Judge rules reasonable cause and warrant required for cell phone searches at the U.S. border!

Finally! On Wednesday, "Judge Nina Morrison in the Eastern District of New York ruled that cellphone searches are a "nonroutine" search, more akin to a strip search than scanning a suitcase or passing a traveler through a metal detector."

Ultimately, of course, it'll still have to be locked down either through Congressional action, which will result in more challenges and CBP ignoring it, up through the Supreme Court. But for now, if you fly in to JFK, you're probably safe from search. A CBP agent admitted in court that most of the searches were fishing expeditions and most people were quite compliant.

I will still be inclined to power off my phone while passing through the ridiculous hell of customs and immigration while coming back into the country, but this is a great improvement, especially for journalists who work on potentially dangerous stories!

Meanwhile, since Biden is a lame duck, he's said to be working on a set of SCOTUS reforms that includes adding more justices to cover the additional circuit courts that have been added to the country.

https://reason.com/2024/07/26/courts-close-the-loophole-letting-the-feds-search-your-phone-at-the-border/

Australian tech fixes ClownStrike problem with a $55 bar code scanner and 20 minutes!

Rob Woltz, tech geek at an Australian tax/accounting firm with lots of PCs with encrypted hard drives, is one clever boffin.

Here's the problem. Encrypted hard drives. The key for unlocking the drive is 48 hexadecimal characters long! Your success rate of conveying that over the phone is very, VERY low.

Ron remembered that Windows PCs considers a bar code scanner no different than a keyboard, so he went down to an office supply store and bought one. Then he printed a bar code of the key, plugged in the scanner into one of the bricked PCs, booted it, and pointed the scanner at the bar code! And it unlocked the hard drive! Plug in a recovery flash drive, delete the bad ClownStrike signature file, reboot, and the PC is working just fine!

THEY FIXED ALL OF THEIR BRICKED MACHINES BY LUNCH TIME!

It took 3-5 minutes per PC, 20-30 minutes per server!

It is so nice when smarts overcomes a problem! Rob deserves a commendation and a nice little bonus for working out this solution.

I attended an seminar once where the subject was something along the lines of 'When things go to hell', basically when your database server breaks in a really horrific way. What's the first thing you do?

Walk away. Go get a cup of coffee, and think. Because if you jump in and start trying to fix things, you're much more likely to make things worse than if you step back, and form a plan to triage the situation and assess it to figure out what happened, THEN set to fixing things.

https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/25/crowdstrike_remediation_with_barcode_scanner/

(I really need to go through all my ClownStrike posts and tag 'em consistently!)