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Random notes: January 18, 2014.

Saturday, January 18th, 2014

Obit watch: Larry Monroe, former KUT-FM DJ. Yes, it was radio – worse yet, public radio. But I liked pretty much everything Monroe did for the station. I drove home from South Austin many Thursday nights listening to the “Phil Music” show, back when KUT broadcast city council meetings. (This was a long time ago, in another country. It was called “Phil Music” because it began with Monroe playing music while the council members were in private session and/or there were gaps in the broadcast; in other words, “fill music”.)

I don’t care much for golf. But, by way of Jimbo, one of the more interesting things I’ve read so far this year: Grantland writer discovers a woman who’s invented a revolutionary putter, and starts working on a story about her. Then things get weird.

Edited to add: adding link to MetaFilter discussion of the story above.

Posted in Clippings, Obits, Radio, Sports | Comments Closed

You could hear the music on the AM radio…

Friday, January 17th, 2014

When was the last time you listened to the radio?

Actually, I still do, mostly when I’m driving around with Mom and Jeff Ward is on. If I’m alone in my own car, though, radio has become to me something like a buggy whip.

But there are some people who still need buggy whips, such as the Amish. And there are some people who still need radios. Like Federal prisoners.

The pocket analog radio, known by the bland model number SRF-39FP, is a Sony “ultralight” model manufactured for prisons. Its clear housing is meant to prevent inmates from using it to smuggle contraband, and, at under thirty dollars, it is the most affordable Sony radio on the prison market.

But what makes this New Yorker piece more interesting to me is…the SRF-39FP is actually a pretty good radio. It uses one AA battery, will run for 40 hours, and:

Others in the online DXing community argue that the SRF-39FP is superior to virtually every other pocket analog radio, praising it for its large tuning thumbwheel, over-all sensitivity and audio quality, and, above all, its reputed indestructibility. Electronics and radio collectors also marvel at features that are normally associated with professional equipment rather than consumer goods: in particular, an exceptional single-integrated-circuit receiver that insures reception in remote locations—or deep within heavy prison walls. In fact, the SRF-39FP was one of the first radios to use the breakthrough CXA1129N integrated-circuit chip, considered by DeBock to be the primary innovation among Sony pocket radios; it helped make the SRF-39FP the smallest and most sophisticated in a line of pocket radios that had launched two decades earlier, in the late nineteen-seventies.

I almost want to pick one up. (I checked; there aren’t any listed on eBay right now.)

(By way of the newsycombinator Twitter feed.)

Posted in Amish, Clippings, Geek, Law, Radio | 1 Comment »

More obits people sent me.

Wednesday, December 18th, 2013

Harold Camping. I’m really kind of curious what’s going to happen to Family Radio now; does it survive with a new leader? Do the stations get sold off? I think most of them are non-commercial licenses; is there another religious group that would want to buy them?

Janet Dailey, noted romance author.

“I kept saying to Bill that this is the kind of book I’d like to write,” she said once in an interview, adding, “He got tired of hearing that in a hurry.” He told her to start writing or stop talking about it. She said she modeled many of her male protagonists on her husband. He died in 2005.

You know, “Start writing or stop talking about it” is actually pretty good writing advice.

For the historical record: Ray Price. AV Club.

Posted in Books, Clippings, Music, Obits, Radio | Comments Closed

Shoes for radio!

Friday, December 6th, 2013

The other one has dropped. (Previously.)

(I know, this is really inside Austin, and even more, inside Austin radio. But it was the subject of some discussion among my family. Also, there’s just really not a lot going on.)

(Edited to add: my brother forwarded a Statesman blog entry that you don’t have to pay to read. Some quotes:

“JB and Sandy have been part of Mix for 18 years, which is a lifetime in radio,” vice president of programming Cat Thomas said. “JB and Sandy made an indelible impact on our station, their audience and the city of Austin. But unfortunately, the declining performance of the show and the expense of the show no longer made economic sense, and we were unable to come to terms. We thank them for their work and wish them the best in the future.”

…

Figures from Nielsen (formerly Arbitron) show “The JB and Sandy Morning Show” placed eighth among listeners ages 25-54 and seventh among the key demographic of women ages 18-49 in November.

