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Electronic Frontier Foundation

DOJ Often Used Cell Tower Impersonating Devices Without Explicit Warrants 146

Via the EFF comes news that, during a case involving the use of a Stingray device, the DOJ revealed that it was standard practice to use the devices without explicitly requesting permission in warrants. "When Rigmaiden filed a motion to suppress the Stingray evidence as a warrantless search in violation of the Fourth Amendment, the government responded that this order was a search warrant that authorized the government to use the Stingray. Together with the ACLU of Northern California and the ACLU, we filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden, noting that this 'order' wasn't a search warrant because it was directed towards Verizon, made no mention of an IMSI catcher or Stingray and didn't authorize the government — rather than Verizon — to do anything. Plus to the extent it captured loads of information from other people not suspected of criminal activity it was a 'general warrant,' the precise evil the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent. ... The emails make clear that U.S. Attorneys in the Northern California were using Stingrays but not informing magistrates of what exactly they were doing. And once the judges got wind of what was actually going on, they were none too pleased:"

Comment It's not the ads. Its about not being tracked (Score 2) 978

See here's the thing, I don't have problems with ads, per-se, I have problem with ads being served by third parties that also serve ads on thousands of other sites as well and track me from site to site. Serve up your ads from your own servers, under your own domain, then I'll see your ads just fine. But if you expect to show me ads that track me, you can go get bent.

Comment Re:Full disclosure takes a hit (Score 2) 156

1 hour? Give me a fucking break. Doing it in public is as good as launching the attack yourself.

EFnet was fixed within an hour or two for the most part. More importantly the hub servers were not impacted which helped with getting things working sooner.

The patch could have been discussed behind closed doors. If you wanted to get someones attention about the real threat, you could have popped a single server ONCE without making it public.

Indeed the patch could have been discussed behind closed doors, but sometimes zero day things happen. The real question is how do you deal with it when it happens.

Do you have any idea what its like running a network like EFNet and coordinating upgrades across all servers? Do you think there are admins awake and ready to be your bitch and patch their servers on your command in all time zones? Currently showing 44 servers linked ... Yea, an hour was plenty of time to deal with the issue ...
You're a douche for even saying what you're saying.

I personally fixed 4 or 5 efnet servers directly and got patches out to the efnet admin community pretty quickly. Neonlod also had patches out pretty quickly as well, sooner than I did actually.

TBH I'm surprised that it didn't happen sooner seeing that the bug had been there since 2004. The bug itself was a combination of errors. First was a code change that was supposed to do parameter count checking for the called function, however zero was put in for the parameter count that was required.

This didn't matter for a while though as the rest of the code didn't rely on that parameter count checking code. However when some additional code was added, it wasn't protected by the old code that didn't care about parameter count, but it expected that the new parameter count code was working(which it wasn't) thus a command with an empty parameter caused the core dump. Fail.

Comment Re:fsck xfs does something? (Score 1) 196

You have your root filesystem mounted read only and then run xfs_repair on it. Sometimes getting your root filesystem remounted read-only can be tricky, however. Sometimes this requires passing init=/bin/sh to the kernel, so you start with no other processes running. However you go about getting your root filesystem mounted read only, after you run xfs_repair(or e2fsck for that matter really) you reboot immediately.

Stop trying to oversimply things you don't understand.

Perhaps you don't understand things as well as you think you do. See the section below regarding the -d option to xfs_repair and the context in which you'd use it.

-d Repair dangerously. Allow xfs_repair to repair an XFS filesystem mounted read only. This is typically done on a root fileystem from single user mode, immediately followed by a reboot.

Comment Re:Interesting (Score 1) 65

Same on a properly configured Linux system, really. If you get to the point where you are running into the Linux out of memory killer, you probably need more memory for what you are trying to do anyways. For a desktop I think the default Linux out of memory killer is okay, but for servers...disable that crap.

Comment Re:Interesting (Score 1) 65

You can disable the oom killer on Linux and just panic on oom, if you want it to act more like FreeBSD. There is a sysctl setting called vm.panic_on_oom. Setting sysctl vm.panic_on_oom=2, will cause the kernel to panic on OOM regardless. That will give you a well defined behavior and not have to deal with the random process...errr..OOM killer.

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