“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone. The Christians in Holland are also living in fear because their sons are being sent to Germany. Everyone is scared.”
- Anne Frank
The increasingly divided United States of America has been witnessing the rapid collapse of democracy before our very eyes. The free America our people have fought and died for is already gone; fascism is here. Our checks and balances have failed, and the structures we rely on to reinforce the integrity of our free country are rife with corruption, openly collaborating with one another to seize power and push our country deeper towards authoritarian rule under the almighty fist of a single party.
Our American people have bought into the lie of the mythic past, readily willing to accept lies as truth, readily willing to divide each other and blame out-groups for our problems, increasingly enthusiastic to hand over supreme, executive power to a single party that can brutalize perceived enemies to restore our country to a believed – however false – “great” past.
Truth is under attack. Democracy is under attack. America is under attack.
At all the hotels I’ve ever stayed at, I’ve never once encountered one with an access system I trust to protect me, my party, or our belongings. It’s always been trivial to clone NFC access tags or magnetic stripes, the former being the subject of this blog post. It’s for this reason that I’ve always carried such access tags in a shielded wallet or sleeve in order to lower the odds of an opportunistic adversary burgling my belongings, though obviously a truly dedicated adversary has plenty of other avenues to achieve physical access.
I’m currently out traveling and for a variety of reasons, a self-contained mobile travel router setup is desirable for me. This was pretty simple to set up with an off-the-shelf GL.iNet, TracFone, and power bank–with a few gotchas to look out for: while piecing together this setup, I discovered that GL.iNet travel routers were actually incompatible with my TracFone (and I assume a number of other common phones); SSH’ing into the underlying router OS and making some quick configuration changes is all that’s necessary to unblock a blocked phone.