Thank you for giving actual ratings figures.

The decision to discontinue the Mix 94.7 morning show comes during the station’s annual Bikes for Kids campaign, which raises money each year to buy bikes for hundreds of needy Central Texas children.
Bikes for Kids will go on without Hager and McIlree, Entercom officials said.
“Bikes for Kids remains a part of the fabric of our station,” Thomas said. “It will absolutely continue.”

)

(I haven’t linked to Mandela obits because I figure, at this point, they’ve crossed over into “you can’t avoid them” territory.)

(Edited to add: if you’re really craving something swell to read, try the thoughtful comment by lelnet on this week’s “TMQ Watch”.)

Posted in Clippings, Radio | Comments Closed

Just some random krep.

Monday, November 25th, 2013

The FDA has told 23andMe to stop selling their DNA interpretation service.

I note this for a couple of reasons:

  1. Earlier this year, they were advertising all over many of the podcasts I listen to.
  2. I’ve flirted with the idea of getting a 23andMe kit as a Christmas or birthday present. (Hey, you get one for a family member, you get many of the benefits of purchasing your own, plus you’ve got that whole gift thing taken care of.)
  3. I did not complete the purchase process, but as far as I can tell, 23andMe is still selling their product.
  4. “This product is a device within the meaning of section 201(h) of the FD&C Act, 21 U.S.C. 321(h), because it is intended for use in the diagnosis of disease or other conditions or in the cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease, or is intended to affect the structure or function of the body.” Nope. Not seeing it. At best, it tells you that you have some genetic markers that may indicate a predisposition towards a condition. I have serious questions about the way the FDA is interpreting the regulations here.
  5. What business is it of the federal government how people get their genetic information and what they do with it? “But what if they’re wrong?” Seems to me you have the same recourse as you would with any other consumer product; complain to the maker and ask for a refund or a do-over. But that’s apparently not good enough for our government, which feels like it has to do something about the scourge of non-goverment-approved genetic testing labs.

The Treasure Island casino in Las Vegas is dumping the pirate show. I can remember seeing it (more or less) twice: once in the “original” version, which was more of a straight-forward pirate battle, and once in the “Sirens of TI” incarnation, where the “pirates” included scantily clad young women. Treasure Island is dumping the pirates in favor of more retail space. Sigh.

Questions. So many questions.

  • Isn’t it kind of crappy to let one of your most popular personalities go right in the middle of the annual “Bicycles For the Crippled Orphans Left Behind By the Widow of the Unknown Soldier for Christmas” campaign? Yes, his contract was apparently up (“at the end of the year”, which, to me, implies December 31st), and yes, it isn’t unprecedented to let people go around this time of year (Not that I’m bitter or anything) but couldn’t they have worked out something to at least let him stay and finish out this year’s charity campaign? I think it makes the station look bad.
  • Why does a morning radio show need four on-air people?
  • “In the most recent Nielsen (formerly Arbitron) ratings period, Mix 94.7 placed 12th. Its morning ratings, however, are much higher.” How much higher, you jackass? You’re the one with the AllAccess account! (According to a post from the same blogger back in October, JB and Sandy didn’t crack the top five.)
  • Dudley and Bob are still on? Wow.

Posted in Clippings, Geek, Law, Radio | Comments Closed

Two for your consideration.

Wednesday, October 30th, 2013

PetaPixel reprints a post (from the LensRentals blog) about a WWII story I’ve never heard before.

Jay Zeamer was a pilot. But he wasn’t a great one. He had problems passing his check tests, especially when it came to the “landing” part. He managed to get into B-17s and started flying as a “fill-in” pilot and on photoreconnaissance runs.

But nobody wanted to fly with him. So he created his own crew by gathering up every…

… misfit and ne’er-do-well in the 43rd Air Group. As another pilot, Walt Krell, recalled, “He recruited a crew of renegades and screwoffs. They were the worst — men nobody else wanted. But they gravitated toward one another and made a hell of a team.”

But they didn’t have a plane. So they grabbed onto a dilapidated B-17 that had been flown in for spare parts and somehow rebuilt it into flying condition. The base commander thought this was a pretty good thing, and intended to assign the plane to another crew.

