Archive for the ‘Radio’ Category

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Obit watch: April 17, 2019.

Wednesday, April 17th, 2019

Owen Garriott, astronaut.

In 1973 he was the science pilot of Skylab 3, the record-breaking 59-day mission — more than double the duration of any previous flight — to Skylab, the first United States space station.
He logged nearly 14 hours outside Skylab in three spacewalks, during which physiological and biomedical metrics were monitored to determine the body’s response to long periods spent in reduced gravity.

…

He returned to space in 1983 on the 10-day flight of the shuttle Columbia, which carried the European Space Agency’s Spacelab 1 module, on which a multinational team of scientists conducted research.
On that mission, Dr. Garriott operated the first amateur radio station from space. He used his station’s call sign, W5LFL, to connect with about 250 ham operators, including his mother in Enid, Okla.; Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona; and King Hussein of Jordan.

…

His marriage to Helen Walker in 1952 ended in divorce. In addition to his son Richard, his survivors include three other children from that marriage, Randall, Robert and Linda Garriott; his wife, Evelyn (Long) Garriott; three stepchildren, Cindy Burcham, Bill Eyestone and Sandra Brooks; 12 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Posted in Geek, History, Obits, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 23, 2019.

Saturday, February 23rd, 2019

Yesterday was a busy day for the NYT: the obit writers were apparently playing catch-up. One of these I knew about, but was waiting for a reliable source on, while the others I had not heard about.

William E. Butterworth III, noted and bestselling author.

According to his website, there are more than 50 million copies of his books in print in more than 10 languages.

If the name doesn’t ring a bell with you, that’s because he wrote mostly under pseudonyms. His best known pen name was W.E.B. Griffin.

(Also: awesome photo, NYT.)

Ken Nordine, poet and “word jazz” guy.

Mr. Nordine became wealthy doing voice-overs for television and radio commercials. But he found his passion in using his dramatic baritone to riff surreally on colors, time, spiders, bullfighting, outer space and dozens of other subjects. His free-form poems could be cerebral or humorous, absurd or enigmatic, and were heard on the radio and captured on records, one of which earned a Grammy nomination.

I used to fall asleep with the radio on and wake up to it in the morning. As I recall, early on Sunday mornings, in that twilight zone when I was half-awake and half-asleep, our local public radio station aired re-runs of “Word Jazz”.

I had not heard of Ethel Ennis, but this is an interesting story: Playboy jazz poll winner for best female singer,

She recorded for major labels in the late 1950s and the ’60s; toured Europe with Benny Goodman; performed onstage alongside Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong; and appeared on television with Duke Ellington. She became a regular on Arthur Godfrey’s TV show and headlined the Newport Jazz Festival.

And then she mostly walked away from it all and became Baltimore’s unofficial “First Lady of Jazz”.

“They had it all planned out for me,” she told The Washington Post in 1979, referring to the music executives in charge of her career. “I’d ask, ‘When do I sing?’ and they’d say, ‘Shut up and have a drink. You should sit like this and look like that and play the game of bed partners.’ You really had to do things that go against your grain for gain. I wouldn’t.”
She added: “I want to do it my way. I have no regrets.”

Finally, David Horowitz, newscaster and consumer reporter. I remember watching the syndicated version of “Fight Back!” on one of the Houston TV stations (though I don’t recall which one) back when I was young…

Posted in Books, Guns, Music, Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

More Black Hat/DEFCON 26 updates.

Wednesday, August 15th, 2018
  • Slides for “A Dive in to Hyper-V Architecture & Vulnerabilities” with Joe Bialek and Nicolas Joly can be found here. (The link on the Black Hat site is still borked.)
  • This isn’t an actual DEFCON 26 presentation, but it’s referenced in Vincent Tan’s “Hacking BLE Bicycle Locks for Fun and a Small Profit”, and I want to bookmark it for later: “Blue Picking: Hacking Bluetooth Smart Locks” by Slawomir Jasek.
  • Slides for “Ring 0/-2 Rookits: Compromising Defenses” with Alexandre Borges are here.
  • Also not a DEFCON presentation, but picked up by way of an Ars Technica story: “Fear the Reaper: Characterization and Fast Detection of Card Skimmers” by Nolen Scaife, Christian Peeters, and Patrick Traynor. In which the authors analyze a bunch of skimmers confiscated by NYPD…and then build a device that can detect skimmers, based on nothing more than the physical properties of how card readers work. Quote of the day: “Security solutions requiring significant behavioral changes are unlikely to be successful.”
  • Content for “All your math are belong to us” with sghctoma is here: slides, white paper, and exploit code.

