We keep saying we’re going to get the TMQ Watch out closer to Tuesday, if not actually on Tuesday.
And then things keep popping up.
We apologize for the lateness. Perhaps next week.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Archive for August, 2018
TMQ Watch: August 28, 2018.
Thursday, August 30th, 2018Oh, noes, Llano.
Wednesday, August 29th, 2018Back in February, I touched on problems with the Llano Police Department. I had not seen an update on this until yesterday, when Reason‘s “Hit and Run” blog, of all places, ran a story covering the latest developments.
Summarizing:
Chief Kevin Ratliff is now ex-Chief Kevin Ratliff. He was fired July 26th…after being convicted of two counts of official oppression and one count of tampering with a governmental record.
These were all class A misdemeanors. I can’t tell if conviction on these charges requires Ratliff to surrender his peace officer’s license. It doesn’t look like the other indicted officers have gone to trial yet. (Former officer Harden is set for trial in October.)
But wait, there’s more! There was another incident that resulted in another Llano officer and a sheriff’s deputy also being indicted on official oppression charges!
Basically, the two officers responded to a domestic dispute. The male party wouldn’t open the door to the responding officers: so first they tried to pick the lock, then they kicked the door in.
“You’re going to jail,” Roberts told Holley as he stood over him. The officers held Holley in the back of a patrol unit for nearly an hour, then later took the handcuffs off and let him go.
Holley was never charged with a crime.
And apparently, there’s body camera footage of this whole affair as well.
When asked if there was a climate of corruption at the police department, [City Manager Scott] Edmonson said, “Uh, no.”
When asked if Edmonson could be certain of that given the city’s done nothing to investigate that angle, Edmonson replied, “Can we be sure of anything?”
Existential philosophy in Llano. Who’d thunk it?
The sheriff’s deputy is currently suspended:
The sheriff disciplined Roberts the Monday after the incident and stripped him of his police powers and put Roberts on paid administrative leave when the indictment came down. Blackburn didn’t allow Roberts to sit at home to earn his pay, he put his deputy to work in the county jail until the criminal charges are resolved.
“I think for the citizens of the county, if he’s going to be on paid leave, he should be working for it,” Blackburn said.
The Llano PD officer resigned.
When guns are outlawed…
Tuesday, August 28th, 2018Shot:
Chaser: what story is this related to?
Hong Kong Professor Faces Murder Trial in ‘Yoga Ball Killing’
“Yoga Ball Killing”? Yes: Dr. Khaw Kim-sun is accused of murdering his wife and 16 year old daughter using yoga balls filled with carbon monoxide.
…
Dr. Khaw, who has pleaded not guilty, had told the police that Lily [the 16-year-old daughter – DB] might have tried to kill herself with the yoga ball. Last week, the prosecutor, Andrew Bruce, said in court that was a “lame excuse” and “simply untrue.”
Prosecutors say that when Dr. Khaw drove the yoga balls home in his Toyota, he had used a monitor that would sound an alarm if the gas reached dangerous levels. They said Ms. Lee, his mistress, was an assistant in the rabbit experiment.
Look, I understand bringing your work home with you. But when your work is a yoga ball filled with carbon monoxide? Leave that (stuff) in the lab.
Spicy bar snack, by way of Mike the Musicologist:
I saw Carbon Monoxide Yoga Balls open for Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test at Altamont in ’67.
CanCon.
Monday, August 27th, 2018That’s “Canadian Content” for those of you in my audience unfamiliar with the term.
I don’t remember how I stumbled across this, but yesterday I discovered “The Devil at Your Heels”, a 1981 documentary by Robert Fortier which is available at the National Film Board of Canada’s website.
Perhaps surprisingly to some people, this is not a movie about blues music. “Devil” is a documentary about Ken Carter, a semi-famous Canadian stunt driver, and his attempt to jump a car from the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River to the US side: a distance of about one mile.
According to the background blog entry on the film, Fortier originally intended this to be a short documenting the jump.
It took five years just to get to the point where Carter was actually able and ready to make the attempt. And Fortier kept filming in spite of the setbacks: rain interfering with construction of the jump ramp, exploding rocket fuel tanks, Carter’s attempts to raise money…
I “watched” about 55 minutes of it yesterday while puttering around doing other things, and plan to finish watching it in the next couple of days. There is a twist at the end which I spoiled for myself, but I won’t do that to you. (If you search for “Ken Carter” or “The Devil at Your Heels” on Wikipedia, you’ll find the twist.) From what I saw, I think this is another Canadian documentary that’s worth your attention. It isn’t quite as bat guano insane as “Project Grizzly“, but it’s still fun.
The whole movie is also available in high-def on YouTube, again thanks to the NFB:
Somehow, while searching around looking for more stuff about Ken Carter and the jump, I ran across this article on AutoFocus, a Canadian auto news site, about Jacques Ostiguy. Ostiguy was a Canadian designer, noted for his work on the Chrysler Cordoba and for Bombardier (the company that made Ski-Doo snowmobiles).
