171–180 of 193 posts
The sad thing about this technology is that it's routinely used, as enumerated in this article, to a completely worthless end. Cocaine should not be illegal anywhere, nor should surveillance stings be set up to entrap people.
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Don't care for drugs or sex work, for all I care they should be legal. What is horrifying to me is the amount of violence / abuse amounting not only to slavery and trafficking but also the murders of the innocent these people commit. Should they be left unchecked, to flourish? Look at countries where criminal activity has gone up severely, thinking of drug cartels in Mexico for one (or other places) where normal peop…
To be frank, I think the most parsimonious theory for why these trades involve so much violence is because we've made them black markets and forced the entities that successfully operate in those trades to be equipped to contend with increasingly military-like police forces, as well as incentivized to be secretive in their dealings, removing the reputational and regulatory pressures that many other industries are sub…
The real reason drug dealers tool-up isn't to deal with cops; it's to deal with robbers. Dealers hold stock and cash, and if those are stolen, there's not much the dealer can do - he certainly can't report the robbery to the police.
So as a few people have noted above, decriminalisation would result in a significant reduction in both violence and firearms offences.
Every time I read about police investigation techniques that justify the use of mass-surveillance, deception, and entrapment, I grow closer to fully rejecting the legitimacy of criminal law and criminal justice. The less legitimacy I assign to criminal law and criminal justice, the more infuriating it is that the budgets of law enforcement agencies grow ever more inflated to do ridiculous schemes like this to enforce…
Have you ever hung out with a cokehead?
Solution: avoid hanging around with bad-tempered people.
Alternative solution: launch an unwinnable global war on drugs.
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That's what I was saying a true OTP is a cumbersome version of stream cyphers that trades some improvement in security for a huge increase in fragility and difficulty of use and distribution.
> With a single key much smaller than a megabyte Unless that was a preshared key, you're not talking about a one time pad. One time pads are inherently symmetric. If you're comparing symmetric to assymmetric crypto systems, you might as well just say that 'if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a bicycle'.
Stream ciphers and OTPs are both symmetric.
The "symmetric" part is the fact that the same key is used for encryption and decryption, not that the plaintext and key are the same length.
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Do not rely on technical means to solve an administrative problems. Vito Corleone didn't have messenger apps, email or ERP systems, but his enterprise ran like like a clock. So should yours.
1. That was way before the advent of smart phones and most technological surveillance techniques. 2. It was fictional.
2. There were a lot of non-fictional organizations that ran just fine without any modern means. Genghis Khan conquered a lot of countries without relying on radio for communications or satellites for reconnaissance. Using a WhatsApp-like chat apps to communicate about criminal activities is very convenient, but opens a new vector of attack against you.
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that's not a cellphone network that's a VHF/UHF radio repeater network. basically same idea as ham radio hilltop repeater stuff in the US, but built for private purposes, and using COTS radios capable of basic encryption.
From the article: Soldiers seized 167 antennas, more than 150 repeaters and thousands of cellphones and radios that operated on the system. It sounds like it had both radio and cell bands if phones were able to use it.
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Or they could learn to use Signal. Properly installed (F-Droid) on off-the-shelf phones with fresh prepaid sims and OS updates disabled, it can be considered secure software against all but the most sophisticated adversaries. Then, simply verify the handshake key for your contacts, and you can be sure there is no man in the middle attack. Rotate phone+sim every 2 months, while keeping the same "outside" number, say,…
The easier way to attack this is by instituting a know your customer law for phone systems including prepaid SIMs, combined with accomplice charges for anyone who's SIM is used in connection with criminal acts.
Think about it: unless you distribute SIMs at the local police station, your last mile enforcement officer is just some guy in a kiosk making minimal wage. Assuming he is motivated by law to do his job right, and photocopy IDs etc., he's still untrained to spot fake ones, unwilling to make a ruckus if the customer face does not really match the ID etc.
All it takes is one rogue distributor or some homeless guy, and you will have thousands of SIMS that can't be traced. Then you have anonymous roaming sims for people willing to pay the data roaming fees.
It's a friction, not a silver bullet.
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Or they could learn to use Signal. Properly installed (F-Droid) on off-the-shelf phones with fresh prepaid sims and OS updates disabled, it can be considered secure software against all but the most sophisticated adversaries. Then, simply verify the handshake key for your contacts, and you can be sure there is no man in the middle attack. Rotate phone+sim every 2 months, while keeping the same "outside" number, say,…
> Properly installed (F-Droid) on off-the-shelf phones with fresh prepaid sims and OS updates disabled, it can be considered secure software against all but the most sophisticated adversaries. IMEI will identify the phone. Signal does not work well without GCM.
So you will prove the target uses a phone, and that phone connects to Signal servers or some offshore VPN. That's not very useful.
The quest is to access communication contents, or map out a criminal network that can then then lead to identifying other physical locations of terminals and unknown members of the ring.
> The rain pattered lightly on the harbour of the Belgian port city of Ghent when, on 21 June 2021, a team of professional divers slipped below the surface into the emerald murk. The Brazilian tanker, heavy with fruit juice bound for Austra— No. Stop. This is not how you report news. This is a failed fiction author’s blog post. When I read a news story, I want the facts, not a goddamned noir piece. Give me the facts,…
This is a long feature piece. It's journalism. If you want the simple facts, the story has been reported plenty of other places. You can get the CliffsNotes on Twitter.
The style you are calling «journalism», others call "entertainment". The article does provide information, but the idea implied in the opening, of "bringing you somewhere" (as if fiction), clashes with the supposed intention of inform and comment (the «lightly pattering rain» is irrelevant to the story). If a journal is intended for recording idle remarks, its purpose may be artistic, if for annotations, informative, if for reasoning, analytical: the three can find an organic balance in a journal, finding a thread in the person of the writer. But the idle remarks are not required in the loci for information and analysis, where they are dissonant. Similarly, the "imagery" used as introduction clashes with the piece and looks like clumsy obedience to some weakly grounded convention.
That kind of imagery is not necessary in long feature pieces and journalism. And it mixes up registers with doubtful purpose and effect ("are we reasoning or are we feeling, imagining dreaming...?").
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The FBI sure, but who knows what kind of budget the team was given. But they did leverage their position as law enforcement to arrest all of their competitors
They arrested their customer, which isn’t great for retention.