Author: Christopher Burg

Want to Avoid Being Swatted? Sign Up for Our Anti-Swatting Service Today!

You know police procedures are inadequate when convincing SWAT teams to storm random addresses happens so often that there’s a term for it. The Seattle Police Department (SPD) was recently caught up in a rather embarrassing swatting incident. Instead of taking responsibility for its inadequate procedures it has decided to put the burden on the citizenry:

On its official “swatting” resource site, the Seattle Police Department acknowledges how swatting works, along with the fact that citizens have requested a way to submit their own concerns or worries about being a potential victim. (Full disclosure: after having my own personally identifiable data distributed in a malicious manner, I asked SPD for this very thing… in 2015.)

“To our knowledge, no solution to this problem existed, so we engineered one,” SPD’s site reads. The site claims that swatting victims are “typically associated with the tech industry, video game industry, and/or the online broadcasting community.”

SPD’s process asks citizens to create a profile on a third-party data-management service called Rave Facility (run by the company Smart911). Though this service is advertised for public locations and businesses, it supports private residences as well, and SPD offers steps to input data and add a “swatting concerns” tab to your profile.

Want to avoid being swatted? Sign up for our anti-swatting service today! If you don’t sign up, then the department cannot be held responsible for murdering you when some random jackass on the Internet calls in a fake hostage situation.

What gets me is not just that swatting happens so often that there’s a term for it but that it happens so often that the SPD website has a page dedicated to it. If swatting happens so often that your department has to dedicate a page to it, then your procedures for responding to random hostage situation calls need some serious overhauling.

But He’ll Defend Our Gun Rights

Donald Trump paid lip service to the National Rifle Association (NRA) and gun rights, which was enough to convince many gun owners that he would protect gun rights. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody with more than two brain cells to rub together but he lied:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday his administration is just a few weeks away from finalizing a regulation that would ban so-called bump stocks, devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns.

“We’re knocking out bump stocks,” Trump said at a White House news conference. “We’re in the final two or three weeks, and I’ll be able to write out bump stocks.”

Now to sit back and wait for his apologists to claim that this is really just part of his 517 dimensional chess game to defend gun rights from those evil liberals.

If You’re Going to Go, Go All Out

White smoke signals that the gender has been revealed.

Black smoke signals that the gender has not been revealed.

An off-duty border patrol agent wanted an explosive gender reveal party for his family and friends, but he ended up igniting a wildfire that spread to Coronado National Forest in Arizona.

Dennis Dickey, 37, of Tucson, Arizona, has to pay more than $8 million in restitution, starting with a $100,000 initial payment and monthly payments thereafter, the Department of Justice said in a statement.

Properly Warning Users About Business Model Changes

I have an update from my previous article about how the developers of GPGTools botched their changeover from offering a free software suite to a paid software suite. It appears that they listened to those of us who criticized them for not properly notifying their users that the latest update will change the business model because this is the new update notification:

That’s how you properly inform your users about business model changes.

Installing macOS Mojave on Unsupported Macs

I’m back, I’m married, and I’m behind the news cycle. Although being behind the news cycle should be treated as a state of bliss, it’s not a great place to be when you use news articles for blog material. It’s going to take me a day or two to catch up.

One project I did tackle over my extended vacation is getting macOS Mojave installed on my computers. Mojave dropped official support for several Macs but just because Apple doesn’t officially support a platform doesn’t mean it can’t be used. I see no reason to throw away perfectly functional hardware and enjoy receiving security updates. Because of that, I ended up playing with dosdude1’s Mojave Patcher.

The patcher originally didn’t work for me because all of my computers have FileVault enabled and the version I first downloaded had a bug where it couldn’t mount FileVault containers. That was before I left for my wedding. Fortunately, by the time I got back a new version that fixed that bug was released.

