I am happy to see the bag survived its most untimely truck tumble while remaining a e s t h e t i c a l l y - - - p l e a s i n g.

What a sturdy bag it is!

I love Kim Zetter's tweet:

Must have been a turnip truck https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1384936715769503745

That's a dig at the turnipesque savvy of Cellebrite, which royally stumbled into this.

cf. https://www.dwt.com/blogs/privacy--security-law-blog/2015/03... > FCC chair Wheeler said the FCC “didn’t just fall off the turnip truck.” Through CALEA, CPNI, and CSRIC, Wheeler said the agency has been working to protect consumer privacy.

Yup. Those things have way to "fell from a truck". Another win for the "fell from a truck" gang ;)

I found that funny too. It sounds to me like a good way to end up with the device to analyze without being constrained by a contract or EULA prohibiting it.

Yes, it's known as a euphemism. TFA just took the joke to hilarious extremes with the photos.

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fell-off-the-back-of-a-t...

TFA? I know you're referring to Moxie (somehow) but I can't figure out the acronym.

IIRC "The Fucking Article". I think the expletive originally was because people "wouldn't read TFA", but eventually it just kinda became the way to refer to the article linked from a Hacker News thread.

Oooh of course! Thanks!

Also can be "the fine article" when used in a non-antagonistic way!

I think it originated with "RTFM" which was an old unix admin way of saying read the fucking manual (or man page).

Yes RTFM I'm very familiar with, which is why I should've connected the two.

Indeed, how convenient. If it truly did fall off the truck right while he is on a walk then there is the possibility that is a rubber duckie attack. This is basically the equivalent of leaving a USB flash drive lying around. I hope the author took the necessary precautions when reverse engineering the device. Companies like cellebrite have deep connections to certain three letter communities that staging this sort of attacks trivial.

"falling off a truck" is slang for "was stolen".

TIL: https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/fall+off+a+truck

Edit: looking up a bit more, it seems like this idiom is used to denote goods sold for cheap because they were stolen. Like "Bob is selling genuine iPhones very cheap, I fear they fell from the back of a truck".

Edit edit: I initially took it as "we won't tell how we got this", because I didn't know this idiom, but it seems several people agree with this interpretation. Not necessarily stolen, but obtained from an undisclosed source.

That isn't quite right. Although it's commonly used to describe something that's been stolen, it's more generally used to indicate that the speaker doesn't want to talk about where it came from. That's how it's been used in this article.

Given the sort of business Cellebrite is in, they would probably still want to treat anything connected to it with an overabundance of caution.

I think we can be relatively confident that the connected machine was airgapped and perhaps run in a VM.

Perhaps even in a faraday cage..

> (...) and perhaps run in a VM.

One of the screenshots[0] shows the VMware Tools Service running, so yeah, looks like a virtualized guest.

[0]: https://signal.org/blog/images/cellebrite-dlls-loaded.png

> If it truly did fall of the truck

lol

Seeing reactions like GP’s I’m surprised at how many people don’t know this expression.

I thought it was an euphemism because they couldn't reveal who gave it to them. Confessing it was stolen, even as an euphemism, is too blatant to be taken seriously IMO.

Even if you didn't, i think its pretty obvious from context.

If English is your second language, you may not have come across it. It's a very informal and infrequent idiom.

FWIW we have the exact same expression in French “c’est tombé du camion”

Dito for German: "vom Laster gefallen"