At least here, there are randomly triggered checks by shop staff where they have to manually rescan anything before they let you leave. And possibly, those checks are more easily triggered if you do certain very strange things like buying nothing but many separate instances of "bananas' with widely varying weights. Wouldn't be too hard to program a set of rules for the most obvious red flags.

And of course, the area is wide open and well covered by cameras, and usually self-checkout means paying by card or google pay or something, which will tie your identity to the purchase.

I saw a video where someone took banana bar code stickers wrapped around a bunch of bananas and put them on the TVs in their shopping cart and then checked out via self checkout.

I predict that self checkout will only remain in the more trustworthy areas…

Congratulations, you have discovered the concept of shoplifting!

That's crazy. But coming from someone who wrote a book on retail fraud and worked as a retail fraud analyst for several years... you could have just walked straight out with those items.

Transacting was your way of leaving a calling card for the investigators/analysts to find you... You stole regardless of how you did it.

IANAL and this depends on the jurisdiction, but in many places, the penalties for shenanigans like these are far steeper than for outright theft, as it's considered to be financial fraud.

You know you can just walk out the door with the items without using the scanner at all right?

Couldn't you also not just check stuff in? These are all obvious drawbacks, it's not really a high-scrutiny environment.

Careful, the law is lenient if you steal from other normal people, but as soon as you steal from the wealthy, try to fraud them, you will see all sort of laws to make sure you are an example to others so they never think about doing the same, but a normal person? Oh well, you should have paid for insurance, or suck it up.

On the other hand, the wealthy can lobby, inflate the prices overnight just because, while also reducing the good weight aka double increase, and you can’t say anything because it’s legal!! It’s a one way “justice” system.

People like you are why we are living in an increasingly lower trust society, with for example having items behind locked door in shops.

Reminds me a bit of the shopping cart theory.

Usually the advertised price must be honored, because it may have brought the customer to your store.

For prices displayed on the shelf-label inside the store the law is usually not that strict (YMMV), as a shop-owner can refuse sale on check-out (otherwise I could put a pricetag on e.g. a shopping-basket and the shop-owner would be legally required to sell me the basket...).

Besides, most shops I've seen (in Europe) already moved from Infrared communication to RF (NFC or proprietary), for centralized shelf-label management without handheld devices. So all this study (and the underlying reverse engineering of the IR-protocol) might do is probably accelerate the transition from IR to RF-based ESL...

In your country merchants are not obligated to honor fraudulently altered price displays.

Probably mostly dangerous for the user, or are people routinely writing their own price signs in the store and then "buying" it for less? Walking up to the lot at the car store and crossing out some zeros? Don't see how this would be any different.

In which country?

I guess they can use the cameras to show you were tampering with the labels and call the police. Somewhat related xkcd https://xkcd.com/1494/

I wonder if since IR is invisible you could theoretically, in an intellectual exercise, blast IR light in a room and mass change them surreptitiously if that was your goal.

Hacks? In my Hacker News? The nerve!

Beside of how the media often tries to present it, the value of Flipper Zero is not for everyone to "become a hacker with this simple app".

Its value is to provide a standardized hardware platform for (white hat) hackers for probing, prototyping, refining and sharing of security research in the fields its hardware supports (Sub-GHz RF, NFC, IR, and custom external boards via simple Input/Output pins).

Prior to that, everyone who wanted to research e.g. RF security had to either build/assemble something custom or buy much more expensive equipment. This created a barrier to collaborate on research, as everyone had to buy/build the same setup.

On top of that, Person A researching some RF topic selected an RF-transceiver from Company X, Person B used a component and a proprietary SDK of Company Y, so consolidating both work streams for a better foundation for all RF-related research required alot of time and effort from someone, breaking workflows of at least one group of researchers, etc.

In contrast, security research which utilizes Flipper Zero can be reproduced and built upon by everyone. All the work is harmonized on the same Hardware architecture, so it's easy for someone familiar with the platform to dive straight into a new idea without having to build a new breadboard, select a chipset, buy additional probing equipment etc.

I use mine for all sorts. I volunteer at a second-hand shop so use it to set up remotes for donated media devices, I've used it to run scripts to apply the same changes to many computers that aren't on a group policy via BadUSB, I've used it for toys-to-life games, and very much more. There are plenty of genuine uses if you're cluey.

Turns out it's what they said it was all along, an educational device.

Yeah, I bought it and it collects a dust since then. Fun device but I have no idea how to use it in my life.

It’s been very useful to me in so many ways, from fob management, to one IR, to rf scanner and other stuff, it’s useful if it fits your needs, just like anything else out there.

This one provides the source and asks you to build it yourself so at least it has some credibility for the "education use only" claim.

I've seen similar things posted on here before that had a binary build only and zero technical documentation. It was really hard to see any kind of research or education value in those.

It's useful for dealing with the industrial equivalent of IOT garbage

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