Many small bloodsucking insects.

August 21st, 2019

I think I’ve managed to keep on top of the Austin City Council and Travis County Commissioners lists.

But I let the list of Texas Congressional reps fall into disrepair and obsolesce. And I didn’t think the list of Texas Senators needed to be updated, either.

It seems that the House and Senate IT people (or whoever is in charge of the websites for reps and senators) have been doing a lot of reconfiguration and standardization. Even if the senator or rep hadn’t changed since 2016 or so, there were still broken links to district maps and contact forms. Plus it seems like these folks move office locations about as often as…well, as something that moves a lot.

Anyway, I’ve spent a good chunk of my spare time for the past couple of days updating the Senators and Representatives lists. Just in case you want to make use of those for a specific purpose, such as contacting your rep to explain that a magazine ban is going to cost him his seat in Congress. You know, the usual.

The next bunch of free mental CPU cycles are going to spent going back over the commissioners and city council lists, just to make sure they haven’t slipped in any changes. (It looks like Jeff Travillion has hired some staff members since he took office, and I’ve updated his entry.)

If you good folks notice anything that’s wrong or broken or out of date, please contact me and I’ll get it fixed ASAP.

In the meantime, UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED, ESPECIALLY to COMPUTER BULLETIN BOARDS.

Posted in Admin, Politics, Texas | Comments Closed

While we’re talking about defensive gun use…

August 21st, 2019

Andrew Branca did a good post on Monday (that I missed) over at Legal Insurrection about the Michael Drejka case: the trial has started.

You might know the Drejka case better as the “handicapped parking space shooting”. Trying to summarize as objectively as I can: Mr. Drejka confronted Markeis McGlockton’s girlfriend about being parked illegally in a handicapped parking space. Mr. McGlockton intervened and shoved Mr. Drejka to the ground: Mr. Drejka, apparently believing he was in a vulnerable position and subject to further attack by Mr. McGlockton, shot and killed him.

Mr. Drejka was not initially charged: the local sheriff stated that he believed this was a legitimate case of self-defense. A month after the shooting, Mr. Drejka was charged with manslaughter.

As I’ve noted here and elsewhere, this is not a clear cut case of either lawful self-defense or an unlawful killing. Reasonable people can look at the same evidence and come to differing conclusions on guilt or innocence. It’s thus perfectly reasonable for some people to believe Drejka was justified in firing that shot. It is also perfectly reasonable for the State Attorney to believe there exists enough evidence inconsistent with self-defense to bring the matter to trial and have a jury decide the matter. This is the system working, folks.

Bonus: CNN debunking.

Posted in Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Hard lessons learned.

August 20th, 2019

There’s an article in today’s NYT about Anwar Ghazali. Mr. Ghazali was convicted of second degree murder a few days ago.

What did he do? He shot a 17-year-old who shoplifted some beer from the convenience store Mr. Ghazali was clerking at.

You should apply the usual NYT gun related story discount to this article, but I think there are some illustrative lessons to be learned here.

Dorian Harris, 17, grabbed a few cans of Spiked Watermelon beer from a cooler in the Top Stop Shop in Memphis last year. He ran out the door without paying, dropping one in his haste. The store clerk grabbed a handgun and chased him, firing off a few shots into the dark night, on March 29, the authorities said.

So the guy was running off, he wasn’t a fleeing armed felon who could endanger others, and Mr. Ghazali was (by this account) out of danger. Why did he grab a gun and pursue? I’m not a lawyer, much less a Tennessee one, but I’m pretty sure grabbing a gun and pursuing a person who is in flight, and poses no immediate threat to you or others, takes you outside of “castle doctrine” and into “the DAs likely going to charge you – that is, if you don’t get shot by the cops while you’re running down the street waving a gun” territory.

The store clerk grabbed a handgun and chased him, firing off a few shots into the dark night, on March 29, the authorities said.
“I think I shot him,” the clerk, Anwar Ghazali, 29, told a customer when he returned to the store, according to a police affidavit and the Shelby County District Attorney’s office.

“I think I shot him.” So he was spraying shots into “the dark night”?

Always be sure of your target and what is beyond it. What if he had hit an innocent person in a house or apartment nearby?

But he did hit somebody.

Mr. Harris’s body was discovered two days later in a nearby yard, where he had bled to death from a gunshot wound in the back of his left leg, the district attorney’s office said, and Mr. Ghazali was arrested.