Not surprisingly, Zeamer and his crew took exception to this idea, and according Walt Krell the crew slept in their airplane, having loudly announced that the 50 caliber machine guns were kept loaded in case anyone came around to ‘borrow’ it. There was a severe shortage of planes, so the base commander ignored the mutiny and let the crew fly – but generally expected them to take on missions that no one else wanted.

Zeamer and crew called the plane “Old 666”. And yes, they took on the missions no one else wanted.

Even among the men of a combat air station, the Eager Beavers became known as gun nuts. They replaced all of the light 30 caliber machine guns in the plane with heavier 50 caliber weapons. Then the 50 caliber machine guns were replaced with double 50 caliber guns. Zeamer had another pair of machine guns mounted to the front of the plane so he could remotely fire them like a fighter pilot. And the crew kept extra machine guns stored in the plane, just in case one of their other guns jammed or malfunctioned.

My kind of guys.

Having a plane with an apparently nutty crew who volunteered for every awful mission not surprisingly made the commanding officers look the other way.

This would make for one heck of a movie. Especially in light of what eventually happened to “Old 666” and her crew. But for that you should go read the rest of the story at PetaPixel or LensRentals.

Meanwhile, by way of Insta (who draws a different conclusion than I do): W. Joseph Campbell, author of Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, writes about Orson Welles, “War of the Worlds”, and the question of whether there really was a mass panic.

Posted in Clippings, History, Radio | Comments Closed

Random notes: September 10, 2013.

Tuesday, September 10th, 2013

You could hear the music on the AM radio…

(If you have to put this much effort into “saving” commercial radio, is it really worth saving?)

I’m not a huge NASCAR fan: if I’m home and a race is televised, I’ll put it on as background noise, and I’d happily go to a race if someone invited me. But my life doesn’t revolve around it. With that said, this is interesting:

Ryan Newman replaced Martin Truex Jr. in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship on Monday night when NASCAR penalized Michael Waltrip Racing for manipulating the outcome of last weekend’s race.
Michael Waltrip Racing was fined $300,000, and general manager Ty Norris received an indefinite suspension. Truex, Bowyer and Vickers were docked 50 points apiece — but Bowyer’s deduction does not affect his position in the Chase, which begins Sunday at Chicago.

Isn’t “manipulating the outcome” of a race pretty much what every racing team tries to do? Is this example just particularly egregious? (And I find it surprising that there’s been no FARK thread on this yet.)

(Edited to add: Thanks to Ben for his thoughtful and enlightening comments, which you should really go read now. Also, FARK did put up a thread after I posted this.)

Posted in Cars, Clippings, Radio, Sports | 3 Comments »

Random notes: August 21, 2013.

Wednesday, August 21st, 2013

I’ve written before about Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn, and the efforts by the State University of New York (SUNY) to close it, since it is bleeding money like a severed aorta.

…a judge on Tuesday ordered the hospital to be returned to its previous owners, nullifying a 2011 transfer to the State University of New York.

The hospital was previously owned by Continuum Health Partners. Why did they transfer it to SUNY? They say it was either that, or shut the place down. You see the punchline coming, don’t you?

“Upon due consideration, Continuum respectfully concludes that we cannot reassume management of LICH and is unable to take responsibility for the hospital’s operations,” Stanley Brezenoff, the president and chief executive, said in a statement.

New York’s WBAI is in trouble. Normally, I don’t care that much about NYC radio stations. But:

…huge debt and a dwindling membership have left both WBAI and Pacifica starved for cash. The station, one of five owned by the foundation, has operated in the red each year since 2004, accumulating more than $3 million in net losses, according to Pacifica financial statements. In addition to WBAI, Pacifica has stations in Los Angeles, Washington, Houston and Berkeley, Calif., and feeds content to more than 150 affiliates.
Among Pacifica’s debts are more than $2 million in broadcast fees owed to Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!,” the network’s most popular show. To cover Pacifica’s operating costs, the network has drained most of its accounts, hobbling the organization and raising the doomsday scenario in which it would have to sell WBAI’s broadcast license.

