this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
750 points (99.1% liked)
Technology
59105 readers
4109 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
My girlfriend has a medical implant for her gastroparresis. How concerned should we be? If that device shuts off, she can’t eat, and there’s only a handful of doctors in the country that can work on it, and the one that sees her is often booked two weeks out
The thing is, if there's a wireless exploit/hack that can cause "patient harm" the FDA+Health Canada would force a recall the sec its publicly known.
The flipper wouldn't be the only thing able to exploit it, anybody with a radio and some software would be able to. It just so happens the flipper can also do it cause its a swiss army knife and has a general purpose radio.
Generally by the time an attack exists on the flipper, its already been mastered on laptops and raspberry pis and stuff, putting it on the flipper is more to make it available to test easily without having to lug out the laptop. Nobody is inventing new exploits for such underpowered hardware as the flipper. People are porting known exploits to it.
I can't say how concerned you should be, but this won't make her any safer than before, equal risk. Just as likely someone with a laptop in a backpack doing that. We don't make laptops illegal tho.
What I would be concerned about is the idea that the company that makes the implant would not be able to easily test for issues in the implant with such an "illegal" device. Yes they could use a laptop, but you don't use an xray machine to find a stud, you use a handheld studfinder cause its cheap and easy.
Hope that helps explain a bit
No, and I never once thought these capabilities were unique to the Flipper. My concern is how much it lowers the barrier of entry to potentially dangerous behavior. When people say they got one “just to be evil”, it’s deeply concerning. If someone said the same thing about a gun, something else that can be dangerous and needs to be handled responsibly, I’d be notifying someone. It’s not the capabilities themselves, it’s how accessible it makes those capabilities to the otherwise-inept