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".

"A Single Line of Computer Code Put Thousands of Innocent Turks in Jail"

I'll leave the title as it was, but people were hunted down just for having been once logged by a tracking pixel inside a messaging app.

Simply terrifying, I hold that off for a while, since it sounded like the usual fakes, but it seems its not, as more and more keep confirming it.

"The government eventually exonerated 11,480 of the wrongly accused, but some had already spent months in prison, and reportedly some even committed suicide."

"Elif finished dressing her youngest and watched police search her family's home before they took her into custody — for using a messaging app the government deems seditious.

She knew the arrest was coming. She'd already lost her job, because traces of the app known as Bylock were found on her phone"

"The regime relies on logs from the country's ISPs to identify users of Bylock, fingerprinting them on the basis of their communications with Bylock's servers. These communications can be triggered without using Bylock, though: Bylock's tracking pixel was used for analytics for pop-up ads and in at least eight apps."

https://m.slashdot.org/story/336657

http://cbc.ca/beta/news/...

https://boingboing.net/2018/01/...

Okay, That right there is pathetic https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/... .

First of all telekom was not able to assure their clients' safety so that some Joe would not access them.
Second of all after a friendly warning and pointing a finger to the exact problem telekom booted the guy out.
Thirdly telekom took a defensive position claiming "naah, we're all good, we don't need security. We'll just report any breaches to police hence no data will be leaked not altered" which I can't decide whether is moronic or idiotic.

Come on boys and girls... If some chap offers a friendly hand by pointing where you've made a mistake - fix the mistake, Not the boy. And for fucks sake, say THANK YOU to the good lad. He could use his findings for his own benefit, to destroy your service or even worse -- sell that knowledge on black market where fuck knows what these twisted minds could have done with it. Instead he came to your door saying "Hey folks, I think you could do better here and there. I am your customes and I'd love you to fix those bugzies, 'ciz I'd like to feel my data is safe with you".

How on earth could corporations be that shortsighted... Behaviour like this is an immediate red flag for me, shouting out loud "we are not safe, do not have any business with us unless you want your data to be leaked or secretly altered".

Yeah, I know, computer misuse act, etc. But there are people who do not give a tiny rat's ass about rules and laws and will find a way to do what they do without a trace back to them. Bad boys with bad intentions and black hoodies behind TOR will not be punished. The good guys, on the other hand, will.

Whre's the fucking logic in that...

P.S. It made me think... why wouldn't they want any security vulns reported to them? Why would they prefer to keep it unsafe? Is it intentional? For some special "clients"? Gosh that stinks

This is the story connected to this rant:
https://devrant.com/rants/1533475/...

Thanks everybody for the concern! I want to inform you that I'm doing alright again. I went to a not too big event not far from home.

After a few beers and one stronger drink me and my friend had a good time. Everything that happened after, I can't remember it.

My friend told me we were walking to our bikes (he wouldn't let me go home, he noticed something was wrong) and right before we arrived I fell to the ground. After a while my friend helped me up but as I stood again I fell immediately, my head hit the ground hard.

I puked a lot and after almost an hour the police was there, who called an ambulance (last night I got a flashback in my dreams and vaguely saw one of the two ambulance drivers.

They inspected me but surprisingly they didn't take me to the hospital. My friends' mom also arrived and together they pulled me in to her car.

After that they brought me home and of course my parents were shocked as hell. They pulled me out of the car and put me down on the couch. It was about 4 am at this moment.

I first woke up at 7 am but immediately fell asleep again (I can't remember me doing this but my father said I did this, he stayed awake the rest of the night). An hour later, 8 am, I finally woke up. A lot went through my head because I could't remember how I came home.

Without many words I went to bed and later we talked about everything that happened.

https://tagesschau.de/inland/...

What the fuck?

Yea, lets give the (in my opinion corrupt) police the full power to do just about everything - Oh and if you are not christian, bad for you we also put crosses everywhere you look now.

WHAT IN THE FUCKING FUCK? Why in the flying fuckworld is it possible to do such changes to the law without listening to "intelligent" (intelligent == people with a bit of common sense) people?

Same happened when europe wanted to give robots basic human rights (luckily they gave up on that after scientists wrote a paper)

This REALLY isnt a world I want to live in.

This isn't about dev stuff or anything, but I guess zombies kind of exist now?

There's an article and news footage of a teenager high off of bath salts, ripping his clothes off, and attacking a man by tearing and eating half of the man's face.

From the article "When Miami Police officer Jose Ramirez arrived on the scene and ordered Eugene to freeze, the crazed attacker ignored the warning, growling at the officer instead. Ramirez shot Eugene once, then four more times when the first shot didn’t seem to have an effect, killing Eugene, but not before 70-80 percent of Poppo’s face had been chewed off."

You can go ahead and read about it here: http://gunsandammo.com/blogs/...

If you get sick looking at blood, or someone's face missing, don't click that link. You will probably put your phone down (or get up from your computer) and puke.