Lord, you know I don’t ask for much. But if WBAI’s broadcast license does go up for sale, please let the Koch brothers purchase it. Thank you.

Posted in Clippings, Radio | 1 Comment »

TMQ Watch: August 13, 2013.

Friday, August 16th, 2013

We were trying to come up with a clever introduction to the return of Tuesday Morning Quarterback (and, thus, the TMQ Watch) but we couldn’t. On the other hand, we were also suffering from a bad case of 70s nostalgia (brought about by many things, but exacerbated by the death of Bert Lance). So we thought we’d throw some vintage music your way before cracking open this week’s TMQ after the jump. Oddly enough, it turns out to be fitting for reasons we’ll see later on…

(more…)

Posted in Android, Apple, Books, Camels, Clippings, Gatsby, GPS, Mammals, Music, NFL, Radio, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed

Bookity bookity bookity.

Tuesday, August 6th, 2013

Two more things that I wanted to bookmark:

Peteris Krumins’ “A Unix Utility You Should Know About: Netcat“. Actually, I want to bookmark his entire site, as there’s a lot of good stuff there, including “Low Level Bit Hacks You Absolutely Must Know“.

Also: Michael Ossmann’s HackRF Kickstarter, which is fully funded and has 29 days to go. This is a project I’m really excited about and will probably end up backing. Short version: HackRF is a project to build a software defined radio that is about the size of a USB hard drive, runs off of USB bus power…and if you back the project (and if it ships, this being Kickstarter and all), the cost is around $300, which puts it into “Shut up and take my money” territory.

Posted in Bookmarks, linux, Radio | Comments Closed

DEFCON 21 update: August 5, 2013.

Monday, August 5th, 2013

Yeah, I know, I’ve been quiet. Much of Friday’s blogging time was eaten by Bluehost instability, and Saturday and Sunday were busy.

But I do have some updates and links.

I’m going to cut things off here for right now. I’m still trying to find links to some of the other presentations I mentioned (in particular, I’d love a link of some sort to Anch’s “Pentesters Toolkit” if anyone has one) and will post updates as they come in. Depending on what I dig up, there may be a second post tomorrow. In the meantime, this should keep you busy.

Posted in Android, Bluetooth, Cars, DEFCON 21, Geek, Law, Radio | Comments Closed

DEFCON 21: -1 day notes.

Wednesday, July 31st, 2013

Just because I’m not going to DEFCON 21 doesn’t mean I can’t try to cover it. From 1,500 miles away. Sort of half-assedly.

DEFCON hasn’t even started yet, but Black Hat is going on, and some stuff is coming out. The biggest story so far has been Barnaby Jack’s death. I haven’t mentioned it previously because I’ve felt like it was well covered elsewhere (even FARK).

Another “big” (well, I think it is) story that I haven’t seen very much coverage of is the phone cracking bot. Justin Engler (@justinengler on Twitter) and Paul Vines, according to the synopsis of their talk and the linked article, built a robot for under $200 that can brute force PINs. Like the one on your phone.

Robotic Reconfigurable Button Basher (R2B2) is a ~$200 robot designed to manually brute force PINs or other passwords via manual entry. R2B2 can operate on touch screens or physical buttons. R2B2 can also handle more esoteric lockscreen types such as pattern tracing.

This is one I’ll be keeping an eye on.

Borepatch is in Vegas this year, attending both Black Hat and DEFCON. He’s got a couple of posts up: a liveblog of the NSA director’s presentation at Black Hat, and another post about the links between black hats and political candidates.

So the DEFCON schedule is up. If I was going, what would get me excited? (I’ve included the Twitter handles of the speakers from the DEFCON 21 schedule information; I figure this gives a central source for looking up someone’s feed and getting copies of their presentation.)

From Thursday’s talks: I’d probably go to “Hacker Law School“, as I’m a frustrated wanna-be lawyer anyway. Why not?

Anch’s (@boneheadsanon) “Pentesters Toolkit” talk makes my heart skip a beat:

You’ve been hired to perform a penetration test, you have one week to prepare. What goes in the bag? What is worth lugging through airport security and what do you leave home. I’ll go through my assessment bag and show you what I think is important and not, talk about tools and livecd’s, what comes in handy and what I’ve cut out of my normal pen-test rig.

