shamino

Sounds like a perfect use for blockchain technology.

Migrate the CVE database to a blockchain and encourage multiple entities (tech companies, cloud providers and security-focused non-profits in addition to government agencies) to host mirrors.  There's really no reason something like this should be controlled by a single government-funded organization.  Especially when government programs (of all kinds) can (and always could) be canceled at the drop of a hat.

A few things:

1. You write that "most third-party clone software also won't work. Or at least they won't work when trying to create a bootable clone of a macOS system volume."  That is very misleading.  The two most popular disk-clone tools (SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner) can both clone a system volume.  And they do it using Apple's ASR utility!  Just like you're describing here.

2. ASR is not completely reliable.  Which is why neither SD nor CCC advertise bootable backups as a fully-supported capability.  They will run ASR, but there's no guarantee that the result will be bootable.  Which will also be the case if you manually run ASR.

3. The only reliable way to make a bootable backup is to back up the data volume.  Then download a macOS installer and make a bootable flash drive from it.  Then boot that flash drive and use its Recovery/installer to install macOS over your data backup.

All that having been said, the article is still really useful as documentation for how to do this by hand, for those who don't want to buy SD or CCC or who for other reasons need to manually make a clone.

What makes you think the scammers are actually buying all the phone numbers that show up as Caller ID information?

Caller ID is trivially easy to forge.  VoIP and PBX systems all include the ability to configure any Caller ID number you want, and for perfectly legitimate reasons.  But it means there is almost nothing restricting the call-originator from supplying numbers that aren't in service or that belong to innocent third parties.

The fact that you're asked to reply "Y" to activate the link doesn't mean your reply is going back to the scammer.  It is employing a feature of iOS, where URLs are blocked for messages to which you've replied - assuming that you wouldn't reply to a scam.  iOS doesn't care if anybody receives that "Y" response, it only cares that you sent something.  And afterward, when you view the message, the URL will be clickable.  Not because anything was "activated" but because you replied to the message.

I can almost guarantee you that the only part of that message owned by the scammer is the URL in the message's body.  Everything else is completely bogus.

The presence or absence of toll roads is irrelevant.

It's easy to recognize these as scams because they don't include legitimate URLs.  Instead of having a link to something like "www.ezpassva.com/foo" (something that would be part of the legitimate EZPass Virginia system), they have a link like "ezpass-com.foo.bar", which is a completely different domain that has nothing to do with any legitimate EZPass service.

Blocking the address is pointless because the next message always comes from a different, also forged, address.

But absolutely report it, both to Apple and to the FBI.  Especially the FBI.  Although they can't get anything useful from a bogus e-mail address, they can track the URL to the server and start working with the owner to determine where the money is going, and use that to identify the actual scammers.

baconstang said:

If you think you got one, go directly to the agency that deals with tolls.

No government agency (toll collecting or otherwise) sends out text messages to try and collect on tolls/fines.

If you did run through a toll plaza without a transceiver, they are going to send a printed notice/bill/invoice to you in the mail, to the address associated with your vehicle's registration.  They're not going to send you a threatening text message, even if they have your phone number on file.  And they won't have that number, because nobody is ever required to supply a phone number when registering a vehicle.

I addition to use on web sites, SVG are great for embedding in documents that will later be printed or exported to PDF - like word processing documents.  This will allow the graphics to look great when the document is zoomed or when it is printed at a high resolution.

While office suites usually include drawing tools, an external tool that generates SVG may be more robust or offer specialized features that the bundled drawing tools don't offer.

I personally do this a lot.  I use a UML-editing tool called PlantUML to generate UML diagrams using a specialized scripting language.  I use it to generate the diagram as an SVG drawing file.  I then embed the SVG drawings into word processing documents.