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.
Headline of the day.
Wednesday, August 15th, 2018Your loser update: pre-NFL edition.
Wednesday, August 15th, 2018Actually, this sits at the weird intersection of a couple of things:
You’ve stood by us through it all. We love you for it, and so does @budlight.
These special fridges will unlock celebratory beers when we get our first regular season “W”.#VictoryFridge pic.twitter.com/LgsGNabMpt
— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) August 14, 2018
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.
DEFCON 26/Black Hat updates: August 14, 2018.
Tuesday, August 14th, 2018I 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.
Also: badge related coverage if you care. Personally, I don’t need a stinking badge.
Black Hat updates:
- Putting this here for my IBM mainframe friend: “Mainframe [z/OS] Reverse Engineering and Exploit Development” by Chad Rikansrud.
DEFCON 26 updates:
- Haven’t found slides yet, but reference material for “Building Absurd Christmas Light Shows” with Rob Joyce is here.
- Also no slides that I’ve found for “You’d better secure your BLE devices or we’ll kick your butts!” with Damien Cauquil. But: his Twitter feed has an interesting link to “Exploiting BLE Smart Bulb Security using BtleJuice: A Step-by-Step Guide“, a blog post by Vaibhav Bedi (I think). What’s interesting about this post is that it covers the whole process of installing and configuring BtleJuice, “a framework to perform MiTM attacks on BLE devices”. Also: GitHub repo for Btlejack, “everything you need to sniff, jam and hijack Bluetooth Low Energy devices”.
- I’m excited about this one, though I haven’t had time to go through all of it yet: “Ridealong Adventures—Critical Issues with Police Body Cameras” by Josh Mitchell. Slides. five_oh_noes, a body camera scanner. More body camera related stuff.
- GitHub repo for “Breaking Smart Speakers: We are Listening to You” with Wu HuiYu and Qian Wenxiang. At the moment, this includes the presentation slides and Amazon Echo exploit code.
Pilot error.
Monday, August 13th, 2018The Dallas Wings, who are a team in the WNBA, fired their head coach Fred Williams yesterday.
The root cause was apparently not that the Wings have lost eight games in a row: they are 14-17 so far this season, and could conceivably make the playoffs. The root cause appears to have been that Mr. Williams and the team president/CEO got into “a postgame altercation”. It isn’t clear to me if punches were thrown or exactly what the nature of the altercation was: either it was serious enough that CEO Greg Bibb felt compelled to fire Williams before the season ended, or (possibly) Mr. Bibb is just a little oversensitive.
In any case, the Wings are still one game ahead of…that’s right, the Las Vegas Aces.
(Apologies for linking to ESPN, but the Dallas paper was really obnoxious about ad blockers. I couldn’t find any mention of this in the Statesman or HouChron.)
Obit watch: August 13, 2018.
Monday, August 13th, 2018V.S. Naipaul, noted author.
Dr. Richard Jarecki. He was most famous for hacking roulette:
He and his wife honed his technique at dozens of casinos, including in Monte Carlo; Divonne-les-Bains, France; Baden-Baden, Germany; San Remo, on the Italian Riviera; and, briefly, Las Vegas. He became a regular in San Remo, where he had lucrative runs over several years.
By 1969 he had become “a menace to every casino in Europe,” Robert Lardera, the San Remo casino’s managing director, told The Morning Herald.
“I don’t know how he does it exactly, but if he never returned to my casino I would be a very happy man,” Mr. Lardera said.
According to the NYT, his technique basically amounted to painstaking long term observation of thousands of spins, looking for roulette wheels with biases, and then exploiting those biases.
DEFCON/Black Hat updates: round 2.
Thursday, August 9th, 2018Another Ars story based on another Black Hat panel:
The presentation in question is “Understanding and Exploiting Implanted Medical Devices” by Billy Rios and Jonathan Butts. No slides or white paper yet, so I don’t want to comment very much. But: I do also want to point out this article, “The $250 Biohack That’s Revolutionizing Life With Diabetes“. Why? Well…
Some additional interesting looking work:
- “TRITON: How it Disrupted Safety Systems and Changed the Threat Landscape of Industrial Control Systems, Forever” by Andrea Carcano, Marina Krotofil, and Younes Dragoni. “In 2017, a sophisticated threat actor deployed the TRITON attack framework engineered to manipulate industrial safety systems at a critical infrastructure facility. This talk offers new insights into TRITON attack framework which became an unprecedented milestone in the history of cyber-warfare as it is the first publicly observed malware that specifically targets protection functions meant to safeguard human lives.” Slides. White paper.
- “There will be Glitches: Extracting and Analyzing Automotive Firmware Efficiently” by a whole bunch of people.
- And it just wouldn’t be a security conference in 2018 without a Tesla attack: “Over-the-Air: How we Remotely Compromised the Gateway, BCM, and Autopilot ECUs of Tesla Cars” by Ling Liu, Sen Nie, Wenkai Zhang, and Yuefeng Du. White paper is at the link: slides are broken.
That’s all I’ve been able to turn up today. More tomorrow, I hope.
Black Hat 2018/DEFCON 26 0 day updates.
Thursday, August 9th, 2018Some of yesterday’s Black Hat presentations:
- “Stress and Hacking: Understanding Cognitive Stress in Tactical Cyber Ops” by Celeste Paul and Josiah Dykstra.
- “Reversing a Japanese Wireless SD Card – From Zero to Code Execution” by Guillaume Valadon. And here’s the GitHub repo.
