Monthly Archives: February 2023

Passcode Vulnerability

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The subheadline of a Wall Street Journal article on cell phone security vulnerabilities presents the subject of my post.

The passcode that unlocks your phone can give thieves access to your money and data; “it’s like a treasure box”

The article then laid out the problem:

The thieves are exploiting a simple vulnerability in the software design of over one billion iPhones active globally. It centers on the passcode, the short string of numbers that grants access to a device; and passwords, generally longer alphanumeric combinations that serve as the logins for different accounts.
With only the iPhone and its passcode, an interloper can within seconds change the password associated with the iPhone owner’s Apple ID. This would lock the victim out of their account, which includes anything stored in iCloud. The thief can also often loot the phone’s financial apps since the passcode can unlock access to all the device’s stored passwords.
“Once you get into the phone, it’s like a treasure box,” said Alex Argiro, who investigated a high-profile theft ring as a New York Police Department detective before retiring last fall.

This image lays out the technique:There’s nothing magic about iPhones in this regard, though; Android cell phones are just as vulnerable to this sort of attack.

However, there are a couple of solutions to this, regardless of the type of cell phone you use. Each solution also works even better when done in concert with the other, and they rely on something old-fashioned: caution and concern for personal privacy.

One solution is to not use your cell phone to conduct any activity, not only financial, that you don’t want exposed to the public, much less to a thief. That way, if your cell phone is stolen, there’s nothing in it beyond your contact list that can be hacked. The potential cost of doing non-telephone things on your cell phone is far greater than the short-term convenience gained.

The other solution is to not store anything in the cloud. Keep your private material private by keeping it entirely within your home’s network, and ideally even more restricted: keep that information solely on your PC’s or laptop’s hard drive, or better, on an external hard drive that connects only via USB—and keep that external storage device separate from your PC/laptop.

Related, and subsidiary to all of that, don’t store passcodes or passwords on your PC/laptop, even via a passcode/word manager. In the unlikely event your laptop is stolen, or your PC is stolen via home break-in, that manager can be hacked at the thief’s leisure.

Disingenuosity of NATO’s “Biggest European Members”

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Here’s the lede in the WSJ article:

Germany, France, and Britain see stronger ties between NATO and Ukraine as a way to encourage Kyiv to start peace talks with Russia later this year, officials from the three governments said, as some of Kyiv’s Western partners have growing doubts over its ability to reconquer all its territory.

Ukraine’s President Volodymir Zelenskyy always has been willing to engage in peace talks with the barbarian invader, and his criteria for entering into those negotiations have been clearly stated all along. That Vladimir Putin refuses to meet those criteria—his insistence, in fact, that Ukraine isn’t even a real nation—are on the barbarian chieftain, not on Zelenskyy. Rishi Sunak, Emmanuel Macron, and Olaf Scholz, the British Prime Minister, French President, and German Chancellor, respectively, know this full well. I’ll have more on that growing doubt of Ukraine’s recovering its territory (not reconquering, as those three put it) below.

There’s this from a carefully anonymous French…official:

We keep repeating that Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? If the war goes on for long enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable. And no one believes they will be able to retrieve Crimea.

None of these wondrous national leaders—or the Biden administration, come to that—believed Ukraine would be able to defeat the barbarian’s initial invasion, either; they expected Ukraine to fall in a matter of days. That was their rationalization for withholding weapons Ukraine—the folks actually doing the fighting, bleeding, and dying—said they needed to drive the barbarian back out. And so here we are, a year later, and the Ukrainians are still fighting, bleeding, and dying, and they have recovered much of the territory the barbarian took (and devastated and inflicted atrocities on the captured populations during the occupations, on the way back out, and still from afar. But these wonders continue to avert their eyes from that).

If these august personages, including our own President Joe Biden (D) were serious about Russia mustn’t win, or whether the war goes on for [too] long, they’d get out of the way of arms transfers to Ukraine, they’d rapidly supply the weapons Ukraine says they need, in the numbers and at the pace Ukraine says they need them, so Ukraine could avoid an attritional war, recover all of their lost territory—including Crimea—and win quickly.

Finally, there’s this most blatant bit of hypocrisy, and outright dishonesty, from Macron himself as he told Mr Zelensky that (as paraphrased by the WSJ)

even mortal enemies like France and Germany had to make peace after World War II.

Of course. But not until after Germany had been driven back completely out of France—and all other Nazi German-occupied territories. Peace talks were not even allowed until then; the Allies demanded Germany’s unconditional surrender before peace talks could begin. Zelenskyy is not holding out for the barbarian’s unconditional surrender, only that he leave Ukraine.

Any Excuse to Slow-Walk

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Now the Biden Defense Department is saying that it won’t be able to deliver the “promised” M1 tanks to Ukraine before the end of this year or potentially the next. According to Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, the military does not currently have the available inventory to supply the tanks. “Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh added:

We just don’t have these tanks available in excess in our US stocks, which is why it is going to take months to transfer these M1A2 Abrams to Ukraine[.]

Actually, we do have the tanks to pass along, excess or not. We have lots of them in active units both here and overseas—like in Europe. It seems that President Joe Biden (D), his SecDoD Lloyd Austin, and Wormuth are concerned about drawing down active inventory and, furthermore, do not take seriously the need to get contracts let (and to get Pentagon bureaucrats out of the way so contracts can be let efficiently) in order to ramp up tank (and other weapon systems) production.

