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Shit... I just got my phone stolen. Realized it 40 seconds post factum [left it at the shop counter and someone took it].
20 minutes later called the police [cuz I had to get home and use wife's phone].
5 min later poluce arrived
10 min later they got all they could from shop's security officer.
Police officer asks me to login my samsung acc on his phone. 2 minutes later we are on the way to the exact location my phone is at.
15 minutes later officer hands me my samsung 😁
got my phone back in less than an hour after theft.
maybe... Ummm... Maybe all this tracking thing is not that bad...?13 -
Fixing family / friends technical problems, episode 2.
Problem: "I lost my iPhone, I know there's a thing that lets you find it. Can you help?"
Debugging:
Me: sure, it's called "find my iPhone"
Friend: ah yes that's it. How do I use it?
Me: I'll show you, just login here and ... oh you didn't set it up?
Friend: Probably not, I don't know much about this computer stuff.
Me: ... when you setup your phone for the first time, it's a full screen thing that says "do you want us to locate your phone if it's lost. Yes / No". It's hardly writing an encryption algorithm now is it?
Friend: no it's not, but still I just didn't know. I probably clicked no for everything.
Me: ... says here you clicked yes for iCould ... and yes for photo sync ... so you read the one about your pictures but not about lost or stolen property ... nice.
Friend: ... so you can't find it then.
Me: No, natural selection took it away from you.
Friend: oh **** off.6 -
So, my boyfriend's phone was stolen and my Google Drive account was synced on that phone. Also noticed that someone attempted to change my Gmail account. That dimwit does not know to whom he's messing with. Huh! I'm going to hunt that son of a gun and will make his life be tormented in hell! Muhuhuhahahahaha!19
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So after my phone got stolen I am now using a series30 Nokia device, problem was synching contacts dumped from Google contacts. Run a Python script that modified the vcf into a format compatible with the series 30, never felt more of a hacker man than this
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!dev
GOD FUCKING DAMMIT
My Mother was intelligent enough to get her phone stolen and screams at me over the phone of my brother why I can't do more than telling her the last known location
BECAUSE THEY SHUT IT DOWN
I CAN'T DO SHIT WITHOUT THE PHONE HAVING AN INTERNET CONNECTION
But what if they go through my files go into my bank account
THEY CAN'T BECAUSE YOU HAVE A PASSWORD ON IT
but they could crack it or something
NO THEY CAN'T WITHOUT TRYING FOR MONTHS OR YEARS OF POSSIBLE COMBINATIONS
but
NO BUT JUST FUCKING CALM DOWN IF THEY AREN'T THAT BAD THEN THEY WILL CALL ME IF THEY ARE ASSHOLES THEY NEED AT LEAST MAKE A FACTORY RESET AND DELETE ALL YOUR FILES
I CAN'T DO MORE THAN THIS SO FUCKING SHUT UP AND DON'T LEAVE YOUR PHONE AT A FUCKING WAITING ROOM AND DON'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING ON THE FUCKING INTERNET ESPECIALLY FACEBOOK
Thanks know I can't concentrate anymore........5 -
Long rant ahead.. 5k characters pretty much completely used. So feel free to have another cup of coffee and have a seat 🙂
So.. a while back this flash drive was stolen from me, right. Well it turns out that other than me, the other guy in that incident also got to the police 😃
Now, let me explain the smiley face. At the time of the incident I was completely at fault. I had no real reason to throw a punch at this guy and my only "excuse" would be that I was drunk as fuck - I've never drank so much as I did that day. Needless to say, not a very good excuse and I don't treat it as such.
But that guy and whoever else it was that he was with, that was the guy (or at least part of the group that did) that stole that flash drive from me.
Context: https://devrant.com/rants/2049733 and https://devrant.com/rants/2088970
So that's great! I thought that I'd lost this flash drive and most importantly the data on it forever. But just this Friday evening as I was meeting with my friend to buy some illicit electronics (high voltage, low frequency arc generators if you catch my drift), a policeman came along and told me about that other guy filing a report as well, with apparently much of the blame now lying on his side due to him having punched me right into the hospital.
So I told the cop, well most of the blame is on me really, I shouldn't have started that fight to begin with, and for that matter not have drunk that much, yada yada yada.. anyway he walked away (good grief, as I was having that friend on visit to purchase those electronics at that exact time!) and he said that this case could just be classified then. Maybe just come along next week to the police office to file a proper explanation but maybe even that won't be needed.
So yeah, great. But for me there's more in it of course - that other guy knows more about that flash drive and the data on it that I care about. So I figured, let's go to the police office and arrange an appointment with this guy. And I got thinking about the technicalities for if I see that drive back and want to recover its data.
