Canada

I think this is the first shot in the open war on technology, there has been a quiet push for years.

Automakers blame an RF toy for their own disgustingly poor security measures, and the government jumps to ban the toy. What happens when Bell declares that only criminals need a VPN to hide their traffic, or Rogers decides that only a hacker would ever need to have server in their home? How about a more general case, cordless angle grinders and sawzalls are the fastest way to steal catalytic converters from cars, how long before they are subject to a ban or can only be sold to "approved" persons?

There's unironically been calls to ban pointed knives in the UK because they get used in crimes.

Its really no worse than it was with keys. The flipper zero only works on very cheap, corner cutting simple systems. A lot of cars (and all cars should) use non-repeating codes so a simple interception is useless. That doesn't make them invincible of course.

Those cars would, back in the day, use simple corner cutting keys to be secured. There were quite a few cars back in the day that would have only a very small number of keys meaning there was a mon-trivial chance of you running into a car that you could open that wasn't your own. There are countless stories of people accidentally unlocking and getting into cars that are not there's.

Here's a concrete example, there are only about 5000 different keys for some brands of Toyota. A car thief could get 10keys and try 10cars a day (and remember this would take a minute or 2 and not really look suspicious) and successfully steal a car every 2 months or so. A dongle pretty decisively kills this avenue of attack. But like all things shitty engineering opens up new attacks, although on the whole it's a lot harder to steal a car today than before dongles.

Agreed! It's actually pretty easy to make a car not start - that is in fact the default behavior for a large chunk of metal. ~~The fact they will start given whatever fixed input is incredibly unnecessary.~~

Edit: Apparently they don't? It's in the article. This announcement is just totally misaimed.

Seems more to me like vulnerabilities are widespread in everything, and this thing ended up being made to exploit them?

*edit
Wait, did you mean the same thing I said? Phrasing wasn't clear to me.

Yeah, that's the bright side here. If they try to control everyone by banning science, bitch, I've already got it!

Nah, the politicians asked around, the automaker lobbyists blamed the device, some intern-slave wrote a halfass bill, and no one cared to stop fundraising as little power prostitutes long enough to question it.

How are people even stealing cars by fob, then?

Edit: It's in the article. By using the fob + an amp or cracking the codes like big boys, neither of which this can do. Flipper Zero should sue the government for defamation.

Honestly they just need an enemy to distract from real potential solutions because solutions are hard. They did the same thing with firearms.

What an asshat indeed.

I mean, that's typical politician behavior. let's not pretend the other options are different. This is the shit you have to do to get morons to vote for you.

As far as I can tell, it hasn't been banned yet. So go get one and then don't get caught with it once the toothless ban comes into force.

The price is what kept me from having one already. I always wanted a device like this since I was a kid and the idea was still science fiction.

Ironically, I first heard about it from a video review showing it doesn't actually do some of these hacks well or at all, such as opening a garage door by duplicating the code of the remote for the garage door.

It's a bunch of antennas. Low GHZ radio, RFID, NFC, Bluetooth. It will also read/write those button-cell keys. There's also GPIO for you to create your own add-on hardware.

I have no clue how they plan on outlawing them, but it's going to be some reactionary knee-jerk law that does more harm than good.

If the concern is car theft, go after the vehicle manufacturers that aren't using rolling codes and properly securing their vehicles.