Archive for August, 2018

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Pilot error.

Monday, August 13th, 2018

The 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.)

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 13, 2018.

Monday, August 13th, 2018

V.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.

“If casino managers don’t like to lose, they should sell vegetables,” Dr. Jarecki told The New York Times in an article about his win streak in 1969.

Posted in Books, Obits | Comments Closed

DEFCON/Black Hat updates: round 2.

Thursday, August 9th, 2018

Another Ars story based on another Black Hat panel:

Life-saving pacemakers manufactured by Medtronic don’t rely on encryption to safeguard firmware updates, a failing that makes it possible for hackers to remotely install malicious wares that threaten patients’ lives, security researchers said Thursday.

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…

The DIY pancreas movement would never have happened if not for a Medtronic blunder. In 2011 a pair of security researchers alerted the public that the wireless radio frequency links in some of the company’s best-selling insulin pumps had been left open to hackers. Medtronic closed the loophole after the researchers warned of risks to patients, but it never recalled the devices, leaving thousands in circulation.

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.

Posted in Cars, DEFCON, DEFCON 26 | 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

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#51 in a series)

Wednesday, August 8th, 2018

Representative Chris Collins, a New York Republican who was one of President Trump’s earliest and most vocal supporters, was charged with insider trading on Wednesday. He was accused of tipping off his son and others to sell stock in an Australian pharmaceutical company before the results of one of its failed drug tests became public, federal prosecutors said.

Personally, I kind of hope Rep. Collins turns out to be innocent, and it was a dingo who gave the stock tips.

Posted in Law, Politics | Comments Closed

This never happens.

Tuesday, August 7th, 2018

But 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.

“We just really felt like after a full day at the airport, a night of no sleep, no proper nutrition, we were really putting ourselves at risk to go play very high-level, competitive basketball,” Aces center Carolyn Swords said. “It was a very difficult decision because we love what we do. We love the opportunity to compete in front of WNBA fans no matter what city we’re in.”

The Aces felt like they could trust the league to make a decision. And the league decided today.

It was a forfeit.

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 National Football League rulebook has a provision for forfeiture but has never used it (there was at least one alleged “forfeit” in the 1921 NFL season, but because league schedules were so fluid in the 1920s and it was never clear who was at fault for the game not being played, the league now considers it a cancellation, which was very common at the time). Former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle noted that he had never used the league’s forfeit provisions and would never change the result of a game after the fact, a stance that prevented the result of the Snowplow Game, a game that had been decided on an acknowledged but unpunished unfair act, from being forfeited. It was briefly discussed as a potential punishment during Spygate but never implemented.

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.)

Posted in Sports | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: August 7, 2018.

Tuesday, August 7th, 2018

Joël 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.

His butter-laden potato purée, one of many instant classics, consisted of four ingredients —potatoes, butter, milk and salt — but his labor-intensive technique of drying the potatoes and gradually introducing chilled butter and boiling milk elevated the dish far beyond its station.

…

“One of his favorite lines was, ‘Our job is not to make a mushroom taste like a carrot but to make a mushroom taste as much like a mushroom as it can,’ ” Ms. Wells, the co-author of Mr. Robuchon’s cookbook “Simply French” (1991), said by telephone.

…

“The older I get, the more I realize the truth is: the simpler the food, the more exceptional it can be,” he told Business Insider in 2014. “I never try to marry more than three flavors in one dish. I like walking into a kitchen and knowing that the dishes are identifiable and the ingredients within them easy to detect.”

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.

Federal officials were persuaded to drop the deportation proceedings and grant Mr. Ly a foreign student visa. He graduated from Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, became a citizen, embarked on an acting career and moved to Hollywood.

…

Ms. Meselson, who had struggled with depression since she was a teenager, committed suicide on July 22 at her home in Manhattan, her mother, Sarah Meselson, said.

…

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.)

Posted in Food, NFL, Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 6, 2018.

Monday, August 6th, 2018

Charlotte Rae.

Edited to add: NYT obit now up.

Rae also began her extensive television career in the 1950s, with appearances on The United States Steel Hour and The Phil Silvers Show. A role that really brought her attention came in 1961 when she was cast as Sylvia Schnauser, the wife of Officer Leo Schnauser, played by Al Lewis, in the NBC sitcom Car 54, Where Are You?

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | 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

The Washington Post makes me testy again.

Thursday, August 2nd, 2018

Headline:

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.

Posted in Media | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 1, 2018.

Wednesday, August 1st, 2018

Captain Lawrence E. Dickson passed away on December 23, 1944.

On Dec. 23, 1944, Captain Dickson got into a P-51 Mustang fighter plane at Ramitelli Air Base in Italy for a reconnaissance mission. Later, as he piloted the plane during the return flight, it experienced engine failure, the agency said.
Ms. Andrews said she learned from a wingman who flew alongside her father that two other planes flew alongside Captain Dickson’s plane as it descended until it disappeared.
Some witnesses told officials that they saw the plane crash and roll over, the canopy jettisoned.
Officials from D.P.A.A. said Captain Dickson was not seen ejecting from the plane.

(Note: as far as I am aware, the P-51 in 1944 did not have ejection seats.)

Captain Dickson was one of the Tuskegee Airmen. The crash site was not found until 2012, remains were not recovered from the site until 2017, and DNA analysis was not completed until last Friday.

Captain Dickson is the first of 27 members of the Tuskegee Airmen who were declared missing to be identified.

Posted in History, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

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