I used the patcher to install Mojave on my 2010 Mac mini 4,1 and my 2010 MacBook Pro 5,4. Installation on my Mac mini was smooth. I haven’t had any major problems with it. Installation on my MacBook Pro was another matter. I should note beforehand that the MacBook Pro in question has a bad memory controller. One of the two memory banks has a 50/50 chance of working when I power the system on. If it doesn’t work, I only have access to half of my memory. That may be why I have to reset the NVRAM every time I power the system on in order to get it to boot (if I don’t reset the NVRAM, I get the dreaded no symbol when I start the computer).

If you’ve been happily running an older Mac and found out that Mojave won’t install, try dosdude1’s Mojave Patcher. It doesn’t work on every old Mac (a list of supported Macs can be found at the link) but it does work for most of the 64-bit Intel Macs.

Incentivizing Law Enforcement

There are many ways to encourage and discourage desired behavior. The two most common methods are rewards and punishments. You reward behavior you want and punish behavior you don’t want. These two methods are used in every walk of life, even law enforcement. Many municipalities have been encouraging their law enforcers to pursue fines. Unfortunately, an individual can only do so much so when law enforcers are encouraged to pursue fines, they necessarily must put less time into other activities such as solving crimes:

Alongside the Black Lives Matter movement in the past several years, civil rights advocates have begun pointing out that the way municipalities collect fees and fines often disproportionately affects low-income communities of color, especially when those communities aren’t well represented in local governments. In 2015, as a follow-up to investigations of police bias in Ferguson, Mo., the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department released the Ferguson report, which painstakingly documents how the police department in that city relied overwhelmingly on fees and fines collected from people in ways that “both reflect and exacerbate existing racial bias.”

But here’s another result of fee and fine enforcement that has never before been measured: Police departments that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crimes.

In addition to fines and permits fees, fines are a major source of revenue for cities. Moreover, city governments make nothing when burglaries, rapes, and murders are solved. When these facts are considered, it’s not surprise that municipalities encourage their law enforcers to pursue fines instead of solving actual crimes.

One of the most common criticisms of privatizing police is that doing so would result in the police pursuing the interests of those who hired them. What most critics of police privatization don’t recognize is that socialized police also pursue the interests of those who hire them, which is why today’s law enforcers spend most of their time enforcing laws that profit city governments. If police were privatized, you could actually hire them to solve burglaries, rapes, and murders. So long as police remain socialized, the chances of that happening are effectively zero.

We’re Not Telling You the Rules

The politicians in California have passed the first law regulating the security of Internet connected devices. However, manufacturers of said devices are going to have a difficult time complying with the law since the rules are never defined:

This bill, beginning on January 1, 2020, would require a manufacturer of a connected device, as those terms are defined, to equip the device with a reasonable security feature or features that are appropriate to the nature and function of the device, appropriate to the information it may collect, contain, or transmit, and designed to protect the device and any information contained therein from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure, as specified.

The California bill doesn’t define exactly what a ‘reasonable security feature’ would be but it mandates that connected devices come with unique passwords that users can change, which isn’t the case for many IoT products. If someone can log into the device outside a LAN, then it must have either preprogrammed passwords that are unique to each device (no more default login credentials) or a way to generate new authentication credentials before accessing it for the first time.

You must implement ‘a reasonable security feature or features’ but we’re not going to tell you what those features are. Oh, and if you fail to comply with our undefined rules, you will be subject to punishment. Anyways, good luck!

That sounds perfectly reasonable, doesn’t it?

Upgrading Your Unsupported Mac to Mojave

macOS Mojave was released last night. As is often the case with major macOS updates, Mojave dropped support for a slew of older platforms. But just because Apple doesn’t support installing Mojave on older computers doesn’t mean that it can’t be installed. dosdude1 has a utility that allows you to install Mojave on a lot of officially unsupported Macs.

I’ve used his patch utility to get High Sierra on my unsupported 2010 MacBook Pro and haven’t had an issues. I attempted to upgrade my 2010 Mac Mini to Mojave last night but discovered that the utility currently has a problem decrypting encrypted APFS containers. dosdude1 is aware of this problem and will hopefully be able to figure out what is going on so it can be fixed. However, if your older Mac isn’t utilizing APFS or FileVault 2 (which it really should be utilizing), you should be good to go.