Meddling

It would’ve worked, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!

There are 617 posts filed in Meddling (this is page 43 of 62).

Break-in, one year later

Michael Darnell Green


Speaking of anniversaries, today is the first-year anniversary of the break-in of our home. Though Michael Darnell Green was arrested for a string of break-ins around our home at the time, our home was not among those that Green confessed to burglarizing.

Since that time, I’ve become convinced that Green was the burglar. Our burglar appeared to know what he was doing and by all accounts Green is a seasoned professional. He certainly fits the description offered by my neighbors and by the surveillance video that shows the suspect. It could be that Green didn’t remember our home because the detectives taking him around the neighborhood didn’t lead him through the woods the way Green most likely approached our home. Green also was unsuccessful in entering our home, so he might not have remembered it as clearly as the others. He allegedly hit so many homes, I wouldn’t be surprised if he couldn’t remember them all.
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Occupying the high ground

My thoughts on the whole Occupy Wall Street movement have just changed considerably. I just watched the video of UC Davis Chancellor Katehi walking to her car, surrounded by thousands of completely-silent student protesters. Calling it the “Walk Of Shame,” the silent protest was in response to Katehi’s order which resulted in the egregious pepper spraying of a dozen peaceful protesters on the UC Davis campus Friday.

As Garance Franke-Ruta of The Atlantic points out, Friday’s unprovoked attack was much worse than the above video shows, with police holding the peaceful students and directly pepper-spraying them in the face and throat.
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Some see nothing wrong with reporter being detained

I’m appalled at the number of knuckle-draggers weighing in on the N&O executive editor John Drescher’s column today about the detainment of a reporter covering the take-down of the protesters in the abandoned Chrysler building in Chapel Hill. It seems there are quite a few who see nothing wrong with the police detaining a reporter in contradiction to our country’s First Amendment rights. Some apparently think she got what she deserved.

Here’s what the cops should do in the future: check a reporter’s credentials. If the credentials check out, kindly ask the reporter to move out of the way and go back to your work. Do not handcuff the reporter as the reporter will not harm you. And certainly do not order them to cease taking pictures from a pulic location as this would most assuredly be a violation of First Amendment rights.

I don’t think this will go away anytime soon, and nor should it.

Addressing some theories about DoD snooping

Update Nov. 10: The mystery has been solved. Sprint’s borrowing DoD IP addresses, most likely without DOD’s knowledge. It appears to be entirely harmless.

A few of my friends have weighed in with their theories as to why I was seeing my phone traffic coming from a DoD network. Many of these theories point out how the DoD is the owner of vast stretches of IP address space, many of which aren’t advertised as public routes. Some organizations treat these addresses as non-routable addresses, making it appear traffic originates from the DoD. One blogger discovered the IPs of the UK Ministry of Defence being used similarly by T-Mobile.
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DoD IP address mysteriously unreachable

I decided to see if I could find out more about this mysterious IP address that apparently belongs to the Department of Defense.

One of the best ways to do this is to run a traceroute, which shows the path back to the IP through the Internet’s routers. I also wanted to see if I could find any evidence that my router or my ISP’s router was compromised or broken.

Performing a traceroute from my home computer to the IP provides me this output:

root@maestro:# traceroute 28.191.58.169
traceroute to 28.191.58.169 (28.191.58.169), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
1 wireless.tonsler (192.168.3.252) 0.971 ms 1.419 ms 1.634 ms
2 user-0c2h181.cable.mindspring.com (24.40.133.1) 14.064 ms 13.993 ms 24.788 ms
3 66.26.46.13 (66.26.46.13) 18.689 ms 18.942 ms 19.029 ms
4 * * *
5 * * *
6 * * *
7 * * *
8 * * *

It’s not unusual that the traceroute dies on the way back: many hosts and/or networks go down and the packet trace stops. However, it is interesting that the traceroute dies on Time Warner’s network. That last router, 66.26.46.13, belongs to Road Runner:
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Why is the Defense Department snooping on my phone?

Update Nov 9 11:00 AM. Mystery solved! Sprint is apparently squatting on the DoD addresses, using them for their internal phone network. Sprint understandably wants to firewall these phones from the wild and wooly Internet, so it NATs the phone traffic from these supposedly-private IPs to the phone’s public IP address. SIP packets have the internal IP embedded in them, however, and aren’t easily NATted. This address slipped through Sprint’s firewall, causing me alarm (fortunately undue alarm!)

Break out your tinfoil hats because this will blow your mind.

I found something quite disturbing today while trying to get my Virgin Mobile LG Optimus V phone talking completely through Voice-Over-IP (VoIP). For reasons not entirely clear yet, I discovered that voice packets from my phone are being routed to an IP address belonging to the Department of Defense.

Some background

I had long been a “dumb phone” kind of guy when it comes to mobile phones but finally bit the bullet and got an Android phone from Virgin Mobile when the right plan came along. I am also a VoIP enthusiast and have been sending phone calls over the Internet for almost ten years now. I’m also a cheapskate, so naturally when I got my Android phone one of the first things I wanted to do was to figure out how to make calls with it completely over VoIP – using my unlimited data plan instead of burning my limited voice minutes. That’s what hackers do, you know.
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Iran assassaination plot

Over the past few days, the US claims it uncovered a clumsy plot by Iran’s Quds Force to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States. The Iranians supposedly approached an informant posing as a Mexican drug cartel member in an effort to bomb a DC-area restaurant that the diplomat frequents.

I’m having some trouble buying into this plot. Yes, Iran engages in terrorism and assassination but this plot that officials have called “amateur hour” isn’t keeping with Iran’s history. This is the same Iran who allegedly carried out truck bombings in the past which obliterated the bombing vehicles to the extent that only scraps of metal were recovered (with no serial numbers)? How could this Iran suddenly have gotten so sloppy? Iran has shown that it is perfectly capable of carrying out its own bombings. Why would it need to enlist a supposed member of a drug cartel?

I’m a little wary of these charges until I learn more.

Appliance rental ripoffs

Highway robbers

I spent Saturday afternoon emceeing the second annual East Raleigh Community Day, which went better than I expected considering it was the make-up day for the original August date. Anyway, I returned to my car to find a yellow paper stuffed under the windshield wiper.

It was an ad for Rent-A-Center, a rental appliance store at the other end of the shopping center. On the paper were the smiling mugs of Hulk Hogan and Troy Aikman, flashing thumbs up signs from the screen of an LG 60″ HDTV. Folks who don’t know any better could have this TV delivered for the special rental price of only $29.99 per week (regularly $39.99 per week). Yes, $29.99 per week. That’s supposedly a deal.
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The “Mugged in London” scam

I was sifting through my Gmail spam folder when I found a message purporting to be from my friend. Let’s call him Bryan:

Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2011 02:02:13 -0700 (PDT)
From: Bryan bryan@bryansHackedEmailAccount.edu
Reply-To: Bryan scammersFakeEmailThatLooksLikeBryans@ymail.com
Subject: Urgent help…Bryan
To: Bryan bryan@bryansHackedEmailAccount.edu

How are you doing? This has had to come in a hurry and it has left us in a devastating state. My family and I had a visit to (UK) for a short vacation unannounced some days back, but unfortunately we were mugged at the park of the hotel where we stayed by some thugs, all cash, cell phones and credit cards were stolen off us but luckily for us we still have our passports with us.
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