- “Mental Health Hacks: Fighting Burnout, Depression and Suicide in the Hacker Community” by Christian Dameff and Jay Radcliffe.
- “Open Sesame: Picking Locks with Cortana“. “Exploiting the ‘Open Sesame’ vulnerability attackers can view the contents of sensitive files (text and media), browse arbitrary web sites, download and execute arbitrary executables from the Internet, and under some circumstances gain elevated privileges.”
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:
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.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#51 in a series)
Wednesday, August 8th, 2018Personally, I kind of hope Rep. Collins turns out to be innocent, and it was a dingo who gave the stock tips.
This never happens.
Tuesday, August 7th, 2018But when it does, I can’t miss commenting on it.
Friday night, the Las Vegas Aces were scheduled to play a WNBA game against the Washington Mystics.
But things happened along the way. I can’t find specific details, but the general summary is that it took the Aces 26 hours to get from Las Vegas to Washington, D.C. They arrived around 3:45 PM on Friday. The game was scheduled to start at 8 PM Friday, so they’d been travelling all that time and had about four hours to rest and get ready for the game.
The team thought this was unacceptable. The Aces had already been in contact with the player’s union throughout the whole travel fiasco, trying to get the game delayed: but the WNBA schedule is so tight at the moment the league didn’t feel like they could delay.
So the Aces just refused to play.
The Aces felt like they could trust the league to make a decision. And the league decided today.
There was little precedent for the decision because the WNBA has never before canceled a game. There have been only a handful of instances over the past few decades in major sports in which teams have had to forfeit.
Most of those occurred because of fan involvement, notably the Chicago White Sox’s infamous Disco Demolition Night in 1979, when the field was so damaged the second game of a doubleheader could not be played.
As far as I can tell, while there is a Wikipedia page on forfeits in sport, and a seperate one for baseball specifically, I can’t tell if any basketball game – NCAA, NBA, or WNBA – has been forfeited before now. (The NCAA has voided wins, but that’s different.)
The last forfeit I know of in NCAA football – or in any other sport before now – was the Grambling State-Jackson State game in 2013. I welcome correction if anybody has a more recent example.
Edited to add: Ooops. Missed that California University of Pennsylvania forfeited one in 2014 after five players were charged with assault.
(“Don’t WNBA teams fly charter?” I think that’s covered in one of the links, but the short answer is: no, the league ordinarily doesn’t allow charter flights in order to keep a level playing field, since some teams have more resources than others. The league did give special permission to the Aces to arrange a charter while all of this was going on, but the team wasn’t able to arrange one on short notice.)
Obit watch: August 7, 2018.
Tuesday, August 7th, 2018Joël Robuchon, noted French chef.
Lawrence and I often joke about French cooking: “High prices. Small portions.” And I’ve never eaten at a Robuchon restaurant. But he sounds like someone who had the right ideas.
…
…
Paul Laxalt, former Senator.
Tom Heckert, former general manager of the Cleveland Browns. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Amy Meselson. She was 46 years old, and had a reputation for defending immigrants to the United States. Her obit opens with a great story about her zealous advocacy for Amadou Ly, a Senegalese immigrant who was part of a winning robotics team at his high school.
…
…
Ms. Meselson earned her middle name by surviving a life-threatening respiratory disease. Besides dealing with depression, she had recently been given a diagnosis of attention deficit disorder and extreme anxiety — all aggravated when she traveled to Greece two years ago to volunteer at a camp for Syrian refugees, Sarah Meselson said at a memorial service.
At the service, she said she wanted to recount her daughter’s maladies for two reasons.
“One,” she said, “is to emphasize what everyone already knows — that it is not always possible to comprehend the level of suffering that others may be experiencing, especially when they appear to be successful and to excel to the extent that Amy did.
“The other,” she added, “is to applaud my daughter for all that she accomplished despite her mental illness.”
In that vein, this is hard as hell to read, but worth it. (Hattip: Popehat on the Twitter.)
Obit watch: August 6, 2018.
Monday, August 6th, 2018Edited to add: NYT obit now up.
DEFCON 26/Black Hat 2018 preliminary notes.
Sunday, August 5th, 2018DEFCON 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:
- “Stress and Hacking: Understanding Cognitive Stress in Tactical Cyber Ops” by Celeste Paul and Josiah Dykstra, because cognitive stress under pressure is something I’m interested in and has wider implications.
- “Reversing a Japanese Wireless SD Card – From Zero to Code Execution” by Guillaume Valadon.
- “Mental Health Hacks: Fighting Burnout, Depression and Suicide in the Hacker Community” by Christian Dameff and Jay Radcliffe, for obvious reasons.
- “Open Sesame: Picking Locks with Cortana“, with Amichai Shulman, Ron Marcovich, Tal Be’ery, and Yuval Ron. The lockpicking in this case looks less like actual physical lock sport: “In this presentation, we will reveal the “Open Sesame” vulnerability, a much more powerful vulnerability in Cortana that allows attackers to take over a locked Windows machine and execute arbitrary code.”
- “Applied Self-Driving Car Security” because Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek.
What about DEFCON 26? After the jump…
The Washington Post makes me testy again.
Thursday, August 2nd, 2018Headline:
The provocative Mike Daisey is a straight-shooter in his solo show about guns.
Dear WP:
The words you were looking for in that headline were “known liar“. “Known. Liar.”
You’re welcome.