Author: Christopher Burg

Potentially Most Worthless Form of Protest Ever

When a bunch of triggered snowflake conservatives started burning their Nike products to protest the company’s decision to make Colin Kaepernick its mascot, I foolishly asked if there a more useless way to protest a company than destroying your own property? The question was meant to be rhetorical but a trigger snowflake liberal stepped up to the plate to prove that there are more useless forms of protest through his act of protesting by shooting himself in the arm:

Mark J. Bird, 69, was charged last month with discharging a gun within a prohibited structure, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit and possessing a dangerous weapon on school property, court records show. He was found bleeding from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his arm about 8:15 a.m. on Aug. 28 outside a bathroom in the Charleston campus K building.

[…]

One college employee told police that he held Bird’s hand to calm him down as others tried to stop the bleeding. While waiting for authorities to arrive, Bird said he had shot himself in protest of President Donald Trump, police noted in their report. The report did not elaborate.

I’m sure Trump is all broken up over the fact that some college professor, whom he would probably tear apart on Twitter if he was even vaguely aware of his existence, from Las Vegas decided to shoot himself in the arm with a .22 pistol. I expect Trump to announce his resignation this week due to the power of this professor’s protest.

The real icing on the cake though was this:

Inside the bathroom, campus police found a $100 bill taped to a mirror along with a note that said, “For the janitor,” according to Bird’s arrest report. On the floor of the restroom was a black-and-white, .22-caliber pistol and one spent shell casing.

$100 to clean up blood? Obviously this professor has no idea how expensive it is to cleanup a scene contaminated with blood. You don’t just run a mop across it and call it a day. The scene has to be sterilized because human blood can carry some really nasty shit.

I will probably regret this but I’ll ask anyways, is there a more useless way to protest than shooting one’s self in the arm with a small caliber handgun?

Don’t Trust Snoops

Software that allows family members to spy on one another is big business. But how far can you trust a company that specializes in enabling abusers to keep a constant eye on their victims? Not surprisingly, such companies can’t be trusted very much:

mSpy, the makers of a software-as-a-service product that claims to help more than a million paying customers spy on the mobile devices of their kids and partners, has leaked millions of sensitive records online, including passwords, call logs, text messages, contacts, notes and location data secretly collected from phones running the stealthy spyware.

Less than a week ago, security researcher Nitish Shah directed KrebsOnSecurity to an open database on the Web that allowed anyone to query up-to-the-minute mSpy records for both customer transactions at mSpy’s site and for mobile phone data collected by mSpy’s software. The database required no authentication.

Oops.

I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised by this. Companies that make software aimed at allowing family members to spy on one another already have, at least in my opinion, a pretty flexible moral framework. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of the data collected by mSpy was stored in plaintext in order to make it easily accessible to other buyers.

You Are Responsible for Your Own Security

One of the advertised advantages of Apple’s iOS platform is that all software loaded onto iOS devices has to be verified by Apple. This so-called walled garden is meant to keep the bad guys out. However, anybody who studies military history quickly learns that sitting behind a wall is usually a death sentence. Eventually the enemy breaches the wall. Enemies have breached Apple’s walls before and they continue to do so:

In a blog post entitled “Location Monetization in iOS Apps,” the Guardian team detailed 24 applications from the Apple iOS App Store that pushed data to 12 different “location-data monetization firms”—companies that collect precise location data from application users for profit. The 24 identified applications were found in a random sampling of the App Store’s top free applications, so there are likely many more apps for iOS surreptitiously selling user location data. Additionally, the Guardian team confirmed that one data-mining service was connected with apps from over 100 local broadcasters owned by companies such as Sinclair, Tribune Broadcasting, Fox, and Nexstar Media.

iOS has a good permission system and users can prevent apps from accessing location information but far too many people are willing to grant access to their location information to any application that asks. If a walled garden were perfectly secure, users wouldn’t have to worry about granting unnecessary permissions because the wall guards wouldn’t allow anything malicious inside. Unfortunately, the wall guards aren’t perfect and malicious stuff does get through, which brings me to my second point.

What happens when a malicious app manages to breach Apple’s walled garden? Ideally it should be immediately removed but the universe isn’t ideal:

Adware Doctor is a top app in Apple’s Mac App Store, sitting at number five in the list of top paid apps and leading the list of top utilities apps, as of writing. It says it’s meant to prevent “malware and malicious files from infecting your Mac” and claims to be one of the best apps to do so, but unbeknownst to its users, it’s also stealing their browser history and downloading it to servers in China.

In fairness to Apple, the company did eventually remove Adware Doctor from its app store. Eventually is the keyword though. How many other malicious apps have breached Apple’s walled garden? How long do they manage to hide inside of the garden until they are discovered and how quickly do the guards remove them once they are discovered? Apparently Apple’s guards can be a bit slow to react.

Even in a walled garden you are responsible for your own security. You need to know how to defend yourself in case a bad guy manages to get inside of the defensive walls.

Marketing Master

It seems like everybody is talking about this article, which claims to be written by an insider in the Trump administration who is part of a resistance. The main thing people are trying to ascertain is who wrote it.

Since everybody else is speculating on the matter, I might as well join the fun. Do you know who I think wrote it? Trump (or somebody on Trump’s team).

As the saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity and Trump is, if nothing else, a master at marketing himself. This article, and by extent Trump’s name, has reached the front page of every major newspaper and news website. It’s being discussed on all of the major news channels. Avoiding hearing discussion about it is practically impossible. It’s a great marking piece and probably the easiest way to get free advertising from pretty much everybody.