Push some more of my buttons, please.

The Aaron Bayles (@AlxRogan) “Oil and Gas Infosec 101” talk kind of intrigues me, but it would depend on my mood at the time as to whether I went to that one, or skipped out for a break.

Likewise with the Beaker and Flipper talk on robot building: yeah, robot building is something I’m interested in doing, but I might just be in a mood to visit the Atomic Testing Museum instead, and read your slides later. Nothing personal: I’m sure it will be a great talk.

I’m intrigued by the ZeroChaos (@pentoo_linux) panel on the Pentoo LINUX distribution for penetration testing. I’m not sure how that differs from, say, BackTrack, but I’d probably show up just so I could find out.

The “Wireless Penetration Testing 101 & Wireless Contesting” talk by DaKahuna and Rick Mellendick (@rmellendick) hits yet another of my hot buttons. I can’t tell from the description how much of this is going to be describing contests in the Hacker Village, and how much will be practical advice, but I’d show up anyway.

That takes us into Friday. Just from a preliminary look at the schedule, it looks like the big thing this year is hacking femtocells. Doug DePerry (@dugdep) and Tom Ritter (@TomRitterVG) are doing a talk on “I Can Hear You Now: Traffic Interception and Remote Mobile Phone Cloning with a Compromised CDMA Femtocell”:

During this talk, we will demonstrate how we’ve used a femtocell for traffic interception of voice/SMS/data, active network attacks and explain how we were able to clone a mobile device without physical access.

The Charlie Miller (@0xcharlie) and Chris Valasek (@nudehaberdasher) talk, “Adventures in Automotive Networks and Control Units“, sounds interesting as well. I’m just slightly more interested in femtocells than automotive hacking, so apologies to Mr. Miller and Mr. Valasek: if the two weren’t in conflict, I’d hit your talk for sure.

And if you haven’t been to a software defined radio talk, Balint Seeber’s (@spenchdotnet) sounds promising.

“The Secret Life of SIM Cards” by Karl Koscher (@supersat) and Eric Butler (@codebutler) intrigues me the most out of the 11:00 talks. And I’m kind of interested in the Ryan W. Smith (@ryanwsmith13) and Tim Strazzere “DragonLady: An Investigation of SMS Fraud Operations in Russia” presentation because, well…

This presentation will show key findings and methods of this investigation into top Android malware distributors operating in Russia and the surrounding region. The investigation includes the discovery of 10’s of thousands of bot-controlled twitter accounts spreading links to this type of SMS fraud malware, tracing distribution through thousands of domains and custom websites, and the identification of multiple “affiliate web traffic monetization” websites based in Russia which provide custom Android SMS fraud malware packaging for their “affiliates”. During this investigation we have mapped out an entire ecosystem of actors, each providing their own tool or trade to help this underground community thrive.

There’s not much that intrigues me after Benjamin Caudill’s (@RhinoSecurity) presentation on “Offensive Forensics: CSI for the Bad Guy“. If I was at DEFCON, this is the time where I’d probably be browsing the dealer’s room, though I might go to the Amir Etemadieh (@Zenofex)/Mike Baker (@gtvhacker)/CJ Heres (@cj_000)/Hans Nielsen (@n0nst1ck) Google TV panel: these are the same folks who did the Google TV talk at DEFCON 20.

I feel kind of conflicted at 4:00. The Daniel Selifonov talk, “A Password is Not Enough: Why Disk Encryption is Broken and How We Might Fix It” sounds interesting. But I’m also intrigued by the “Decapping Chips the Easy Hard Way” with Adam Laurie and Zac Franken. Decapping chips is something I’ve been fascinated by, and it looks like Adam and Zac have found methods that don’t involve things like fuming nitric acid (and thus, are suitable for an apartment).

This is also the time when we, once again, present the “Hippie, please!” award to Richard Thieme for “The Government and UFOs: A Historical Analysis“.

I’m slightly intrigued by Nicolas Oberli’s (@Baldanos) talk about the ccTalk protocol, “Please Insert Inject More Coins”:

The ccTalk protocol is widely used in the vending machine sector as well as casino gaming industry, but is actually not that much known, and very little information exists about it except the official documentation. This protocol is used to transfer money-related information between various devices and the machine mainboard like the value of the inserted bill or how many coins need to be given as change to the customer.

