March 15th, 2010
A nasty windstorm blew through a couple weeks back and decimated the power infrastructure in my town. A large part of the town was out for as much as six days. While most of us New Englanders have generators to take care of the necessities (laptops, WiFi, PS3, etc.), I noticed that many of my fellow generator-powered neighbors were still unreachable via their telephone, and weren’t online. No connection to the outside world, or even down the street, and most importantly – no 911. Come to find, they were all on Comcast.
A few days into the outage, what began as fast busy signals finally began to change into telco messages telling me that these numbers were unable to receive calls. So while Comcast’s network was beginning to light back up, their customers were still dark. By now, it was about four days that I began seeing Comcast trucks finally make it onto the scene (that’s a pretty terrible response time). They were placing what appeared to be battery backup units all over town, about a mile or so apart from each other. I don’t think they were gas powered, but were more likely heavy-duty DC battery units (which work fine on NEBS-rated telco equipment). It took until almost the sixth day for Comcast to bring enough of their repeaters back up to where my neighbors were able to make phone calls. I don’t think their Internet connections came back until even later.
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February 15th, 2010
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman
A friend of mine was going on about really knowing people; “people… are not defined by what they do”, he said. The point he was making was not to judge people by the cover of what they do in life. But the deeper point, that he may not have even realized, was the tragedy in the truth of that statement. How tragic it is that we aren’t defined by what we do. It seems to me that, given the finite amount of time we have to live and become, that we spend more of our lives thinking about what we want to do than actually doing it.
I’m not talking about recreation. There are a lot of things we could do, but most of us have a shorter list of things we love to do. These are the things that give us purpose in life; they drive and define who we are, and we’d gladly choose them over the most expensive recreation. People refer to these higher things as passions or callings. I simply call doing the things that give us purpose, “living”. Using the term “living” seems like a misnomer, however, as people usually spend more of their life doing anything but the things that define them. The average person will spend twenty or thirty years of their “life” doing all of the things they don’t want to do in hopes that one day they’ll earn enough money to buy back what they gave up in the first place: the time to live. But time is exactly what we don’t have a lot of. If anything is worth burning our lives out on, wouldn’t it be the things that define us and give our lives purpose?
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February 15th, 2010
Yellow lights sure seem to change a lot faster when there’s a police officer perched across the street. I’ve always wondered if some cruisers were equipped with a special button to speed up the yellows just to screw with the population, but I can’t get anyone to cop to it yet. I can’t get anyone to cop to a magic donut button in cruisers either, but I’m positive they exist.
The most insulting part of this ticket isn’t the ticket itself (a measly $75), but the amount of senescent feces I’m still trodging through to simply pay the thing and move on with my life. The NH DMV has a special phone number that one can dial to pay a fine by credit card. Sounded like a great idea, but they also have something else: a special kind of brainless halfwit who works there. It’s been a week since I’ve started calling, and I’m on the verge of causing violent damage to my telephone at the consistent busy signal. I’m only slightly humored in the variety of torture methods when the opposite occurs: ringing into oblivion. I’ve surmised this is a diabolical, yet ingenious plot to cash in on an otherwise cushy low-salary government job, with the moral justification of single-handedly and subconsciously training people to never run a red light again by means of misdirected frustration. Then again, this job doesn’t require a very high level of intelligence, so perhaps it’s just the result of long donut breaks where the phone cord is dislodged to avoid inconvenient human contact.
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February 6th, 2010
Two Advanced iPhone Forensics Workshops are scheduled for 2010. Both workshops are open to both private sector and law enforcement personnel, and as usual with discounted ticket prices for active duty, vetted law enforcement. Please contact me if you have any questions about the upcoming workshops, and hope to see you there!
April 19-20, 2010
Peel High-Tech Crimes Unit
Mississauga, Ontario Canada
[ Register Here ] |
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May 4-5, 2010
Chicago Police Training Academy
Chicago, IL USA
[ Register Here ] |
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February 5th, 2010
A Spiritual Search for Growth Through Music
“Boy, do I have a lot to learn!” Anyone who’s ever picked up a musical instrument of any kind-from the first caveman banging rocks to that little kid at the guitar shop-has thought that. I know I did. I’d been trying for years to break into the music scene, to show everyone my chops, to make my mark. And I was good. But I wasn’t great. I knew that there was something missing.
