any chance of getting paid for it.
If I buy a product and like it as-is then I don't necessarily want it to change over time.
Buy once is better, buy once with optional updates or periodic version releases is better still.
And generally speaking there is a lot of options that are excellent for developers but complete shit for the users. That's obvious, but it's off the point in the context of fairness.
Then Minecraft pioneered the model of users paying once and getting free lifetime updates. And shortly thereafter various SaaS pioneered the model of the user paying monthly while the software barely changes.
And somehow we pretend like those two business models aren't both broken, and like the first one somehow doesn't work anymore
It is certainly a very well-known instance of it, but pioneered?
That is not to blame him, but I remember his writing being very influential with start up founders.
Maybe they can sell the hardware which includes 1 major upgrade release.
Maybe they can have a Kickstarter campaign to fund new releases.
RAR / WinRAR - same and it's even older.
I've heard people talk about this "solution" for over a decade, especially with crypto trying to justify itself, but I've never seen it successful.
developers all end up launching their own things and getting all the money up front in some way or another
more communities burned
You usually end up with insufficient donations to move anything, but now gained a bunch of users who think they own the devs and complain about every change which isn't that one thing they donated for...
Much easier fix: They already open-sourced everything, the official branch is sufficiently stable and feature-rich. People are free to fork and create something new, decoupled from the Flipper team and maybe even financed by donations if they want to.
What part of their GPL-licensed firmware that is hosted in a public GitHub, do you consider not to be open-source?
1. They open sourced the entire Software under GPL from the start, and always pushed all their changes to that public github.
2. They supported the first-party firmware for years, including huge rewrites of the interfaces used by applications, etc.
3. They actively involved the community on many topics around the product and were always responsive.
They did their job very well, financed ONLY by one-time sales of hardware. NO subscription or additional licensing fees were ever charged.
There is still alot of potential in the hardware itself (e.g. Bluetooth/BLE, NFC Tag writing,...), and the Community is working on alot of different topics.
Tl;DR: The Flipper team is free to go and invest resources elsewhere now. Thanks for your support, keep up the great work!
There are many good examples of this working out great for the community, one that I am playing with recently is the community firmware for the Synthstrom Deluge music production workstation, where the community is just taking it into the stratosphere in terms of capabilities beyond the original factory firmware.
There will always be folks who want to share their work.
Another good example is the pwnagotchi scene, where the project is kept alive by its users due to the open source nature of the original firmware images.
Another possibility is that it is a medical and/or supernatural condition. They all appear to be canines. They could be werewolves, in a world where medicine and/or magic has developed a way to allow the change to just affect the body leaving their mind and personality intact.