Posted in Bluetooth, Bookmarks, DEFCON, DEFCON 26, Radio | Comments Closed

Your loser update: pre-NFL edition.

Wednesday, August 15th, 2018

Actually, this sits at the weird intersection of a couple of things:

Bud Light is installing “Victory Fridges” throughout the Cleveland area that will unlock via WiFi following the Browns’ first regular-season win this season.

Which do you suppose is going to happen first: a Browns win, or someone hacks the fridges? My money is on the latter.

Cleveland hackers, you’ve got at least 25 days to prove me right.

More from the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.

And how about a little musical interlude? We haven’t had one in a while.

Posted in Geek, Loser, NFL, Radio, Sports, WiFi | Comments Closed

DEFCON 26/Black Hat updates: August 14, 2018.

Tuesday, August 14th, 2018

I apologize that I wasn’t able to post more coverage over the weekend: as I expected, it turned out to be fun, but packed.

I intended to post this yesterday, but I wasn’t able to find many updates on my lunch hour. Then I got stuck in a gumption trap late in the day at work, and basically came home and collapsed.

In retrospect, that was better, because this story broke late in the afternoon: Caesars Palace security was (in the opinion of at least some DEFCON attendees) a little too aggressive about searching rooms. More from Defiant, a company that was at DEFCON. Statement from Marc Rogers.

Good post with links over at Borepatch’s site about the widely covered “voting machine vulnerabilities”.

Also: badge related coverage if you care. Personally, I don’t need a stinking badge.

Black Hat updates:

DEFCON 26 updates:

Posted in Bluetooth, DEFCON, DEFCON 26, Radio | Comments Closed

Black Hat 2018/DEFCON 26 0 day updates.

Thursday, August 9th, 2018

Some of yesterday’s Black Hat presentations:

Some others that I didn’t get to the first time around:

  • “Software Attacks on Hardware Wallets” by Alyssa Milburn and Sergei Volokitin. “…we show how software attacks can be used to break in the most protected part of the hardware wallet, the Secure Element, and how it can be exploited by an attacker.” Slides. White paper.
  • “Screaming Channels: When Electromagnetic Side Channels Meet Radio Transceivers” with a whole big bunch of folks. “…we show that it is possible to recover the original leaked signal over large distances on the radio. As a result, variations of known side-channel analysis techniques can be applied, effectively allowing us to retrieve the encryption key by just listening on the air with a software defined radio (SDR).” Slides. White paper.

Ars Technica has a story up in advance of Justin Shattuck’s “Snooping on Cellular Gateways and Their Critical Role in ICS” presentation later today:

…many of the unsecured gateways were installed in police cars, ambulances, and other emergency vehicles. Not only were the devices openly broadcasting the locations of these first responders, but they were also exposing configurations that could be used to take control of the devices and, from there, possibly control dash cameras, in-vehicle computers, and other devices that relied on the wireless gateways for Internet connections.

There are a couple of other presentations from yesterday that sound interesting on second look, but the links to them are currently broken. Also, I haven’t had a chance to read through all of these yet: I did give a quick skim to “Stress and Hacking” and “Reversing a Japanese Wireless SD Card” and look forward to a more careful read of both.

I think I’m going to try to post a second update later this evening if the broken links are fixed and/or new content is available. We should also be getting close to the point where the DEFCON 26 media server has preliminary versions of the presentations up…

Edited to add: DEFCON 26 presentations are now live on the DEFCON media server.

Posted in DEFCON, DEFCON 26, Geek, Radio, WiFi | Comments Closed

DEFCON 26/Black Hat 2018 preliminary notes.

Sunday, August 5th, 2018

DEFCON 26 and Black Hat 2018 start up later this week. Again, I’m not going, but I do feel like I’m inching closer to making a return. Full-timers from my group have been sent to Black Hat in the past, so who knows what’s going to happen next year?

