Ghost Guns | Watch Out | Musk's Big Play | Progress

Written while searching for Easter Eggs

Apr 18, 2022

Classic Samsung (Credit: Lance Ulanoff)

Ghost guns

Five years ago, we were talking about 3D- printed guns mostly in the abstract. Getting the plans for printing them was difficult and they were still unproven as reliable firearms.

Fast-forward to today and The White House, which now calls these serial-number-less firearms “Ghost Guns,” said that 20,000 of them were reported to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Explosives last year.

The White House is taking action but I worry that this genie is way out of the bottle. 3D printers cost as little as $400 (but can also cost as much as $13,000). The plans are clearly out there and likely being traded on the dark web. And with a rise in crime, these untraceable firearms are becoming a go-to weapon for criminals.

I know, it feels like another case of “this is why we can’t have nice things.” Cave people found that rocks could be used to break other rocks and honed them into specialized tools. Naturally, they were soon making weapons out of them and smacking each other across the head with rocks. Same with fire. It’s power, cooking, and arson.

Technology is just like everything else, a tool, it has no politics, emotions, or agency. People overlay their needs and impulses on the tools at hand. Of course, we’re gonna print 3D weapons. The question is, as always, what we do about it. After the previous administration made it easier to access 3D printed gun blueprints, I’m glad this Whitehouse has a plan, though I don’t expect it to have much impact.

Sigh.

Almost played

Legendary former Met and current announcer Keith Hernandez, who likes to riff during his play-by-play of Mets games, recently shared that he almost got scammed, and it sounded all-too-familiar.

He got a text from his power company warning they were about to shut off the lights for non-payment of bills. Hernandez made a rookie error (actually a common one, but I can’t resist a baseball metaphor) and called the number. Hernandez learned he could fix the problem by sending them money through Zelle. Zelle is a money transfer system supported by banks like Capital One (and like Venmo and Apple Pay). Fortunately for Hernandez, he’d never heard of Zelle, and that’s what prompted him to call his bank directly.

End of the story but another important reminder that no one is safe from scammers, and social engineering remains the best way to ensnare unsuspecting consumers.

The other shoe

Last week Elon Musk revealed the rest of what I believe may have been his plan all along: To take full control of Twitter by buying it.

The billionaire made a $41B offer but his prospects look dim. Some major shareholders have already publicly rejected the deal and now they’ve inserted a poison pill making it all but impossible to acquire shares above 15% of the company. The bigger question is, what’s the next phase of Musk’s Twitter plan?

Will he quit Twitter, return with a bigger offer, one strong enough to overcome the pill or qualms of shareholders, or does he launch a Twitter competitor?

Whatever Musk does, we’ll be talking about it…on Twitter. I had some more thoughts here.

Progress

I have drawers full of old technology (see the story below on retrieving images from a BlackBerry Torch), and I love pulling out old gadgets and seeing if I can power them up and then sharing the findings on Twitter.

last week I was playing with an old Barnes & Noble Nook reader. This was back when B&N was trying to compete with Amazon and become a true technology company. It stood out from the pack by combining a large E Ink screen with a smaller, color LCD one, which you used for navigation and book shopping. It was an oddball device and did not save the company, which now outsources its Nook development.

I also grabbed an old Samsung SGH-T429 feature phone. This was back when Samsung was chasing Nokia and, as a result, built phones that looked exactly like that then market leader’s devices. It was a tiny, cute phone that ran on the T-Mobile Network. It even still plays the once iconic T-Mobile start-up tune.

What does all this mean, not much, except, maybe, we’ve come a long, way, tech baby.

Missed on Medium and TechRadar

Stay well

See you soon

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