[theshrike79]

There are a bunch of semi-easy tools for lockpicking too and a good percentage of American locks are reeeally bad at thwarting even a novice picker. In worst cases you just need a flat piece of metal.

Too many fancy electronic locks can be bypassed with a single magnet placed correctly.

https://www.youtube.com/@lockpickinglawyer

These devices are the electronic equivalent of a lock-pick. They still need skill and intent to use, by itself they shouldn't be illegal. They should motivate companies to make proper security measures.

You can grab a $10 ESP32 and a battery pack, load some ready-made software on it and flood everything in a 50 meter radius with so many fake Wifi-APs most devices will go offline. Or you can deauth every wireless device within range.

The tech is available and doesn't require much skill to use.

[weinzierl]

Exactly, and in regard to the parent comment mentioning teenagers: They are exactly the group that needs the Flipper least because they have might not have money but they often have plenty of time.

If anything the Flipper helps to spread the knowledge where the frontier of practical feasibility is to a wider demographic. This demarcation line is far from trivial but the world would be a better place if all of us knew more about what they should be afraid of and where they can chill.

[bmitc]

> and in regard to the parent comment mentioning teenagers: They are exactly the group that needs the Flipper least because they have might not have money but they often have plenty of time.

That was my point.

[milkshakes]

if your security model can't stand up to teenagers with plenty of time, it might be time to reconsider it.

[bmitc]

I was more addressing the idea that the Flipper device, while cool, seems to stand to do more harm than good by making its functionality so readily available to a wide class of people. Yes, it is generally a good idea to not oversupply teenagers with things that do things they otherwise couldn't but do harm.

Cars are trivially broken into. Increasing the safety of the locking mechanism would do some good but not prevent. This is what I was referring to by appropriate. Maybe that weakens my argument about at least considering the Flipper as a potentially harmful device, but the Flipper can do a lot of things.

There is a lot of security that relies on things simply being inconvenient.

[wolrah]

> There is a lot of security that relies on things simply being inconvenient.

Remember how in the mid-00s it was pretty trivial for any nerd with a Linux laptop to sniff traffic on a WiFi network and intercept passwords? For years the security-aware community was making a point of this, but major web sites just kept using unencrypted HTTP for their logins and such.

Then someone released a Firefox extension which made it literally point and click for almost anyone on any OS to capture and reuse passwords over the air. Suddenly it went from trivial for nerds with the right tools and a bit of training to trivial for anyone who wants to try, and very soon after that we started seeing the "HTTPS Everywhere" movement explode in popularity, sites like Facebook locking down at least their login endpoints if not the entire site to only work over HTTPS, etc.

Insecure communication was always a problem, but it took the combination of popularity of WiFi and point-and-click tools to make the world care enough for the problems to get solved. Until that happened, those with the ability to solve it didn't care enough because it didn't impact their bottom line because not enough of their customers cared.

[milkshakes]

> There is a lot of security that relies on things simply being inconvenient.

Good, this will hopefully lead to less of that.

edit: Like Firesheep, as my sibling comment pointed out.