So I've got 2 phones, 1 rooted but reliant on the other one that's unrooted for a data connection to my home (because Android Q, and no bootable TWRP available for it yet). And theoretically a laptop that I can put Arch on it no problem but its display backlight is cooked. So if I want to bring that one I'd have to rely on a display from them. Good luck getting that done. No option. And then there's a flash drive that I can bake up with a portable Arch install that I can sideload from one of their machines but on that.. even more so - good luck getting that done. So my phones are my only option.
Just to be clear, the technical challenge is to read that flash drive and get as much data off of it as possible. The drive is 32GB large and has about 16GB used. So I'll need at least that much on whatever I decide to store a copy on, assuming unchanged contents (unlikely). My Nexus 6P with a VPN profile to connect to my home network has 32GB of storage. So theoretically I could use dd and pipe it to gzip to compress the zeroes. That'd give me a resulting file that's close to the actual usage on the flash drive in size. But just in case.. my OnePlus 6T has 256GB of storage but it's got no root access.. so I don't have block access to an attached flash drive from it. Worst case I'd have to open a WiFi hotspot to it and get an sshd going for the Nexus to connect to.
And there we have it! A large storage device, no root access, that nonetheless can make use of something else that doesn't have the storage but satisfies the other requirements.
And then we have things like parted to read out the partition table (and if unchanged, cryptsetup to read out LUKS). Now, I don't know if Termux has these and frankly I don't care. What I need for that is a chroot. But I can't just install Arch x86_64 on a flash drive and plug it into my phone. Linux Deploy to the rescue! 😁
It can make chrooted installations of common distributions on arm64, and it comes extremely close to actual Linux. With some Linux magic I could make that able to read the block device from Android and do all the required sorcery with it. Just a USB-C to 3x USB-A hub required (which I have), with the target flash drive and one to store my chroot on, connected to my Nexus. And fixed!
Let's see if I can get that flash drive back!
P.S.: if you're into electronics and worried about getting stuff like this stolen, customize it. I happen to know one particular property of that flash drive that I can use for verification, although it wasn't explicitly customized. But for instance in that flash drive there was a decorative LED. Those are current limited by a resistor. Factory default can be say 200 ohm - replace it with one with a higher value. That way you can without any doubt verify it to be yours. Along with other extra security additions, this is one of the things I'll be adding to my "keychain v2".11 -
Had a stupid sales dude. Lost his driver's license due to reckless driving (and this was a few in a row including drunk driving) for 6 months. As it was his job required to drive around he got instantly fired.
So he had to leave laptop, iPad and phone with us (IT). His next stop was finance for the lease car but he was pissed, left the building and drove off.
Apparently rules are super shitty for the theft of a lease by the registered employee. So we could not really mark it as stolen. We alerted the police anyway and he was caught next week for driving without a license. So he went to jail and we got the car back5 -
Fuck the feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. when a friend comes crying for you for help with their hacked account and you keep asking them about what they did to protect it in the first place and they reply with nothing, no recovery email, no recover phone, no secondary verification, NOTHING. and you can do nothing but stand there and watch them cry while you can literally do nothing because there literally nothing you can do to retrieve their stolen accounts. FUCK BLACK HAT HACKERS.3
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Great start to Halloween, phone has been stolen, and turned off so I can't track it. Oh, and I have no job so I can't get another right now. YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY3
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My son used an ASUS Live L1 for about 3 years, and then we bought a new smartphone 1 year ago. Cool, except that the e-mail address he registered with Live L1, no longer exists, has been permanently deleted. His newest phone was stolen, and we took the L1 to set it up again. Only... Google wants him to log in to the original email (FRP Lock) that no longer exists.
How absurd, the L1 cell phone was never marked as stolen, and now we are unable to use our property. Is there a way for my son to convince google that the phone is his?
Microsoft, Google, Apple... They give the impression that people give money and use devices as if they were a "favor".12 -
So my phone got stolen last night. FOR FUCK SAKE. I scrape together enough money to get another cheap phone after the last one broke, and now I need YET ANOTHER ONE WHEN I HAVEN'T GOT A JOB AND CAN'T APPLY FOR ONE WITHOUT ARGRFHUJGHIOSDJGBH:USKDGHISD:1
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The same people who are afraid of their data stolen by websites are totally fine with adding a phone number on take away websites.
What the fuck?
I hate it. It's a mandatory field. I don't know my phone number and if you call me there I won't even see it. If you can't deliver my order it must be my fault and so be it.14 -
Disclaimer: This is all theoretical. Neither me nor my friend (with whom I discussed this) are stupid enough to even try to pursue this, but as an idea, i believe it might generate cool/new ideas/ways for handling secure communications across social groups.