Tanks we have in Europe could be at the Ukrainian fronts in a couple of days plus training time. And the Slavs aren’t as dumb as the German government makes them out to be; they’d train up quickly.

Separately, F-16s, European NATO fighter aircraft, and associated logistics chains could be transferred to Ukraine in a few hours plus training time. A-10s, designed from the ground up to destroy armor and other ground formations and which too many in DoD insist are excess to our needs (so no inventory about which to worry drawing down) could be delivered to Ukraine in a matter of days plus training time. It’s time to stop saying “No.”

I have to ask: what’s the value of weapons that are held in reserve and held in reserve and…? Weapons held in reserve in favor of not drawing down inventory, rather than for sound tactical reasons, are weapons that are not available to defeat an enemy’s offensive, or to punch through enemy defense lines, or to exploit breakthroughs otherwise created. (Note, for instance, that the Ukrainian offensives in the east that liberated Kharkiv and much of that oblast, and in the south that liberated Kherson, petered out by the time the one got to Bakhmut in the east, and the other to the river on the southern edge of Kherson, due to lack of armor and other mechanized systems with which to continue exploiting those efforts’ success.)

Aircraft withheld altogether are aircraft not available to shoot down the barbarian’s aircraft and missiles that the barbarian is using to destroy Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, hospitals, and residential neighborhoods all across Ukraine and to butcher civilian women and children.

The only effect of holding back these tanks—and of NATO nations (like Germany) slow-walking delivery of their “promised” Leopard tanks—and aircraft is to prolong the barbarian’s war against Ukraine. The only purpose for prolonging that war is to increase the bleeding and the weakening of Russia, with the side effect of increasing the odds that Russia will eventually succeed in overrunning and destroying Ukraine.

That the prolongation also increases the bleeding that Ukrainians are doing—civilian women and children as well as Ukrainian soldiers—doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest to Biden and his cronies or to those European NATO nations. That increased Ukrainian bloodshed also comes in close parallel with Biden’s avowed policy of creating and then protecting the invader’s status as sanctuary, proof against Ukrainian strikes against the barbarian’s staging areas and supply dumps that are inside Russia.

Yet Another Reason…

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…for State and local jurisdictions to stop taking government funds. This one is from HUD.

In proposed regulations that would touch any jurisdiction that accepts any sort of HUD funding, fair housing must mean a plan to “promote equity in their communities, decrease segregation, and increase access to opportunity and community assets for people of color and other underserved communities.”

Sounds reasonable.

However.

Those required to comply will include more than 1,200 cities and counties receiving HUD funding. All will be required to develop “equity plans.”
Such equity could mean anything from building low-income housing to redrawing school district lines for racial or socio-economic integration, all as assessed by the HUD bureaucracy.

Because folks moving from here to there still will be told, on arrival there, where they will be permitted to live and where their kids will be permitted to go to school and on and on—they’ll still be under government control. If they want, for good or bad reasons, to live with folks who look like them, or who share their values, or…, central government under these rules will not permit them that choice.

Racial discrimination in housing is pernicious, Husock concluded his piece (at the link). But he doesn’t go far enough in his conclusion. For Washington to invoke it to socially engineer neighborhoods across America is dangerous. No. For the Federal government itself to give special treatment to one group of Americans over other groups of Americans is especially pernicious racism.

This is another example of Federal government funds that are being transferred to State and local jurisdictions coming with strings attached, for good reasons or ill. Government strings only increase the central government’ ability to dictate terms to locals, to reduce our States to the same relationship to the central government as counties have relative to their States: merely convenient districts whose sole purpose is to enforce Federal law. That works for counties in States, but the structure of our system of federal government puts the States—individually as well as a group—on par with our central government on nationally domestic matters—and on higher authority on matters domestic to an individual State.

It is this federal republican structure, the role of our several States as [50] separate experiments in democracy, that string-loaded Federal funds transferred to States and locals so severely deprecates.

“Mistake”

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Recall the Smithsonian Museum student visitors who were ejected from the Museum by its guards for the heinous crime of wearing pro-life ball caps. The Museum’s management has responded to House Republicans requests for status and repercussions.

“This was an aberration and not reflective of Smithsonian values and practice of welcoming all visitors regardless of viewpoint,” Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III said. “Visitors are not to be denied access based on messages on their clothing, and an error was made in this regard on January 20, 2023.”
When asked whether disciplinary action would be taken, Bunch responded, “The instruction to visitors to remove their pro-life hats was a mistake – a misinterpretation of what was permissible. It was not a willful violation.

The museum’s guards were acting out of mistake, so they’ll skate with no consequences.

Sure. The ejection might have been a mistake. I don’t think it was, but if it was, why aren’t the museum’s training and evaluation personnel—the ones who trained these guards and then marked them ready for duty—under sanction for their failed training and evaluation?

Regardless, stipulate the guards’ ejections of the students was a mistake. That wasn’t all that the Museum personnel did to these students. Per Jordan Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, which is representing the students,

The museum staff mocked the students, called them expletives, and made comments that the museum was a “neutral zone” where they could not express such statements[.]

That behavior was not a mistake; it was deliberately done. Why aren’t the guards being punished for that?

It looks like the Smithsonian, under current management, isn’t worth the moneys committed to supporting it.