The Privilege of Power

I would like you to read this story and ask yourself, what do you think would happen to you if you were in Ryan Haass’ position:

On Sunday, Feb. 11 after leaving the Tippy Canoes bar in Osceola, Wis., Haass drove off the road and abandoned his car in a ditch. He left the scene of the accident and later claimed he continued drinking at home.

Surveillance video from the bar in Osceola, obtained by the FOX 9 Investigators, shows Haass spent the afternoon drinking, consuming at least three beers and four Long Island iced teas.

[…]

When the officer asked Haass what he was drinking, he said, “Hey, stop there. I know why you are asking these questions and I’m not saying any more.”

When the officer asked Haas to perform a field sobriety test, he refused and said, “What is the point? I will not perform the test. Now what are you going to do?”

Osceola Police Chief Ron Pedrys was monitoring the situation that night and told Fox 9 that without a field sobriety test, the officer did not have probable cause to arrest Haass.

In this age where drunk driving is probably considered the same as murder to most people, how did Haass manage to get away with this? Why wasn’t he arrested and taken to the station to be blood tested when he refused to perform a field sobriety test? Because Haass happens to be a law enforcer himself.

Power comes with privileges such as professional courtesy. Law enforcers often extend a great deal of courtesy to each other that they won’t extend to regular schmucks like you and me. If one officer pulls another over for speeding, they’ll often pretend that the situation never occurred. If one officer finds that another is in possession of illegal narcotics, they’ll often pretend that they didn’t see anything. And if one officer suspects that another was driving while intoxicated, they often won’t force a sobriety or blood test.

Rules are for little people, not the king’s men.

Officer Noor Sounds Like a Swell Guy

Evidence to be used in the prosecution of Officer Noor is starting to be revealed. The evidence released so far includes excepts from a psychological assessment and a rather telling past interaction he had with a member of the public:

During Noor’s 2015 psychological evaluation, he self-reported that “… he disliked people, disliked being around people, and was disinterested in interacting with people,” according to department documents cited by prosecutors.

Why would the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) continue to employee Noor if he admitted he disliked people and wasn’t interested in interacting with them? If you’re in the job of law enforcement, you’re going to be interacting with members of the public. But if that wasn’t enough to justify terminating Noor, this should have been:

Months before Damond was killed, Noor pulled over a driver who failed to use his turn signal and “the first thing he did was point his gun at the driver’s head,” prosecutors said, citing police records they reviewed.

Don’t get me wrong, I despise people who fail to use their turn signals as much as the next guy. However, I wouldn’t go so far as to put a gun to somebody’s head because they failed to indicate their turn. In fact if I were charged with hiring officers and one of them did that, I’d terminate their ass immediately.

If nothing else, the evidence presented so far raises some questions about MPD’s personnel practices.

There’s No Law So Minor That a Law Enforcer Won’t Murder You over It

Whenever I point out that laws are violence and that law enforcers will escalate even minor transgressions against the law to lethal force, some statist will rebut by asking, “When’s the last time somebody was killed over a traffic ticket?” The answer to that is, just a few months ago:

Locked away in the Mineral County Jail for failing to take care of her traffic tickets, 27-year-old Kelly Coltrain asked to go to the hospital. Instead, as her condition worsened, she was handed a mop and told to clean up her own vomit. She died in her jail cell less than an hour later.

Despite being in a video-monitored cell, Mineral County Sheriff’s deputies did not recognize that Coltrain had suffered an apparent seizure and had not moved for more than six hours. When a deputy finally entered her cell and couldn’t wake her, he did not call for medical assistance or attempt to resuscitate her. Coltrain lay dead in her cell until the next morning when state officials arrived to investigate­­.

Are the officers who, probably literally, watched her die in their cage facing punishment? You probably already know the answer to that question:

The investigators also asked the Mineral County District Attorney to consider criminal charges in the case, after finding evidence the Mineral County Sheriff’s Office may have violated state laws prohibiting inhumane treatment of prisoners and using one’s official authority for oppression.

To avoid a conflict of interest, the investigation was forwarded to Lyon County District Attorney Stephen Rye for review. Rye declined to press charges in the case.

“The review of the case, in our opinion, did not establish any willful or malicious acts by jail staff that would justify the filing of charges under the requirements of the statute,” Rye said.

I guess locking somebody in a cage, refusing them medical care when it was obvious there was something seriously wrong, handing them a mop after they suffered a seizure and telling them to clean up the mess, and failing to even attempt to resuscitate them when they ceased responding to stimuli isn’t “willful of malicious” behavior… at least when you wear a badge.

Although I heap a lot of deserved criticism on law enforcers, they aren’t the only bad actors in the State. Part of the reason there are so many bad law enforcers is because those tasked with overseeing them fail to hold the bad actors responsible. Prosecutors, for example, regularly refuse to bring charges against law enforcers even when handed a mountain of evidence indicating that they did something heinous. If by some miracle a bad law enforcer is taken to court and found guilty of a crime, judges will often hand out a lenient sentences in “recognition of their years of service to the community.” This creates an environment that is a magnet for bad actors. A person with violent urges looks at a situation like this and realizes that they can get away with acting on their urges if they become a cop.

So long as the entire system refuses to punish law enforcers who act in bad faith, the profession will continue to attract the lowest humanity has to offer.