Let's do some role play. Let's design a delivery app for drug dealers, think Seamless or Uber Eats, but for drugs. Not for big deliveries, like kilograms of coke, but smaller stuff. Maybe a few grams of it or something. The clients could rate dealers, and vide-versa. This would build a level of trust within the system. There would be no names, just anonymous reviews, ratings, and prices. Only the info you'd need to know.
The biggest (only?) problem we found (besides legality) was that, how would you prove that you're a client and not a snitch (or cop). This would have to somehow be handled both on signup, as well as when ordering (let's imagine that all who are clients are pure and won't ever snitch).
One of the ways we found to combat this was to have the app invite-only. This would, in theory, do away with the problem of having snitches signing up. However, what if the phone got stolen/breached by a snitch, and they also got full access to the account. One way we thought we could combat this would be with a "dispose number" or something similar. Basically, you call a number, or send a text, or message a Signal bot etc, which would lead to the account's instant termination, no traces of that user left. Hence, a dispose number.
The flow of the app would be as follows:
A client wants some amount of heroin. He opens the app, searches for a dealer, sends the him the desired amount, and in return gets back a price from the dealer. If both parties agree on the amount and price, the deal would start.
The app would then select a random time (taken from the client's selected timeframe and the dealer's "open" time) and a location (within a certain radius of both them, somewhere in between them both for convenience). If both of them accept the time and place, they'll have to meet up at said time and place.
The actual delivery could also be done using two dead drops - the client drops the money at one of them, the dealer drops the goods at the other one. Yes, this might be subject to abuse, but it wouldn't be that bad. I doubt that clients would make huge orders to unknown/badly rated dealers, as well as dealers accepting offers from badly rated clients. My idea is that they would start small, just so if they do lose their money/goods, the actual loss wouldn't be as big for them, but for the other party, having bad ratings would mean less clients willing to buy or dealers willing to sell.
A third way would be to use crypto, but the reason I left this as the last one is because it's not that wide-spread yet, at least not in local drug dealing. With this method, the client would initiate the order, the crypto would be sent to either the dealer or an escrow account, the dealer would then drop the goods at a random place and let the client know where to go to get them. After the client has gotten the goods, they could both review/rate the quality as well as the overall experience with that dealer, which would either make or break the dealer's upcoming deals. This would be pretty much like other DNM's, but on a local scale, making deliveries faster.
So far, this would seem like something that would work. Are there any ideas that might improve this? Anything that might make things more secure/anonymous?
My reason for this post is to spark a conversation about security and anonymity, not to endorse drugs or other illegal stuff.
Cheers!
PS. Really loving the new PC design of devRant14 -
I just realized this is the dumbest marketing stunt McDonald's can come up with
https://thrillist.com/news/nation/...
The card is actually a phone case with your name etched into it.
1. How do I use it if I'm ordering online?
2. Why is the prize meant to encourage mobile ordering a physical card to use in stores?
3. So every time the winner takes out their phone, s/he is just asking to get mugged or have it stolen?3 -
!rant
Many out there say you should use 2 factor authentication with everything, but personally i feel lile that would just turn your phone into a sigle point of failure.
Phisical security is my primary worry, because loosing your phone or having it stolen yould pretty much lock you out of all your accounts.
Another thing is i don't know as much about android security, and i wouldn't be confortable managing it.
I have 2FA active for some key services, but imho a strong password is usually enough. I think its far more more importat for your overall security to avoid passwords re-use.
What do you think? Do you have 2FA on all the time?9 -
My phone was stolen so that's why I wasn't getting here to rant about this, but today I had to make a back up and remembered.
adminer's export function doesn't export the tables in the correct order for import. Doesn't take foreign keys into account.
Dude, that's the whole point of a relational database, relations between tables; if you don't take that into account then what's the point?
Is this the same for the rest of database managers or is it just adminer? Please tell me this isn't normal.4 -
At last! After my phone got stolen last year, I finally have a new one, so I can use devrant again. Feeling like arriving home again :-)6
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i didn't want to leave home today, i still had a ton of code to deploy before a deadline.
i went out, phone gets stolen. and i end up spending a lot of money i am not supposed to spend.
thankfully, i had my WhatsApp logged in on my desktop PC and the latest update allows you to use the web version even when the device is offline, was able to reconnect with clients and assure them that i haven't disappeared with their money.
I feel numb, it's probably going to feel much worse when i wake up tomorrow, i just kept sleeping for the most of today which is kinda strange but i don't want to think much about it.1 -
Two steps forward one back: Gets paid by client, phone gets stolen enroute. Now am just ranting from a tab
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