I wanted to note this because I love this quote in the article:
(Content warning: article may not be 100% safe for work in some environments. There are no explicit drawings in the article itself, but some people might take offense at the headline.)
Obit watch: August 26, 2018.
Sunday, August 26th, 2018Obit watch: August 23, 2018.
Thursday, August 23rd, 2018Ed Brandon, long time weatherman for Channel 13 in Houston.
TMQ Watch: August 21, 2018.
Thursday, August 23rd, 2018Like those truck stop enchiladas you had for dinner last night, Tuesday Morning Quarterback is back on The Weekly Standard.
And like the Genesee Cream Ale you washed those enchiladas down with, so is TMQ Watch: albeit a little late this week.
After the jump, this week’s TMQ…
Obit watch: August 22, 2018.
Wednesday, August 22nd, 2018I wasn’t originally going to post this one, but there’s a story here that’s too good to pass up.
Don Cherry, noted singer and noted amateur golfer. He actually passed away April 4th, but his death was not widely reported until recently.
He was also the voice of Mr. Clean at one point.
Because of his dual pursuits, he nearly sabotaged himself on the eve of his inaugural Masters, in 1953.
The owner of a local nightclub hired him to sing each night of the tournament. When Clifford Roberts, a founder of the Masters and chairman of Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, where the tournament is held, learned of the sideshow, he called Mr. Cherry in for a talk.
“We never had anyone play in the Masters and sing at a local nightclub at the same time,” Mr. Roberts said, as Mr. Cherry recalled in his memoir.
“My reply, without being disrespectful and with a little Texas naïveté, was ‘Mr. Roberts, I have looked at the people playing in this tournament and can’t see anyone else who can sing.’ ”
Quote of the day.
Tuesday, August 21st, 2018I can't wait to become the sysadmin for my fridge.
— Dan Selman (@danielselman) August 21, 2018
(This whole thread is gold, Jerry, comedy gold.)
Obit watch: August 21, 2018.
Tuesday, August 21st, 2018David Rothenberg died on July 15th at the age of 42. His death was not widely reported until late last week.
He worked as a visual artist under the name “Dave Dave” in Las Vegas:
Mr. Rothenberg became a close friend of Michael Jackson, who encouraged him to pursue a career in art. Through brightly colored 1960s-style Pop Art paintings and drawings, he sought to promote positivity, he wrote on his website, particularly through a series called “Lifted.”
“There is a lot that happens in people’s lives, but that doesn’t define them as a human being, it makes them stronger,” Mr. Rothenberg told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2016.
Here’s the rest of the story:
He was 6 in 1983 when his father gave him a sleeping pill in a motel room in Buena Park, Calif., near Disneyland, and then doused his bed with kerosene and set it on fire. The attack left burns on more than 90 percent of David’s body. His father, who was said to be in a bitter custody fight with his wife, Marie, then fled.
“He was working at a restaurant in New York, and he had saved $10,000 for this trip to California,” Mr. Rothenberg told The Review-Journal. “On the trip, he was planning to kill me.”
I swear that I’ve written about his father, Charles, previously, but I can’t find that blog entry now. Charles Rothenberg spent seven years in prison for attempted murder before being paroled. He went on to commit other crimes: I recall them being mostly financial. He’s currently serving a 25 to life sentence in California under the three strikes law.
For the historical record: Kofi Annan.
Obit watch: August 16, 2018.
Thursday, August 16th, 2018The cause was advanced pancreatic cancer, her publicist, Gwendolyn Quinn, said.
Also among the dead: Morgana King, who was somewhat famous as a jazz singer. She was better known, however, as Mama Corleone in the “Godfather” movies.
Herbert Sperling died in early July at a federal prison hospital near Boston. He’d been in prison since 1973.
He also had a reputation for violence.
In 1977, he was indicted on charges of hiring three fellow inmates at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta to murder Mr. [Vincent C.] Papa, whom he suspected of turning police informant. Mr. Sperling was acquitted in the conspiracy, but two other defendants were convicted of fatally stabbing Mr. Papa in the back and chest at least eight times in a prison courtyard.
Mr. Papa had been convicted of choreographing the audacious theft by rogue police officers of tens of millions of dollars worth of drugs from the New York Police Department’s evidence room in Lower Manhattan in the early 1970s and replacing it with bags of flour and cornstarch. The crimes kick-started a consequential corruption investigation of the police.
Much of the heroin had been seized in 1962 in the Bronx from the car in which it had been shipped from the French port city Marseille. The successful investigation in the case inspired the Oscar-winning 1971 movie “The French Connection.”
Mr. Sperling was also suspected in the death of Louis J. Mileto, whom police identified as a courier for the Sperling heroin ring. Mr. Mileto’s frozen, headless and limbless torso was found in 1972 in the trunk of a gutted car in the Hudson Valley. He was identified by his teeth, which were found in his stomach. Investigators said he had swallowed them during a vicious beating.
There’s your telling detail, right there.
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.