What would I do if I was there? A quick skim of the Black Hat briefings schedule doesn’t show a whole lot that really jumps out at me. I’d probably just be hitting targets of opportunity, with a few exceptions:

What about DEFCON 26? After the jump…

(more…)

Posted in Bluetooth, Christmas, Cops, DEFCON, DEFCON 26, Law, Radio, SDR, WiFi | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 20, 2018.

Friday, July 20th, 2018

Adrian Cronauer, the inspiration for “Good Morning, Vietnam”.

Mr. Cronauer, who in reality was not quite the wild man the film suggested — later in life he worked for Republican causes and became a lawyer — admitted to some unease when he first saw the screen portrayal. But he got over it.
“Finally I said: ‘Wait a minute. It was never intended to be a biography. It’s a piece of entertainment. Sit back, relax and enjoy it,’ ” he said. “And that’s what I did.”

Annabelle Neilson. I can’t stand celebrity for celebrity’s sake, and I don’t worship celebrities in general. But there’s something about this story I find touching.

Ms. Neilson was severely dyslexic and, after being badly bullied, left school at 16. A vicious assault during a gap-year visit to Perth, Australia, left her with injuries requiring reconstructive surgery, and she soon began struggling with drug addiction.

She eventually got over her heroin problem, became a model, and was introduced to fashion designer Alexander McQueen. She went on to become his model, muse, and girlfriend until his death in 2010.

In 2014, Ms. Neilson became a star of the Bravo television series “Ladies of London,” and for two seasons viewers watched her recovery from a 2013 horseback riding accident that had left her with a broken back and pelvis.

She also wrote children’s books. Ms. Neilson was 49 when she died.

Posted in Books, History, Movies, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

Let’s go!

Friday, July 13th, 2018

More car related updates and thoughts.

First of all, RoadRich left an excellent and thoughtful comment on the last post which you should go read.

(more…)

Posted in Bluetooth, Cars, Endorsements, Geek, Radio | Comments Closed

Here in my car…

Thursday, July 5th, 2018

I bought a new to me car last Saturday. It’s a 2006 Honda Accord EX-L that had 82,000 miles on it (not bad, in my opinion, for a 12 year old car) and has quite few features I like: leather interior, sun roof, cabin air filter, power seats, and even seat heaters for that one month a year when those are actually useful in Texas. (Also ABS. I’m not clear on whether it has traction control or not. I checked the Honda-Tech VIN decoder and while it is useful, it doesn’t talk about traction control.)

Now that I have the car, I splurged on a couple of things. I got a dashcam for it: the Papago GoSafe 535, which is what the Wirecutter currently recommends. That one has gone up by about $13 in the couple of days since I ordered it, and it really wasn’t my first choice. I wanted the Spy Tec G1W-C, which was a previous Wirecutter choice that I bought for my mother’s car and have been happy with. But by the time I was ready to order, Amazon had sold out of the Spy Tec.

My other splurge item was a LELink Bluetooth Low Energy BLE OBD-II car diagnostic tool. Why? Several reasons:

(more…)

Posted in Android, Apple, Bluetooth, Bookmarks, Cars, Geek, Radio | 1 Comment »

Dumber than a bag of hair.

Tuesday, June 19th, 2018

I missed the first part of this story last week, but I caught the second part when it came across the Hacker News Twitter feed.

There is a company called Tapplock that makes a $99 “smart” padlock. No, this isn’t the same company that makes a “smart” padlock that’s “completely invincible” to anybody that doesn’t have a screwdriver. Different company, different lock.

But it does have a fingerprint scanner and Bluetooth.

Part 1:

Among other features, you can set up multiple fingerprint profiles, so you can enable multiple people to unlock the padlock with their fingerprints.

Except: their protocol doesn’t gracefully handle revocation. The lock communicates over HTTP: there’s no encryption, and…

I could see that a string of “random” looking data was sent to the lock over BLE each time I connected to it. Without this data, the lock would not respond to commands.
But it was also noted that this data did not change, no matter how many times I connected. A couple of lines of commands in gatttool and it was apparent that the lock was vulnerable to trivial replay attacks…
…I shared the lock with another user, and sniffed the BLE data. It was identical to the normal unlocking data. Even if you revoke permissions, you have already given the other user all the information they need to authenticate with the lock, in perpetuity.

