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It's not specifically Indian. Canada just banned Flipper Zero devices because the little radios can replay car key fob signals and older cars are susceptible to
by jwr 3y ago
It's not specifically Indian. Canada just banned Flipper Zero devices because the little radios can replay car key fob signals and older cars are susceptible to replay attacks.
Stupidity is everywhere.
- cedws 3y agoUK government has tried to ban encryption time and time again. This is what happens when you have old/incompetent career politicians in power instead of deep thinkers like scientists and engineers.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago> deep thinkers like scientists and engineers That doesn't work, either, because they tend to be rather dismissive of human concerns, and, at its heart, government is all about humans. I don't have a solution, but I don't think that declaring that only one-or-another "class" of humans is fit to govern, is it.
- jvanderbot 3y agoThat's a stereotype and probably not true. Many deep thinkers are humanists. It's probably more likely around the hyper rational types, but my boss is the most empathetic engineer I've ever worked for. This is anecdotal but your comment seems fairly clearly overbroad
- lynx23 3y agoI've seen the stereotype confirmed on HN several times already. Whenever I, a blind pedestrian, voice my concerns about driverless car technology, I am being downvoted and outright critizised. The undertone is "How can this single person try to block an emerging technology". That pretty much confirms the statement that tech people sometimes have a hard time with human concerns.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- yungporko 3y agoi think it just confirms that in any given group of people, a majority percentage of them will be self absorbed dickheads.
- suoduandao3 3y agoI don't think it's always necessarily a majority - it's just always going to be more than we estimate.
- 0xBDB 3y agoI am empathetic to your concerns but I may or may not agree with your proposed solutions. I do think it's always important to keep in mind that empathy and compassion aren't the same thing, or always aligned. Compassion is more utilitarian. Driverless cars will save a lot of lives when the technology is good enough, and the compassionate thing is implementing the technology when it saves more lives than it endangers. If that's the non-empathy you are getting from the HN community then the community is right, but again, I genuinely empathize even so.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago> Many deep thinkers are humanists. That's the deal, though. Engineers and scientists don't have a monopoly on "deep thinker™". My sister is a "deep thinker." She has an economics degree from Princeton, and has been working at very high levels, for decades. Very decent human being. Not sure if she'd be interested in being a "leader," though. That's part of the problem; it's almost as if wanting the job, automatically disqualifies you. But you are right. It's an overbroad statement.
- midasuni 3y agoThe U.K. has a system where experts in various fields like medicine and engineering are put in the lawmaking process, in addition to experts in becoming elected (ie raising money and selling non tangible ideas to people) It’s not perfect of course, but in my opinion it’s better than a fully democratic system.
- pmontra 3y agoDo those unelected experts advise on new legislation, even write it (why not? We don't expect elected politicians to be experts in much more than ordinary people) or do they also vote to approve or reject those laws like elected politicians do?
- eigenket 3y agoTheoretically they do both. I think the system that the above commenter is alluding to is the House of Lords, where a bunch of unelected "lords" can vote on legislation. The idea is for the lords to be people with particular expertise who we want to be voting on stuff. For example if you have some very highly thought of scientist or engineer you reward them with a peerage and they can sit in the house of lords and vote on stuff. Of course the reality is not so great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_peer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_peer
- YurgenJurgensen 3y agoIt's worse than you think. Read the Criminal Justice Act (Offensive Weapons) Order 1988 (S.I 1988/2019) and marvel at some of the nonsense some politician thought it important to ban. My personal favourite is "Death Stars", since it creates the mental image of some constable trying to confiscate a superlaser-equipped battlestation.
- pritambaral 3y agoHere's the relevant text of the legislation: > the weapon sometimes known as a “shuriken”, “shaken” or “death star”, being a hard non-flexible plate having three or more sharp radiating points and designed to be thrown;
- jvanderbot 3y agoIts possible for young people to make these mistakes. My wife is not an old man and her default position is not to defend e2e encryption. So all it takes is a spurious argument against it (think of the children!) and without skin in the game she is happy to go along. The argument is about proportional gain vs proportional loss and she is not aware of the devastating loss of privacy that would come from banning strong safe encryption.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoYou could prevent this by teaching rational thinking and cognitive biases at the school level, but I assume the reason that hasn’t happened yet because said students would start calling out the hyperbole that politicians and business people often like to employ.
- gryn 3y agoIt Would not be enough. Good unbiased Thinking requires effort. To optimize this there are caching mechanisms at multiple levels, from inside your brain to the societal level to save the energy required to do the thinking. If you deem that cache and all future ones to be invalid(untrustworthy) you'll have to do a lot of thinking from scratch. If you want to practically brick such agent you'll just need to do a denial of service by bringing a huge deluge of claims that they have to spend more than their lifetime thinking through all of them critically.
- jvanderbot 3y agoI am not going to jump to the bait of defending my own wife as a rational person. Instead I'll just point out that difference in information is not difference in ability. She just wasn't aware encryption was used basically everywhere, and so could be forgiven for not having at hand the information to refute the assertion that some back doors in one algorithm or system is harmless. Only an education in these subjects will help, or a widespread awareness campaign by educated folks. Or even a law protecting it as a fundamental right. Just as I criticize her field all the time, and am quickly embarrassed by my presumption of hyper rational super powers. Or at least I was for years.. I'm getting better.
- marcosdumay 3y agoAt least electromagnetic transmitters are something one expect to be regulated. It is bad regulation, but it's just overzealous. Email ban is borderline censorship.
- jwr 3y agoFlipper Zero complies with all regulations, it's a certified consumer device. That it can record and replay a radio signal is not something that should be regulated. We have laws for stealing cars, we don't need to ban specific tools that, among a multitude of other uses, might be used to steal a car.
- _chu1 3y agoThe 1986 Assault Weapons Ban in the US restricted the sale and ownership of several non-existant gun attachments and modifications. It also for some reason banned specific guns like the KS-23 (quite ridiculous gun you should read on if you're a fan of them) that was only manufactured in the Soviet Union and other bloc states and literally couldn't be imported to the US normally regardless because it used the barrel off a 23mm aircraft cannon. Remember to always put someone with no knowledge of guns in charge with making gun laws.