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Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

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Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

#261

Post by conanbatt »

Xylakant wrote: post #201
scottlamb wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good? As a Californian who doesn't own a gun and hasn't fired one in 20 years, I'm unlikely to take advantage of that law, but I appreciate that it exists. A SWAT assault that isn't preceded by presenting a valid warrant is just a heavily-armed home invasion, and home owners absolutely should be able to respond to those. That was presumably already legal, but if "enshrining" it into law as you put it makes it pointed…

If you think about it in practical terms, I don’t think this is a good law. What’s going to happen if a house owner is opening fire at a heavily armed police team that is conducting an illegal raid. Is the police going to stand down and reassess the legality of their entry? Or are they going to shoot back? And what’s the likely outcome? Dead owner and dead police. Great. Now, if you’d really want to dissuade the poli…

The police dont pay fines or repair anything - tax payers do. But cops do enter the houses where they might find someone that answers fire. Only the latter is a dissuasive.

Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

#262

Post by Thorrez »

fragmede wrote: post #216
Thorrez wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s not comparable to murder because it’s much more likely that someone would be killed by you offering them a ride in your car than by swatting them. My car rides don't come with a 0.1% chance of death. I'm not that bad of a driver.

You're right, it's probably higher. Your skill as a driver doesn't make it impossible for a drunk driver in another car to hit yours, unfortunately.

If I drive 1 trip per day, a 0.1% chance of death on each trip means I would only survive 3 years on average. And I take more than 1 trip per day. Most people live much more than 3 years, so the risk is certainly less than 0.1% per trip.

Let's calculate it. There were 42,915 traffic deaths in the US in 2021.[1]

Americans take 411 billion trips per year.[2]

That's 42915/411000000000 = 0.00001% chance of death per trip. So a driving trip is 10000x safer than being swatted.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

[2] https://www.bts.gov/statistical-products/surveys/national-ho...

Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

#263

Post by Thorrez »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #236
Thorrez wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rainbow tables only work if there aren't per-user salts. I assume Ring uses per-user salts, meaning rainbow tables won't work.

You would think so, but, it seems that rainbow tables are surprisingly effective, so that tells you that a lot of corporations -I suspect IoT are the worst offenders- are on low-sodium diets.

Do you have a source for rainbow tables are surprisingly effective?

I was actually under the impression that they're generally overhyped and not useful in most situations.

Even if most IoT companies don't use per-user salts, Ring is one of the most respected ones, since it's run by Amazon. So it likely has salts.

Actually, thinking about this more, I don't think rainbow tables are useful here even without per-user salts. The purpose of rainbow tables is to be a storage optimization, so that you can use less storage than a hash table, while still having a lot of the benefits of a hash table. But this specific use case discussed here is "passwords compromised in non-Ring breaches", for which there is enough storage for a hash table. So a rainbow table provides no benefit over a hash table.

For more information on what rainbow tables are read this (note that the first page doesn't even explain rainbow tables, you have to click part 2 at the bottom to get to the actual explanation of rainbow tables):

https://rsheasby.medium.com/rainbow-tables-probably-arent-wh...

Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

#264

Post by mym1990 »

sph wrote: post #120
mym1990 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like a pretty big generalization, just look at SBF as a counter example. There are plenty of educated young people that do stupid things, and depending on the stage of brain development there could be lots of other things at play: household dynamics being a prominent one, having the proper role models, plain ole human nature, etc...

Probably GP meant that nurture, not nature, is what creates bad people. That includes education, but also upbringing, household, etc. Which I tend to agree with. Sociopaths due to genetic differences are, IMO, extremely rare as to be a non-factor. But childhood abuse and/or trauma is the biggest reason for people becoming violent, unsociable or generally evil. SBF just seems like the stereotypical kid born in a very…

Ultimately it is very hard, if not impossible, to know what is going on in households and what ultimately leads up to that outburst of rebellion or evil-doing. Looking back on my education up to college, I believe kids can be absolutely brutal to their peers(and often are), and when you're spending 8 hours a day in a pressure cooker for 10+ years, I can see how negative outcomes follow.

There is a lot of chaos in nature too though, and I think even with great childhood backgrounds there are some individuals that just want to go a different path, for better or for worse.

Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

#265

Post by mihaaly »

Brybry wrote: post #217
mihaaly wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then we graciously disregarded the trouble of 'obsolete' hardware that is not supported anymore by the 'brand new improved and with most super revolutionary functionality in the universe' version of the software. I am fed up with phone apps already because of that, nearly no month or several week goes by without one warning me: UPDATE! NOW! And then when you update its behaviour is altered, many times functionali…

I have similar fundamental issues with a robotic vacuum but a robotic vacuum has been a game changer for my dysfunctional household where no one actually vacuumed regularly. It doesn't matter if it's the best vacuum or the most secure vacuum or even the cheapest, for us it matters if it actually gets used and thus the floors are cleaner. Same reason I've come to like our stick vacuum: we're far more likely to use it…

Yeah, that option is on my mind too!

Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

#266

Post by mihaaly »

ghgr wrote: post #220
mihaaly wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then we graciously disregarded the trouble of 'obsolete' hardware that is not supported anymore by the 'brand new improved and with most super revolutionary functionality in the universe' version of the software. I am fed up with phone apps already because of that, nearly no month or several week goes by without one warning me: UPDATE! NOW! And then when you update its behaviour is altered, many times functionali…

Regarding the robot vacuum you can have the best of both worlds if you get a compatible device and flash an open-source firmware, like Valetudo [1]. You can operate the device by pressing a button, and you can configure it from a locally-hosted webapp (it doesn't need internet access). [1] https://github.com/rand256/valetudo

Thanks for the tip!

Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

#267

Post by vba616 »

jackmott42 wrote: post #253
vba616 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are estimated to be thousands of swatting incidents in a given year, so the "super boring" result evidently happens the vast majority of the time in the US too. It's also not always that boring in other countries. Here is an example that involved more than some questions and leaving: https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/18-year-old-arrested-in-cana...

Good to know I got only a 1 in 1000 chance of dying because Americans are so hyped up on fake maga tough guy takes that we can't agree to hold police accountable for their behavior.

That's not what I was trying to communicate.

I know I can't win the argument you'd like to start about the absolute risk and whether it's tolerable.

I don't want to!

My point was about the variance, and false confidence that two small rates are truly different. Even when one is zero, so the other is infinity percent larger.

It's not that 1/1000 is "low" or "high" in terms of human cost - that is in the eye of the beholder.

The point is that the frequency of rare events is highly sensitive to random chance, and so even with hypothetical perfect records you can't pretend different numbers are necessarily different rates.

Much less if you guess at numbers based on prejudices.

"How to Lie With Statistics" desperately needs a sequel.

Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

#268

Post by vba616 »

29083011397778 wrote: post #230
vba616 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are estimated to be thousands of swatting incidents in a given year, so the "super boring" result evidently happens the vast majority of the time in the US too. It's also not always that boring in other countries. Here is an example that involved more than some questions and leaving: https://www.wjhl.com/news/local/18-year-old-arrested-in-cana...

From your linked article: > An 18-year-old has been arrested in Canada after investigators traced “swatting” calls at Volunteer High School in Hawkins County and Watauga High School in Boone, N.C. to him. Note that the caller was in Canada, but the swatting and presumably violent police response was in North Carolina. Swatting is as American as apple pie and baseball, IMO.

"presumably violent police response"

The article appears to describe a non-violent response, so you may be wrong in this case as well as about the normal outcome.

Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

#269

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Thorrez wrote: post #263
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would think so, but, it seems that rainbow tables are surprisingly effective, so that tells you that a lot of corporations -I suspect IoT are the worst offenders- are on low-sodium diets.

Do you have a source for rainbow tables are surprisingly effective? I was actually under the impression that they're generally overhyped and not useful in most situations. Even if most IoT companies don't use per-user salts, Ring is one of the most respected ones, since it's run by Amazon. So it likely has salts. Actually, thinking about this more, I don't think rainbow tables are useful here even without per-user sa…

It's entirely possible that my information (not really worth it for me to dig through years of browsing history to find it) is dated.

Re: Amazon Ring cameras used in nationwide ‘swatting’ spree, US Justice Dept. says

#270

Post by Doxin »

schoen wrote: post #192
jasonhansel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously the answer is to buy a smart fire extinguisher, so you can remotely put out the flames from your hacked smart printer. Until someone hacks the fire extinguisher and makes it spray chemicals at you. Then you'll need to add a smart fire extinguisher extinguisher.

There was apparently a recurrent Wikipedia hoax based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_detector_detector where someone asserted that there was a radar detector detector detector (so that you could tell if authorities were positioned to detect your use of a radar detector). Some versions of this hoax are described in https://rationalconspiracy.com/2016/06/02/radar-detector-det...

I mean there's no reason you couldn't build a radar detector detector detector, using the exact same principle a radar detector detector works, just having it detect the heterodyne frequency of the radar detector detector.
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