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Discussion (74 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Is the Flipper Zero community tightly intertwined with the furry community? Is this a connection I've missed?
I feel like infosec was one of the earliest "no one cares who you are if you have skills" user groups. Online, you were just a handle. Man, woman, both, neither, no one knew until if/when you met up IRL. Until then, all you had was your reputation. I think that led to people having a pretty good idea about the attitudes of people they were talking to online, staying away from people who were going to be jerks about identity or pastimes, and a lot of conversations like "General Mayhem is weird, but he's our weird, so no one mentions that fox tail he wears everywhere."
Over time, that was a positive feedback loop: people who weren't cookiecutter felt safer around infosec folks than most other crowds. => That increased the "weird density" of infosec meetups. => People who don't like being around uncommon appearance or behavior stayed away from infosec meetups. => Those meets became safer for uncommon folks. => Repeat.
I don't know if that's right, but again, that's what friends have expressed to me before. It seems plausible.
Note: When I say weird, I mean it affectionately. I've never met anyone in infosec who didn't have some quirk not far below the surface. Frankly, I love that. And because of that, and the virtuous circle I described, I've never had one single person in infosec confess to me that they weren't OK with gay or trans or furries or other type of behavior/identity/etc. I'm a straight white middle class dude, and unfortunately I have had people confess such things to me in other circles, mistakenly assuming that since I was in their demographic, I'd agree with them or at least be OK with it.
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”.
That is my conclusion. They are raising much-needed awareness about that underrepresented group.
> > 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.
Excuse my anger but as a Ex-fursuiter, ex-furmeet host, ex-furry who wishes they would just exist off the internet. I was groomed by folks in the fandom when I was 21. Passed around. It took me eight years and recovery from a psychosis due to a OD of drugs that I finally realised I was in a cult.
But hey, they told me they were my friends. Convinced me that the outside was against me and my only hope was within the fandom. It was okay to act like I was, it was them who didn't understand. My vendetta is real.
They backstab, they manipulate, they use. The drama is out of the world. Low hanging fruit and a safe haven for pedophiles. Baby furs, cub furs, diaper furs make me sick and yet known it's all accepted.
It's a lost cause at this point. I speak out about it because no one else will. If it works for you, fine. But don't you dare tell me it's a fantastical place or an "under represented" community.
They sow their own seeds of disgust and hate.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Works well, and compiling modules like the epaper hacker tool is easy.
https://github.com/i12bp8/TagTinker
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?
Recent UL-C/AES disclosure too IIRC
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
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.
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!
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.
Some of that can be trivially cloned.
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.