Saturday morning, we have the second femtocell talk, “Do-It-Yourself Cellular IDS”, by Sherri Davidoff (@sherridavidoff), Scott Fretheim, David Harrison, and Randi Price:

For less than $500, you can build your own cellular intrusion detection system to detect malicious activity through your own local femtocell. Our team will show how we leveraged root access on a femtocell, reverse engineered the activation process, and turned it into a proof-of-concept cellular network intrusion monitoring system.

Opposite that, and worth noting, are the annual Tobias/Bluzmanis lock talk, and the David Lawrence et al talk on using 3D printers to defeat the Schlage Primus.

More than likely, I’d hit the Daniel Crowley et al (@dan_crowley) talk, “Home Invasion 2.0 – Attacking Network-Controlled Consumer Devices“, and the Philip Polstra (@ppolstra) presentation “We are Legion: Pentesting with an Army of Low-power Low-cost Devices“. I’m particularly intrigued by the Polstra talk, as one of my areas of interest is how small can we make devices that can still do useful hacking? What’s the smallest feasible wardriving system, for example?

I do want to give Jaime Sanchez (@segofensiva) a shout-out for his talk on “Building an Android IDS on Network Level“. This is worth watching.

I’d have to go to the Phorkus (@PeakSec)/Evilrob “Doing Bad Things to ‘Good’ Security Appliances” talk:

The problem with security appliances is verifying that they are as good as the marketing has lead you to believe. You need to spend lots of money to buy a unit, or figure out how to obtain it another way; we chose eBay. We now have a hardened, encrypted, AES 256 tape storage unit and a mission, break it every way possible!

Because, tape! But the Wesley McGrew “Pwn The Pwn Plug: Analyzing and Counter-Attacking Attacker-Implanted Devices” talk also interests me.

The PIN cracking device talk is on Saturday, opposite Amber Baldet’s (@AmberBaldet) talk on “Suicide Risk Assessment and Intervention Tactics“. I’m glad DEFCON accepted her talk, and I am looking forward to seeing the presentation online.

Also noteworthy, I think: James Snodgrass and Josh Hoover (@wishbone1138) on “BYO-Disaster and Why Corporate Wireless Security Still Sucks“.

Todd Manning (@tmanning) and Zach Lanier (@quine) are doing a presentation on “GoPro or GTFO: A Tale of Reversing an Embedded System“. I don’t have a GoPro (yet) or much of a use for one (yet) but I think they are interesting devices, so I’ll be watching for slides from this talk. Same for the conflicting Melissa Elliott talk, “Noise Floor: Exploring the World of Unintentional Radio Emissions“.

This takes us to Sunday. There’s not a whole lot that really turns me on early, though I admit to some interest in the Jaime Filson/Rob Fuller talk on harvesting github to build word lists:

After downloading approximately 500,000 repositories, storing 6TB on multiple usb drives; this will be a story of one computer, bandwidth, basic python and how a small idea quickly got out of hand.

I like the idea behind John Ortiz’s “Fast Forensics Using Simple Statistics and Cool Tools“, and he teaches at the University of Texas – San Antonio, so I’d probably go to that.

Now is when things start heating up from my perspective. Joseph Paul Cohen is giving a talk on his new tool, “Blucat: Netcat For Bluetooth“:

TCP/IP has tools such as nmap and netcat to explore devices and create socket connections. Bluetooth has sockets but doesn’t have the same tools. Blucat fills this need for the Bluetooth realm.

Holy crap, this sounds awesome. All I ask for is code that compiles.

(Unfortunately, this is up against the Eric Robi (@ericrobi)/Michael Perklin talk on “Forensic Fails“, which sounds like fun. But Bluetooth hacking is a big area of interest for me; sorry, guys.)

Speaking of Bluetooth hacking, Ryan Holeman (@hackgnar) is doing a talk on “The Bluetooth Device Database”. Which is exactly what it sounds like:

During this presentation I will go over the current community driven, distributed, real time, client/server architecture of the project. I will show off some of analytics that can be leveraged from the projects data sets. Finally, I will be releasing various open source open source bluetooth scanning clients (Linux, iOS, OSX).

