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Police Department Accused of Updating Their Radios With Pirated Software (www.cbc.ca)
Winnipeg's police department used encrypted radios to stop the public from listening in to their conversations with police scanners. But did they pirate their software keys?
Long-time Slashdot reader Curtman shares this report from CBC News: Winnipeg police have arrested a manager with the city for allegedly updating police radios with fraudulent software he got from a person considered to be a security threat by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, CBC News has learned. Back in 2011, Ed Richardson allegedly obtained millions of dollars worth of illegal software and instructed city employees to use it, police said in a January 2018 sworn affidavit, submitted to the Provincial Court of Manitoba when officers were seeking permission to search the man's emails...
In the affidavit, police said the Motorola radios needed frequent updating, which could only be done if the city purchased a "refresh key" or licence from the company to unlock the proprietary software. Motorola charged about $94 per update per radio, the document said, and a radio shop employee told police Richardson didn't like that. "[The employee] does not believe his actions were for personal gain; he believes that Richardson likes the idea of not giving more money to Motorola," the affidavit said.
The affidavit alleges that Richardson gave one employee 65,000 refresh keys, and told him that "you don't want to know where these came from."
In the affidavit, the employee adds that they "clearly" didn't come from Motorola.
Long-time Slashdot reader Curtman shares this report from CBC News: Winnipeg police have arrested a manager with the city for allegedly updating police radios with fraudulent software he got from a person considered to be a security threat by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, CBC News has learned. Back in 2011, Ed Richardson allegedly obtained millions of dollars worth of illegal software and instructed city employees to use it, police said in a January 2018 sworn affidavit, submitted to the Provincial Court of Manitoba when officers were seeking permission to search the man's emails...
In the affidavit, police said the Motorola radios needed frequent updating, which could only be done if the city purchased a "refresh key" or licence from the company to unlock the proprietary software. Motorola charged about $94 per update per radio, the document said, and a radio shop employee told police Richardson didn't like that. "[The employee] does not believe his actions were for personal gain; he believes that Richardson likes the idea of not giving more money to Motorola," the affidavit said.
The affidavit alleges that Richardson gave one employee 65,000 refresh keys, and told him that "you don't want to know where these came from."
In the affidavit, the employee adds that they "clearly" didn't come from Motorola.
I was working for a fairly large police department, and our mobile data terminals (MDTs) were not Y2K compliant. They were 386's running Windows 3, I can't remember if it was Windows for Workgroups, and Moto told us they wouldn't roll over properly and would cost on the order of $300+ per terminal to update, and we had over 1000 cars.
After researching further, we learned that when the officers logged on to our dispatch system that it downloaded the correct date/time from the Unisys mainframe, overriding the Windows clock. Y2K endrun, Motorola doesn't get a trunkfull of money from us. Everybody working 3rd shift on 31 December 1999 were instructed to log off just before midnight and sign back in just after. Everything worked just fine. The MDTs continued working properly for years until they were eventually replaced.
The only Y2K casualty that we had was the Dispatch system on the HP minis! A patch was supposed to self-deploy at midnight: it was compiled and ready to go, but someone didn't run the link/edit step, and when it deployed, crashed it crashed the whole shebang. At least our Windows network was flawless.
While I can understand the guy not wanting to pay Motorola a ridiculous amount of money to update the radios, if you sign the contract, you're obligating yourself to the licensing fees. Motorola was infamous for this, so either read the fine print and negotiate a better contract, or find a vendor that will give you a better deal - you don't have to deal with Motorola directly to buy Motorola equipment!
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
Bullshit. HIPAA applies to covered entities and that's not the police
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/defa...
Beta is bad enough to make me go edit settings like this sig that haven't been touched since I joined