If You Were Zwirn, How Would Convince People Of These Alarm Panel Flaws?

#1, good question, I've made this its own discussion to highlight it.

Some thoughts:

(1) Convince people this is a practical risk. It might be, I don't know. But it's been nearly 3 years and it's still not clear to me, even if these devices are flawed in the way Zwirn claims, that this is a practical risk. Collecting examples of where the risk was exploited and major damage occurred would help him.

Maybe this is legitimately an issue where many people die each month or maybe this is condition is so rare that it's like saying "Don't ever go outside or you will be hit by lightning."

If #1 can't be done, I don't think the rest matters.

If I were Zwirn, I would have simply pointed out that this is a fairly simple bypass method for intrusion detection systems and ignore the life safety aspect, which is more worrisome but less obviously a problem.

If I wanted to gain entry to a structure with an alarm panel that did not have an isolated bus, all I have to do is kick the front door in, locate the keypad (simple to do, because it's beeping), tear it off the wall, and short the bus line to kill the panel before it can communicate. Boom, I'm in and I can loot the place in a leisurely manner before leaving.

It should be very easy to demonstrate this. A simple video showing how to bypass a popular alarm panel should go viral. But Zwirn is an old-fashioned kind of a guy who is a big believer in security through obscurity, and refuses to do this.

Zwirn is a genius, but he is terrible at communicating. He sounds like a crank when you meet him in person and he writes like a drunk with a thesaurus who gets paid by the word. Both of those handicaps could be overcome if he would point to a genuine problem with an easily implemented solution, in full view of the public. But he won't do it.

And I told him all this the last time we met!

Are there videos of these flaws? Like has anyone set up a panel, armed it, shorted the keybus and shown that it disabled the panel and doesn't transmit any alarms if triggered after keybus short?

That would convince me. If it can be consistently replicated with different models/revisions, then it's clearly a problem and UL/ULC testing is not sufficient.

I've seen a lot of whacky things with alarm panels, but I've not seen one do what Zwirn claims. But to be honest I've also not tested it. Can't exactly go shorting out customer panels to feed my own intrigue, and by the time I had the spare money to buy panels for myself I kinda forgot about it.