And:

Mr. Ghazali didn’t call the police, the authorities said.

If he had called the police, there’s a pretty good chance they would have found Mr. Harris, stopped the bleed, gotten medics out there, Mr. Harris would be alive today, and Mr. Ghazali wouldn’t have been charged with murder. (Admittedly, I haven’t seen the autopsy report, which is why I qualify that with “pretty good chance”.)

Also on point: in a defensive gun use, even if you just display the gun without actually using it, first one to call 911 wins. Massad Ayoob’s writings contain more than one story of someone who legitimately displayed a weapon to deter a threat, and found themselves on the wrong end of a police investigation and legal bills. If I remember correctly (I don’t have the book here at work) Chris Bird’s Thank God I Had a Gun contains a story like this that ended “well”: in that the defensive gun user avoided prison time, but still racked up legal fees and other consequences.

So that’s my takeaways: don’t shoot people who aren’t an imminent threat to life, don’t shoot blindly into the dark, and call the police. Did I miss any salutary points? Feel free to mention my many shortcomings in comments below.

Posted in Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 20, 2019.

August 20th, 2019

NYT obit for Cedric Benson.

Statement from APD.

Posted in Austin, Cops, Law, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 18, 2019.

August 18th, 2019

Cedric Benson, former UT and NFL player, was reportedly killed in a motorcycle accident last night.

Benson, a running back who played for the Longhorns from 2001 to 2004, accumulated the second-most rushing yards in program history and topped 1,000 yards in each of his four seasons. He captured the Doak Walker Award as the nation’s top running back in his senior season in 2004. The next year, the Chicago Bears took him No. 4 overall in the NFL draft. Benson went on to play eight seasons in the league and last played in 2012 with the Green Bay Packers.

He was 36. Reports are that a passenger on his motorcycle was also killed.

Posted in NFL, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 17, 2019.

August 17th, 2019

Quickly, because I’m busy again: Peter Fonda. THR.

Posted in Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

Please refrain from tasting the KNOB.

August 16th, 2019

As a Bluetooth guy, and as someone who just posted a bunch of DEFCON 27 stuff, I feel compelled to say something about the Key Negotiation of Bluetooth Attack (aka KNOB) which has been getting a lot of attention the past few days.

Here’s the actual paper from the USENIX Security Symposium.

The attack allows a third party, without knowledge of any secret material (such as link and encryption keys), to make two (or more) victims agree on an encryption key with only 1 byte (8 bits) of entropy. Such low entropy enables the attacker to easily brute force the negotiated encryption keys, decrypt the eavesdropped ciphertext, and inject valid encrypted messages (in real-time). The attack is stealthy because the encryption key negotiation is transparent to the Bluetooth users. The attack is standard-compliant because all Bluetooth BR/EDR versions require to support encryption keys with entropy between 1 and 16 bytes and do not secure the key negotiation protocol. As a result, the attacker completely breaks Bluetooth BR/EDR security without being detected. [Emphasis in the original – DB]

Here’s a higher level overview of how the attack works.

Also of interest, also from USENIX, also getting some media attention: “Please Pay Inside: Evaluating Bluetooth-based Detection of Gas Pump Skimmers“. What’s cool about this is that the authors have developed Bluetana, an Android app that scans for Bluetooth devices in the area (every five seconds), displays a list of devices it found, and highlights ones that show characteristics similar to those of Bluetooth skimmers.

First, the app checks the device’s class. All skimmers studied within this work, whether discovered by Bluetana or not, had a device class of Uncategorized. If the device class is not uncategorized, the data is saved for later analysis. The device’s MAC prefix is then compared against a “hitlist” of prefixes used in skimming devices recovered by law enforcement. If the device has a MAC that is not on this hitlist, it is unlikely to be a skimmer, and the app highlights the record yellow. Next, if the device name matches a common product using the same MAC prefix, the record highlights in orange. If all three fields (MAC prefix, Class-of-Device, and Device Name) indicate the device is likely to be a skimmer, Bluetana highlights the record in red. The highlighting procedure is the result of a year of refinements based on our experience finding skimmers in the field, and Bluetana includes a remote update procedure to account for these incremental changes.