But wait, there’s more! It turns out that that random data, that unique key…is derived directly from the lock’s MAC address! The one that’s constantly broadcast by the lock so you can access it over Bluetooth!

I scripted the attack up to scan for Tapplocks and unlock them. You can just walk up to any Tapplock and unlock it in under 2s. It requires no skill or knowledge to do this.

Part 2:

But wait, there’s more! Another security researcher, who didn’t have a Tapplock (“I am out of IoT budget for this month as my wife has -kindly- informed me”), decided to play around with the Tapplock’s cloud based admin tools…

…and discovered that, once you logged in with a valid account, you could access any other account simply by incrementing the account ID.

As a result, Stykas could not only add himself as an authorised user to anyone else’s lock, but also read out personal information from that person’s account, including the last location (if known) where the Tapplock was opened.
Incredibly, Tapplock’s back-end system would not only let him open other people’s locks using the official app, but also tell him where to find the locks he could now open!

References:

The Pen Test Partners initial attack.

The Vangelis Stykas admin interface attack.

Sophos “Naked Security” blog: part 1. Part 2.

Posted in Bluetooth, Geek, Locks, Radio, Stupid | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 11, 2018.

Friday, May 11th, 2018

Sammy Allred, noted musician and later local radio host.

Allred’s band, the Geezinslaw Brothers – who once opened for Sun Records-era Elvis Presley – were regulars on the “Louisiana Hayride” radio show based in Shreveport in the late 1950s.
James White, owner of the Broken Spoke restaurant where the Geezinslaw Brothers played, told the American-Statesman in 2007 he remembered the first time he saw them perform on a flatbed truck in 1954 at the opening of the Twin Oaks shopping center in South Austin.

…

Allred, a member of the Texas Radio Hall of Fame, joined KVET-FM in 1969, and in 1990 joined Bob Cole for a morning show that played country music before Allred was fired from KVET in 2007.

Posted in Music, Radio | Comments Closed

Random notes toward an after action report: Dallas.

Tuesday, May 8th, 2018

This is a catch-all for random and undifferentiated thoughts that didn’t make it into my previous NRAAM reports. I’ll put in a jump, since this is running long…

(more…)

Posted in asus_eee, Bluetooth, Books, Clothing, Geek, Guns, Hats, linux, Mixology, NRA, NRAAM, Photography, project_e, Radio, Shirts | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 18, 2018.

Wednesday, April 18th, 2018

Carl Kasell. NPR.

I don’t listen to NPR much these days, but I did kind of like Kasell. And:

He loved magic tricks, and at one memorable company holiday party, he sawed Nina Totenberg in half.
“We laid her out on the table, got out that saw and grrrr … ran it straight through her midsection,” he recalled. “She said it tickled and she got up and walked away in one piece.”

Right away, I knew that Carl had far more up his sleeve than his inimitable gravitas and the random playing cards he keeps there for his magic tricks (if you ever want to know true joy, ask Carl to do magic for you).

I have this mental image of Carl and Harry standing around in heaven, trying to top each other with card tricks.

Barbara Bush, for the historical record. WP. (Edited to add: Lawrence.)

Posted in Magic, Obits, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 16, 2018.

Monday, April 16th, 2018

It was another busy weekend: birthday dinner, BAG day (post forthcoming), lots of running around…so let us get caught up.

Art Bell, noted radio host.

For more than two decades, Mr. Bell, who was 72 when he died April 13 at his home in Pahrump, Nev., stayed up all night talking to those people on the radio, patiently encouraging them to tell their stories about alien abductions, crop circles, anthrax scares and, as he put it, all things “seen at the edge of vision.”

I used to listen to a lot of late night radio, but my time preceded Art Bell. I know someone whose job requires them to drive in sometimes late at night, and back in the day they were an Art Bell listener.

Tim O’Connor, character actor. He had a long-running role on the “Peyton Place” TV series, and also did guest shots in just about everything. (Including “Mannix”.)

Milos Forman, one of the great directors. (“Amadeus”, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”)

And finally, R. Lee Ermey. Borepatch.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

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