Dude lives in Austin, too! Holy crap^2!

And that takes us through to the closing ceremonies and the end of DEFCON 21. I will try to link to presentations as they go up, significant news stories, other people’s blogs, and anything else I think you guys might be interested in. If you have specific requests or tips, please either let me know in comments or by email to stainles at mac dot com, stainles at gmail dot com, or stainles at sportsfirings dot com.

Posted in Android, Bluetooth, Cars, Clippings, DEFCON 21, Geek, Radio | Comments Closed

Random notes: July 5, 2013.

Friday, July 5th, 2013

Everton Wagstaffe and Reginald Connor are serving time for the kidnapping and murder of Jennifer Negron. Ms. Negron was 16 years old when she was murdered.

Both Mr. Wagstaffe and Mr. Connor have maintained their innocence and, after years of fighting, were able to arrange DNA testing of every piece of physical evidence that could be found; none of it implicated them, and the DNA in hair found on the victim’s body came from at least one other person.

The main witness against the two men was a crack addicted prostitute who was “forcibly detained by the authorities in a hotel until she testified”.

In the case of Mr. Wagstaffe and Mr. Connor, no records were kept of police interviews with other important witnesses; there was no physical evidence to support the informant’s claims; one witness, a police detective’s daughter, who could provide a seemingly credible alibi for Mr. Wagstaffe, was never interviewed by police, prosecutors or defense lawyers; the owner of a car supposedly used in the kidnapping said she told detectives that she had it with her at church through the night of Ms. Negron’s death. There is no record of any interview of her, either, even though the car was cited as important evidence.

Is this our old friend Louis Scarcella? Is the Brooklyn DA reinvestigating this case?

No. And no.

The investigation into the death of Ms. Negron was led by a detective from a different squad, Michael Race of the 75th Precinct. His work with another informant led to the conviction of at least three innocent people.
Of 750 murder investigations that he ran, Mr. Race has said, only one was “done the correct way, A to Z.”

One. Out of 750. And three wrongful convictions.

Aye aye mateys, oh, come on the Pirate Radio
Land of the free and home of the brave
FCC crawl in your grave!

(Explained.)

Directors of Meade Instruments Corp., which has helped foster the consumer market with its easy-to-use telescopes and binoculars since 1972, may be tipping their hand by Monday on whether to recommend selling the company, plow ahead alone or possibly seek bankruptcy protection.

This sucks. I’ve wanted a good telescope for much of my life, even though I find it hard to use one with glasses and I really am not able to stay up late in order to do observational astronomy. Still, I’m sad to see the market shrinking, even though the technology gets better and better.

Verizon has a great idea for Fire Island. As you might have guessed, the island got the crap beat out of it by Sandy, and the phone system was devastated.

Verizon, the only phone company in town, wants most of the island and its 500 homes to go all-wireless, ending for good its century-old copper wire phone network. That means phone lines buried underground or strung between poles and then stretched into homes will go out of service and be replaced by an experimental wireless service that sends calls between cell towers and home receivers.

Sounds great, right?

Without phone lines, consumers don’t have the option of DSL Internet. Gone are faxes. Heart monitors that connect over phone lines to hospitals don’t work over wireless, either. And small businesses can’t process credit cards or operate cash machines without buying entirely new payment systems, as Verizon notes in its New York public filing.

Not mentioned in the article: Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) over copper works when the power is out. Will Verizon’s wireless system? The cell towers may have battery backup or generators, but do the home receivers?

Posted in Clippings, Cops, Geek, Law, Radio | 2 Comments »

Scanners live in vain!

Monday, May 27th, 2013

A comment by friend of the blog Jake over at Curses, Foiled Again led me to check out the Broadcastify web site. I think this had been bubbling somewhere below the surface of my conscious mind anyway, but Jake provided the kick I needed.

Broadcastify basically collects radio feeds from scanners and organizes them by location. So you can browse the site, find your local area, and (assuming Broadcastify has a feed) click the bunny to listen to your local police or fire department traffic. There are several player options, including web-based players as well as iTunes, Real Audio, Windows Media, and Winamp.