Then the teacher showed up. I didn’t ask for him. I didn’t think I needed him. And all he said he could teach me was “nothing.”
From Grammy® Award-winning musical icon and legendary bassist Victor L. Wooten-an inspiring parable of Music, Life, and the difference between playing all the right notes…and feeling them.
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February 5th, 2010
Ballistic has come quite a long way since version 1.0. The victim of a $5.99 theft in the App Store, Ballistic was the antidote to a headache created by what was, at the time, the only iPhone app that had the gaul to call itself a ballistics calculator (and inaccurately, mind you). Today, Ballistic is beloved by avid hunters, top competition shooters, and even the military. And unlike some of the competing applications in the App Store, we didn’t have to fuglify Ballistic with olive drab green themes to make it look more commando-fashionable, add silly pictures showing the user how to hold their gun, or cutesy icons to show you which way the wind was blowing. Why? Because Ballistic is an application for shooters. Ballistic’s success has shown that shooters are smarter than your average consumer, and demand a rugged, high performance ballistics computer – not a toy app. Ballistic has led the way in new and revolutionary features the competition has sought to copy to stay afloat. With version 2.x, Ballistic incorporated the world renowned JBM ballistics engine, which is the gold standard other ballistics applications use to measure their own performance. Ballistic’s best days are still to come. So my question to the intelligent and experienced crowd out there using my application is: What do you want next?
Here are the rules. Whatever features you ask for have to be something a large portion of the user base would use; it can’t be a personal preference feature. Features must increase a shooter’s capabilities, rather than decrease them by dumbing the shooter down (for example: no pretty pictures). Features must overall make the application something more usable in the field, but without making the application more complicated to use. Finally, all features must be useful, and not just “cool”. Have at it and post your comments here!
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February 4th, 2010
I’ve finally gotten around to ditching the old, static blog and have replaced it with WordPress. Given that I frequently defile Twitter space with most of my current sentiments and literary fodder, I thought it more productive to share my longer rants here, on my website, and save Twitter for more brief outbursts of sarcasm and inflammatory remarks. Also, I’ve gotten a number of requests for an RSS feed, so those of you who would like to subscribe to my frequent nonsense can now receive me in the full glory of your daily aggregate drool. Welcome to 1995, Mr. Zdziarski, welcome.
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September 17th, 2009
A few have written in with questions about the latest version of the “Zdziarski” method of iPhone forensic recovery, which is used in the automated tools available free to law enforcement agencies worldwide. This is a quick rundown of the most frequently asked questions.
Q. Does this method “jailbreak” the device?
No. In fact, the latest method has an extremely lightweight footprint and the device will boot back into its normal operating mode once the imaging process is complete. The latest methods do not rewrite the operating system, do not patch the NOR, do not patch the kernel, do not grant the examiner access to the device, and do not require a system restore. All of the available automated forensic tools on this site have been updated to use these new methods. The new technique does not even use the 24KPWN exploit, widely touted by the hacking community.
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August 1st, 2009
Would you let a priest share your confessions in a government database? Or everything you confided in your therapist? Well, your doctors are about to share all of your priviledged medical information with the federal government.
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July 24th, 2009
Bypassing Passcode and Backup Encryption:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wS3AMbXRLs
Forensic Recovery of Raw Disk:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHdNoKIZUCw
What Data Can You Steal From an iPhone in 2 Minutes?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34f47m-lYSg
These YouTube videos demonsrate just how easy it is to bypass the passcode and backup encryption in an iPhone 3G[s] within only a couple of minutes’ time. A second video shows how easily tools can pull an unencrypted raw disk image from the device. The seriousness of the iPhone 3G[s]‘ vulnerabilities may make enterprises and government agencies think twice before allowing these devices to contain confidential data. Apple has been alerted to and aware of these vulnerabilities for many years, across all three models of iPhone, but has failed to address them.
The 3G[s] has penetrated the government/military markets as well as top fortune-100s, possibly under the misleading marketing term “hardware encryption”, which many have taken at face value. Serious vulnerabilities such as these threaten to put our country’s national security at risk. Apple’s only fix thus far has been to consistently put a few nails on the front door, but they have thus far failed to fix the major underlying design issues that allow for this threat. Unfortunately, the only way Apple seems to listen is through addressing such problems publicly, as all previous attempts to talk with them have failed. I sincerely hope they fix these issues before a breach occurs.
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