A researcher in Germany has publicly released a post on how to bypass Apple’s latest efforts against unwanted tracking.
On February 10, Apple addressed this by publishing a news statement titled “An update on AirTag and unwanted tracking” in which they describe the way they are currently trying to prevent AirTags and the Find My network from being misused and what they have planned for the future.
…I was quite surprised, that when reading Apple’s statement I was able to immediately devise quite obvious bypass ideas for every current and upcoming protection measure mentioned in that relatively long list.
[…] They introduced the first-ever system for easy, cheap, worldwide tracking into a world where “unwanted tracking has long been a societal problem”, applaud themselves for implementing broken anti-stalking features, and now coerce others into also implementing protection against the tracking network they have rolled out.
Wordfence is a popular service to help protect WordPress servers from attacks. Its CEO has announced they are giving its service away for free to Ukrainian top-level domains (.ua) while simultaneously removing its service from Russia.
…effective immediately, blocked Russian government websites from using Wordfence. Those sites will continue to have Wordfence installed and will function normally, but they will no longer receive any threat intelligence from our servers. That means they will no longer receive firewall rules, malware signatures, a list of IPs currently engaged in brute-force attacks, or our IP blocklist. We are not taking any action against non-government websites in Russia as we do not want to affect civilians.
No longer aiding Russia makes sense when sanctions are announced that prohibit trade with Russia. It begs a deeper question, however, whether Wordfence could shift into more active measures such as pushing rules and signatures that would make a government site vulnerable.
…cargo vessel transporting cars, which was headed for St Petersburg, is “strongly suspected of being linked to Russian interests targeted by the sanctions”, said Capt Veronique Magnin, of the French Maritime Prefecture.
France just sailed up and grabbed a Russian ship, taking it as a wartime action. Should this not be how operations are conducted on Russian information technology as well?
In related news, Russia’s most powerful men appear to be engaging in conflict by tail-between-legs trying to hide as best they can when there is nowhere to hide.
Data reviewed by CNBC from Marine Traffic shows that at least four massive yachts owned by Russian business leaders have been moving toward Montenegro and the Maldives…
These ships are extremely unprotected and vulnerable, while operating in open spaces with almost impossible attribution.
Let’s say a small inexpensive automated drone packed with explosives sinks them (the sort of thing described for over two hundred years, at least since the auto-mobile naval torpedo of 1866), what then?
Source: Mailloux, R., Sengupta, D. L., Salazar-Palma, M., Sarkar, T. K., Oliner, A. A. (2006). History of Wireless. Germany: Wiley.
Most people probably haven’t heard of that incident, and would be far more familiar with the fact that neutral civilian American ships were repeatedly bombed by Germany before WWI started; President Woodrow “KKK” Wilson had intercepted the related German Navy order on November 18, 1914 and somehow managed to deny telling Americans for three years why so many ships and ports were on fire.
…agents who are overseas and all destroying agents in ports where vessels carrying war material are loaded in England, France, Canada, the United States and Russia. It is indispensable by the intermediary of the third person having no relation with the official representatives of Germany to recruit progressively agents to organize explosions on ships sailing to enemy countries in order to cause delays and confusion in the loading, the departure and the unloading of these ships.
And on that note July 22, 1916 (still a year before Wilson would declare Germany an enemy, and just eight days before the infamous “Black Tom” explosion in NYC) the German military intelligence set off a massive bomb during a parade in downtown San Francisco and killed 10 civilians.
Whereas naval warfare has a long and storied past, today it seems to have much in common with cyber warfare, which constantly gets written up as needing a new set of norms, instead of being treated as acts of war.
…domestic violence have increased by 133% in Yekaterinburg – the fourth largest city in Russia – after President Putin approved a law that reduces punishments for spousal or child abuse…
The operative question with Ukraine thus becomes why are Russians being told to shoot at themselves.
Russian leaders painted their own objectives as a morale-deflating act of abuse and self-harm, like saying a shoe is not a foot right before ordering soldiers shoot their own foot in a shoe.
Mama, I’m in Ukraine. There is a real war raging here. I’m afraid. We are bombing all of the cities…even targeting civilians.