Not every locality is there; there are some large gaps in coverage for Texas, to take one example. There are feeds for Williamson, Hays, and Bastrop counties; however, there’s no feed for the Williamson County Sheriff’s Department or Round Rock PD. On the other hand, this is free, and you get what you pay for.

For reference purposes, here’s the Travis County feeds page, which includes Austin/Travis County Fire and EMS and Austin Police and Travis County Public Safety.

Back a long time ago, I was an avid shortwave and scanner listener; I still have the equipment, but my scanner isn’t capable of following the newer trunked radio systems. I’ve flirted from time to time with the idea of purchasing a newer scanner, but now I don’t have to.

Thanks, Jake!

Posted in Cops, Law, Radio | Comments Closed

Ring ring ring, open phone.

Monday, April 29th, 2013

Great and good friend of sportsfirings.com and valued commenter lelnet left a long comment on last night’s cellphone post. Because his comment represents a lot of work and thought (and I believe in rewarding hard work) and because I’m afraid it will get lost in the shuffle, I’m promoting it to a blog post (with his permission).

You can already buy, off the shelf at Fry’s, a “phone” that does essentially what you’re talking about, using available wi-fi networks to connect with Skype and make calls through that, without any involvement of the cell providers. (Yes, I know…Skype is a proprietary protocol and would be unacceptable to Stallman. The firmware is also closed. But since it’s provably _possible_, one could do it with open standards if one saw a market.)

The problem is that it doesn’t scale well. Getting a reliable wi-fi signal is pretty easy…in the sorts of places one is likely to have access to a _wired_ phone whenever one wants one. Building a wi-fi network that covers the places one actually needs mobile connectivity from is a massively harder problem, due to the range limitations of unlicensed spectrum.

It _might_ be possible to do it using amateur frequencies, _if_ you could get regulatory approval to open those up to use by the general public. Which, of course, would involve fighting off both the whole telco industry and at least 80% of the amateur radio community. Considering that the latter group is where you’d be trying to recruit most of your network engineers from, it seems like it’d be a bad idea to begin your plan by irrevocably pissing them off, even if you magically assume that you’ll be able to out-muscle the telcos in Washington.

The last mile is a hard problem on several different dimensions, some of them physical and some of them political. But there is something you _could_ do…

Build an Android (or, if you like, Replicant) phone, pre-configured to send all its traffic through an encrypted VPN to an anonymizing end-point. Purchase connectivity for it on an existing cell carrier’s prepaid plan. Disable the cellular voice service, and have it send and receive calls exclusively through VoIP connectivity to an Asterisk or FreeSwitch server, either run by the same entity that does your anonymizer, or run yourself on a cheap colo server stuck in a rack in some country you doubt is ever going to care enough to spy on you.

Your cell provider can easily determine that Charles Udall Farley (or whatever name you gave them when you signed up…it’s prepaid, so it’s not like the name you give has to pass a credit check) pushes a lot of data around, but they’d have no way of inspecting the content. They’d have a record of Mr. Farley’s movements around their network, but no way to associate that with you, or even with the phone number you make and receive calls on. An Open Source OS on the phone addresses the “remote bugging” fears. It doesn’t depend on you personally running any software that RMS would find objectionable. And since you can make and receive calls from anywhere that you’re able to get a data signal off a cell tower, it’s still useful if your car breaks down by the side of the road, instead of just in your home and office, like a wi-fi-only device would be.

(I came up with this plan for a team of spies in a novel my wife is writing. But although to my knowledge no such phone exists today, there’s absolutely no barrier to someone building one tomorrow. And both the technologies and the services required to support the back-end of it are already available for purchase in the real world right now, at prices comparable to or better than what people who already had cell phones in the mid-90s were paying for service then.)

The only thing I’d add to this is that I, personally, have no interest in pissing off the amateur radio operators out there; both because it is not good strategy, as lelnet notes, and because I happen to be one myself. (KF5BFL, in case anyone was wondering, but don’t look for me; I don’t have any transmitting equipment at the moment.)

Posted in Android, Geek, linux, Radio | 2 Comments »

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