When police arrived looking for what they thought was an abducted child the quickly became confused and were close to become aggressive when a donator alerted [Caleb] Hart to another stream of the swatter himself streaming his side of the emergency call. “I wonder if they killed his dog, did they shoot his dog?” the swatter said over his stream followed by a creepy laugh.
What was Caleb Hart doing? Live streaming Mega Man X for a charity event.
I’m not a “gamer”, because I’ve never felt like devoting that kind of time to playing games. So I’m having trouble understanding how someone gets so wrapped up in something that they feel the need to call in fake abduction calls. Involving unrelated (to the issue) family members is just horrible. I mean…look, there are times when I’ve read something by Caroline Seide, and I might disagree with it (generally when I feel like it goes into hyperbole territory) but at most I roll my eyes, maybe sigh, and that’s it.
Just…guys…could you stop being dickholes, so I can admit to playing video games without women judging me?
You can safely ignore the issue. The level of GamerGate awareness (and SWATing and other tangentially gamer-related affairs) outside of a few small circles is negligible. It is a particularly noisy tempest, but it is still confined in a teapot of a fairly limited size.
That reminded me of the Hitch Hiker’s Guide vignette about the trucker who never could escape the rain. I think it was in the Eoin Colfer book.
The trucker chose to be a trucker to get away from the rain, but it didn’t work. Every day it dumped on him. But what he didn’t know was that he was actually a rain god. The clouds loved him, and just wanted to be near him all the time, and he kept trying to run away!
If you have either of these, whether you ignore them or not, you’re being tracked. Most social media platforms track you in order to advertise to you. The only way to NOT be tracked online is to go through some anonymous stuff like Tor (which means you’re “suspicious”) or to not be online, which as @funruly indicated, has serious social consequences. Like it or not, that’s our reality.
Can be alleviated to some degree by running adblockers and Ghostery (and removing most of the trackers), using text-based browser from the console (e.g. elinks) for routine browsing/searching, often cleaning unneeded cookies.
Sure… but even those aren’t a perfect solution, I’d guess. There is the tracking we know about - the corporate tracking, and the tracking we might not know about. I think on some level, the internet is indeed “public space” (in the Habermas sense of the phrase) or at least that’s probably the law enforcement argument. I dunno… if you set your social media to private does that mean the police/law enforcement agencies need a warrant to look at your stuff? I don’t know if such a case has gone through the Supreme court to settle that? Plus, if someone is trying to track you to do something like this, they’re not going to follow the law anyhow.
They can see only what is there. Not putting stuff in will limit its availability while it allows reading stuff from others. The others then can then get data from you by non-social-media channels, e.g. email.
The security is not either-or, black-white. It has fairly fine granulation, with tradeoffs to choose at every step.
Sure… and to be fair, I’d say that not everyone is fully aware of the fine granulations, especially people who know less about computers, the internet, and how those things work…
A black-white worldview is very common in many areas. It can be quite blinding. Sometimes the results are merely not seeing the obvious opportunities, sometimes it yields the us-vs-them mentality that needlessly polarizes things and makes arriving to solutions all that more difficult…
Though, in digital electronics, the situation is the opposite. You have a voltage range that’s not high enough for one and not low enough for zero and if it is either will depend on process tolerances of the given part. And the totem-pole transistors may get both partially opened, sinking current needlessly. Generally it sucks to be there and should be avoided.
The thing is, if the homeowner fights back, he’s likely to die, and in that case the raid will probably be considered by the police and the general public to have been justified. Information about the “prank” sparking the whole thing might never come to light.
So it might be up to regular citizens to advocate about this. There’s already a movement to reduce the use of violent raids, and this could be part and parcel.
As for technological solutions, police should have the equipment to see when the ANI and caller ID don’t match, indicating probable spoofing. The telephone network should probably enforce rules making spoofing less than trivial, as well. It’s good that the SWAT team in the article was already as suspicious and cautious as it was, and hopefully more will be done in this direction.
Well, there have been enough cases where untrustworthy informants gave bogus tips that ended with SWAT teams going to the wrong houses and getting shot at by the homeowners, and the homeowners weren’t themselves shot or where they were shot but the truth came out. If someone gets killed, the cops are going to look into the circumstances, and if there’s no evidence that anyone at that home called them, that’s going to suggest some things.
What the cops really need is the ability to figure out who it was that actually called them, so they can prosecute when this happens. Knowing that the phone number was spoofed or didn’t come from a phone associated with the address doesn’t help much - they still have to expect the worst and therefore put themselves and the homeowners in danger.