We should not underestimate massive levels of suffering that can be caused from abuse and gross negligence and incompetence, yet also we should no lose sight of the fact that Russia is failing on basically every level.
“The Russians have been frustrated. They have been slowed. They have been stymied, and they have been resisted by Ukrainians, and to some degree, they’ve done it to themselves in terms of their fuel and logistics and sustainment problems,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief reporters.
The most important part of that analysis comes in a follow-up sentence, which I want to hold out and highlight here.
But as I said earlier, we would expect them to learn from these issues and adapt to them and try to overcome them. So I think we all need to be very sober here. in recognizing that this is combat, and combat is ugly, it’s messy, it’s bloody, and it’s not wholly predictable.
That sounds like the seasoned voice of an expert. However, they are giving too much credit.
Expecting Russians to learn from issues and adapt to overcome begs a question of why? Why would Russians still have that capability? The nature of their dictatorship is that any ability to learn, adapt and overcome is a direct threat to the power of a ruthless leadership.
Ugly, messy, bloody and unpredictable stands to reason. Copying and conforming, even repeating past mistakes seems likely. Adapting by learning? Unlikely.
One defender taking out an entire Russian column by attacking it from behind… Russia is displaying high levels of battle-field incompetence.
Russian armor running out of gas while lost goes even higher to a Nazi-level of incompetence (which I’ve written about extensively before in terms of innovation and operations failures that nonetheless drag out suffering for years).
In other words, Russia has spent decades murdering anyone genuinely capable of overcoming obstacles because allowing such skills in their ranks would have meant Putin (the biggest obstacle of all) was threatened.
Another reminder that Putin legalized physical abuse of wives and children, with estimates of at least 14,000 dead each year as a result.
That’s the elephant in the war room right now. If someone in Russia (let’s say just for argument a group of their colonels invoking colonel Oleg Penkovsky) genuinely sees that Russia has “done it to themselves” by exhibiting incompetence in the field, would they be able to push out Putin?
From there it stands to reason Russian Generals are used to plodding along without any real opposition, using aging technology, weak infrastructure, economic failures (mostly corrupt) and lack of will.
A dozen Russian tanks were seen just before the invasion of Ukraine stuck in mud and earlier many were burned out from inexpensive drones… foreshadowing an ease of counterattacks and the “logistics” obstacles for Russia.
This brings to mind June 1941 when Hitler thought he could push 80% of the Nazi Army (where 75% of that depended on horses) through Eastern Europe to seize Moscow in just three months.
Four months later the Operation was stalling so a new Operation Typhoon was initiated and quickly turned to disaster, halted by the elements.
…as they reached the approaches to Moscow, the German formations slowed to a crawl. Autumn rains had turned the dirt roads into rivers of mud. It was the Rasputitsa – the ‘quagmire season’ – and wheeled and horse-drawn transport became hopelessly stuck. The Germans chose to temporarily halt operations.
Nazi horse-drawn (vast majority) and wheeled transport fell to Russia’s “General Mud” Soviet T-34 tanks in WWII had wide tracks on a Christie suspension, technology that outclassed the Nazis especially in mud
That didn’t stop the Nazis however from being immoral mass-murderers committing war crimes.
Approximately 2.8 million Soviet POWs were killed by the German armed forces and other special units between June 1941 and February 1942, mainly through deliberate starvation and exposure to the elements. It was one of the most shocking acts of human atrocity in history.
We must now watch for any indication that Russia won’t benefit from a colonel awakening and resistance (e.g. 1974 Portugal or even Algeria’s 1961 failed putsch) and instead will turn far more punitive and hateful (e.g. killing fields and death camps of Nazi Germany starting in 1942 when it was abundantly clear Hitler was incompetent and couldn’t win any war).
Losing the civil war he started is how things look right now for a rapidly weakening Russian leader (different from Aleppo or Grozny), begging the question of how he may lash out at the most vulnerable in a ruthless and desperate quest for a feeling of power.
Putin first blockaded Grozny allowing no food, medicine or other supplies to enter; then bombed and shelled homes, hospitals and schools for weeks including the use of chemical weapons. The UN labeled it the most destroyed city on earth. Source: AP, Second Chechen War in 2000
