Berg’s 18th Law Times Two
By Mitch Berg
Shot: School shooting in another gun free zone ended cold by a good guy with a gun.
Top story in the media: strippers and snowfall.
Chaser: Austin bomber blows self up as authorities close in.
The chief described how authorities tracked down the suspect’s vehicle to a Round Rock-area hotel. Police began following the suspect’s vehicle, and as SWAT approached, the suspect detonated a bomb in the car, Manley said.
The name of the suspect, described only as a 24-year-old white man, has not been released, pending notification of his family, Manley said.
Now, as I note in the title, Berg’s 18th Law is in full effect.
But I’m going to hazard a guess, here, that the Austin police tracked a copycat. Going from personal delivery to Fedex? Going from packages to tripwires?
I’m not expert – as if – but “single bomber” doesn’t pass my deeply-unqualified sniff test. I’d be happy to be proven wrong. FWIW, Austin’s police chief disagrees.
By the way – this news infographic about the investigation…
…should start one thinking about data privacy:
March 21st, 2018 at 7:09 am
Authorities….obtained a search warrant for his Google search history that showed him conducting searches they considered suspicious, the official said.
Duckduckgo.com
A friend of mine recently purchased a Rasberry Pi3 single board computer, and is working on getting it working with Ubuntu MATE. He says commercially available computers come pre-configured with plug ins to allow easy access to your data the second you log on to any ISP.
He says social media apps are innocuous looking, user friendly front ends to enormous relational databases. He says if you’re gonna play on the internet, you want to make sure you wear your helmet.
March 21st, 2018 at 8:11 am
to get a rough idea of the environment you’re playing in go to:
https://panopticlick.eff.org/
and test your computer using your favorite browser (Safari, Chrome, Opera, Brave, Firefox,etc)
then do the same test with MS Edge in its default setting
With MS Edge my computer “has a unique fingerprint”
with my favorite browser:Firefox 59 w/NoScript, Privacy Badger, and Ublock Origin add-ons, my computer rates “only one in 10,242 browsers have the same fingerprint” which makes my machine relatively anonymous.
The Raspberry Pi is an excellent little machine for browsing the web and you can use multiple browsers with it so you can control how much access the web has to your information even to the point of simply flashing a pristine copy of your OS environment on to your SD card after a session. The RPI is getting faster too, the latest version announced 3.14.18 has a 1.4ghz processor in addition to builtin wireless
March 21st, 2018 at 8:48 am
My Occam’s razor says single bomber. Or at most, the dead guy had accomplices. Building a bomb isn’t a skill one picks up in an afternoon. At least the kind that is detonated by movement or a trip wire. My guess is that he switched to the tripwire because nobody was going to pick up a package on the front steps after the first two explosions. Motive is murky. Could be the first one was the intended target and the others were diversions. Or a psychopath Unabomber style. Or an Islamic State sympathizer. Maybe a UT computer science major who got booted out of his PhD program for sexual harassment. OK, that’s a stretch.
March 21st, 2018 at 8:56 am
Well, NPR is making a big point that the alleged bomber is a “WHITE male” so we know their narrative is going to take the Timothy McVeigh track.
March 21st, 2018 at 9:39 am
He says if you’re gonna play on the internet, you want to make sure you wear your helmet.
Swiftee, could you please draw me a helmet I can use on-line?
March 21st, 2018 at 10:32 am
kel wrote: “Well, NPR is making a big point that the alleged bomber is a “WHITE male” so we know their narrative is going to take the Timothy McVeigh track.”
I don’t see the word “terrorist” here. Curious.
March 21st, 2018 at 11:45 am
I don’t see the word “terrorist” here. Curious.
In case you missed it in the article, Emery:
Police have not identified a motive for the string of bombings, Manley said.
March 21st, 2018 at 1:32 pm
@NW LOL
March 21st, 2018 at 1:33 pm
“Well, NPR is making a big point that the alleged bomber is a “WHITE male”
Yeah, well we already knew that. The cops said the devices were sophisticated.
March 21st, 2018 at 1:42 pm
Mac, that’s a pretty good site. My friend told me about how easy it is to boot a Pi from a clean SD card, but the prob is, you’ll lose your plug ins and third party apps.
He says this is the bomb. It also makes it easy to load clean copies of Windows and Linux OS images.
https://www.symantec.com/products/ghost-solutions-suite
March 21st, 2018 at 1:43 pm
Trick is, create your images BEFORE you log on to the net.
That’s what my friend says.
March 21st, 2018 at 6:58 pm
Ian, yes, the guy was a genius. Have the authorities track you down, tag with him at all the sites. Then, go into a place with video, time stamped and cross-referenced with the packages mailed. Brilliant. ~ His white privilege killed him.
March 21st, 2018 at 11:33 pm
At least the dude wasn’t tricked into carrying a cell phone with camera and microphone that can be operated remotely, like virtually every cell phone on the market!
Thank God security service personnel are chosen for loyalty to the regime rather than competence. Otherwise we’d all be in trouble.
March 22nd, 2018 at 8:54 am
I reinstalled ‘Little Snitch’ on my mac. It shows links for anything going out of your computer, where it’s going to and where the servers are. The point is, everyone is mining data about you constantly, your data is going everywhere and there’s little you can do about if you are connected.
March 22nd, 2018 at 3:52 pm
What? You say your Mac reinflated your little snatch?
March 23rd, 2018 at 3:39 pm
Sounds like something you might want to take up with with your significant other. 😂