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Planet Debian

Tor Relays on Twitter

A while ago I played with a Twitter bot that would track radio amateurs using a packet radio position reporting system, tweet their location and a picture from Flickr that was taken near to their location and a link to their packet radio activity on aprs.fi. It’s really not that hard to put these things together and they can be a lot of fun. The tweets looked like this:

[tweet missing]

This isn’t about building a system that serves any critical purpose, it’s about fun. As the radio stations were chosen essentially at random, there could be some cool things showing up that you wouldn’t otherwise have seen. Maybe you’d spot a callsign of a station you’ve spoken to before on HF or perhaps you’d see stations in areas near you or in cool places.

MAC Catching

As we walk around with mobile phones in our pockets, there are multiple radios each with identifiers that can be captured and recorded just through their normal operation. Bluetooth and Wifi devices have MAC addresses and can advertise their presence to other devices merely by sending traffic, or by probing for devices to connect to if they’re not connected.

I found a simple tool, probemon that allows for anyone with a wifi card to track who is at which location at any given time. You could deploy a few of these with Raspberry Pis or even go even cheaper with a number of ESP8266.

Facebook Lies

In the past, I had a Facebook account. Long ago I “deleted” this account through the procedure outlined on their help pages. In theory, 14 days after I used this process my account would be irrevocably gone. This was all lies.

My account was not deleted and yesterday I received an email:

Screenshot of the email I received from Facebook

Screenshot of the email I received from Facebook

It took me a moment to figure it out, but what had happened here is someone had logged into my Facebook account using my email address and password. Facebook simply reactivated the account, which had not had its data deleted, as if I had logged in.