Tootfinder

$125K stolen in 10 minutes
From Kim Komando's newsletter —
"Feb. 16 was a typical Friday night. Barry and I decided to stay home, grill chicken and make a salad for dinner. At about 6:45 p.m., we heard some loud rumbling overhead.
We walked onto the back patio, and two police helicopters were shining lights all over our property. A recording echoed, “Police. You are under arrest. Stay right there and I won’t shoot you.”
As I looked across the fence, a swarm of armed Phoenix SWAT team members with a few dogs were circling our property. One of the guys said, “Yeah, there’s a jammer right here.” He picked it up. I leaned over the patio and asked, “What’s going on?”
The police told me to go inside
When I asked again, a SWAT member said, “Ma’am, it’s a South American gang targeting homes to steal from. The jammer says you might have been next. Do we have permission to enter your property?” I said, “Yes!” and then he asked something like, “If we find anyone, will you pursue charges so we can arrest them?” I replied, “Of course!”
I opened the driveway gates to our property and the guest house while Barry tossed the police keys to open the security gates. People asked me if I was scared. How could I be? There was a team of really professional police officers protecting me from who knows what.
Turns out, when the gang saw we were home, they likely diverted their attention to the house next door. A house four doors down from us wasn’t so lucky.
The homeowner left at 5 p.m. to have dinner and got a notification his security cameras were offline at 5:05 p.m. He thought the internet went down. Nope, the gang broke in and took $25,000 in cash and valuables worth $100,000. They were in and out in under 10 minutes.
How are they getting away with this?
The gang places cellular and Wi‑Fi jammers around the homes they’re targeting. This way, security cameras and phones are useless. A Phoenix police officer told me the gang probably noticed nothing was down in our house.
We have our cameras and internet hardwired. Even when they tried to jam our signals, the red lights on the security cameras still showed they were recording everything.
But how frightening is that? Your phone doesn’t work. Your cameras aren’t recording anything. On the upside, the gang doesn’t carry guns. This way, if they get caught, they’ll spend about six months in jail before being extradited to Chile.
Nothing is random
The gang scopes out homes beforehand. They drive the neighborhood and look up houses on real estate sites to get an idea of where the primary bedroom is located. They look for dogs, too.
It’s not just in Phoenix, by the way. This is happening all over the country. A friend was robbed by this gang, and he lives in a guarded, gated community in California. Kudos to the Phoenix Police Department — they arrested three members of the gang who were in my neighborhood that night.
So, what can you do?
☑️​ Wireless cameras go kaput with no signal. Try a wired camera for a backup.
☑️​ A cam with SD card storage will still record if there’s no Wi‑Fi.
☑️​ Put up motion-activated lights; they make it harder for anyone to sneak around.
☑️​ A femtocell (think of it as a mini cell tower) could be enough to keep your connection if thieves use jammers — T‑Mobile or Verizon.
☑️​ Have an Amazon Echo? Away mode lets you control your lights so it looks like someone’s home.
☑️​ Make it look like someone’s watching TV at your house when you’re not there with a Television Simulator.
☑️​ A University of North Carolina survey of over 400 incarcerated burglars found security system signs deter thieves.
☑️​ Check Zillow, Realtor⁠.⁠com and Redfin for photos of your house. The more crooks know about the layout, the better for them. Ask to have them removed.
☑️​ Blur your house from Google Maps and Apple Maps while you’re at it.

It feels like #enshittification is an inevitable result of browsers gaining popularity.
Back in the old days, when I was still doing some WebDev, #Microsoft had a monopoly with its #InternetExplorer. It really sucked because they didn't care about web standards. For me, it meant testing my website under #Mozilla, #Opera (back when it used the Presto engine) and then adding awful hacks to make it work under IE (Safari was practically nonexistent in Poland). But the remaining browsers had their small foothold.
Then came #Google with its #Chrome, and we were really enthusiastic about it. Little did I know what was to come later. After all, it was a reasonably portable browser, with an open source engine, that followed standards. On top of that, it had a good chance of ending Microsoft's monopoly — and that was great news, because it meant that one day we wouldn't have to worry about compatibility with IE.
So there came a time when Chrome took over a major share of the browser market. Microsoft replaced IE with Edge. Eventually all the main browsers were using WebKit, Blink or a related engine which made life easier for WebDevs. Mozilla's small market share diminished even further.
Then things went to shit. Google showed its true colors, and abused its monopolist position in every possible way. Standards compliance ended up meaning very little, when the monopolist controls the standards. Being open source helps but there's only as much that volunteers can do when dealing with a corporate giant.
One positive aspect of this is that as GAFAM keeps shooting at their feet, Firefox started gaining popularity again. And it's a much better browser than it used to be back in the day. And what happens next?
Of course, as soon as Mozilla notices they're gaining market share, they're starting their own enshittification. Instead of embracing the users who appreciate what Firefox is right now, they are being greedy and trying to lure more people with buzzwords. This isn't going to end well.