I’m fascinated by both of these papers, just based on a preliminary skimming. I’m hoping to do a detailed reading at that mythical point in the future when I have more free time…

Posted in Android, Bluetooth, Geek, Radio | Comments Closed

Black Hat/DEFCON 27 links: August 16, 2019.

August 16th, 2019

Apologies for being behind on this: I’m also working on another project that’s taking up a lot of my blogging time, but I hope to be done with that soon.

Posted in Bluetooth, DEFCON, DEFCON 27, Locks, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 14, 2019.

August 14th, 2019

Dr. Carl A. Weiss Jr.

The name may ring a small bell for some of you. Others of you may be more familiar with his father…

…Dr. Carl A. Weiss, aka “The man who shot Huey Long”.

Maybe.

Carl Jr. would go on to learn a great deal about the senator and his father: that Long — who had seized near-dictatorial power to become what President Franklin D. Roosevelt branded as the most dangerous man in America — lingered 31 hours before he died of a single bullet wound, a victim, some said, of botched medical care by a patronage appointee at a Baton Rouge hospital; that his father — whose Tulane University yearbook had proclaimed that he was “bound to go out and make the world take notice” — died instantly, his body perforated with 61 bullet holes; and that his father — an antagonist of the Long regime but by most accounts an unlikely murderer — was just as rapidly convicted in the court of public opinion as the assassin.

The junior Dr. Weiss spent much of his life trying to prove that his father did not shoot Long. Some historians agree:

The counternarrative asserts that the doctor had only punched Long, that the bodyguards had overreacted and that Long was actually killed in the fusillade of their bullets. The guards were said to have then covered up their reckless response by pinning the death on Weiss.
“In his heart he knew the allegations weren’t true,” Carl III said of his father in a telephone interview. “The one-man, one-gun, one-bullet is not what occurred.”
Professor Richard D. White Jr., dean of the E. J. Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University and the author of a more recent biography, “Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long” (2006), shares those doubts.
“As a historian I cannot say either way, but deep in my heart I do not believe Carl shot Huey, but instead a stray bodyguard bullet hit him,” Professor White, who had met with Dr. Weiss Jr., said in an email this week.

…

Dr. Weiss ultimately cooperated with James E. Starrs, a forensic scientist at George Washington University, who tracked down Carl Sr.’s revolver (it was not unusual for Baton Rouge doctors making late-night house calls to be armed) and a single spent bullet.
They were found in a safe deposit box belonging to the daughter of Louisiana’s former top police official. Dr. Weiss joined the State Police in successfully suing to review the records and test fire the gun.
The police concluded that the bullet — if it was, indeed, the one that had killed Long — had not come from Weiss’s revolver.
Long’s clothes were also examined, and here the tearing of the material and the residue left on it indicated that Long had been shot at point-blank range. That undercut at least one theory — that Long was killed by a ricocheting bullet fired by a bodyguard.

I want to note here, for the record, that the supposed Weiss gun was not a revolver, but an FN Model 1910 pistol. As a matter of fact, it was this one.

I don’t know what to think about Long and Weiss. I’m inclined more in the direction of T. Harry Williams (who was writing close enough to the event that he could interview some first-hand witnesses, and believed that Weiss shot Long) than I am towards some of the later historians. On the other hand, the whole thing is just such a mess of botched investigations and chain of custody questions (how did the Weiss gun and the bullet end up in that guy’s safety deposit box?) that I doubt we’ll ever know anything for sure.

Posted in Guns, History, Obits | Comments Closed

Quel fromage!

August 13th, 2019

I don’t think this qualifies for flaming hyenas status. Yet.

The Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office served a search warrant at the Sheriff’s Office last week, as part of an apparent corruption probe into allegations of political favoritism in the agency’s issuing of concealed weapons permits, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

…

…sources confirmed that the investigation involves an alleged “quid pro quo” between donors to six-term Sheriff Laurie Smith’s election efforts and people who have obtained concealed-carry weapons permits from her office, which has been relatively stingy about issuing the privilege compared to neighboring counties.
The sources also said that the probe, while publicly surfacing over the past few days, had been in the works far longer and that it is focused on some of Smith’s trusted advisers in the agency.

…

…at least four recipients of the 13 permits either issued or renewed last year donated at least $1,000 to Smith’s re-election efforts, including to her formal campaign or to the independent Santa Clara County Public Safety Alliance that supported her.
That includes match.com founder and Santa Clara County Valley Water District board member Gary Kremen, a Los Altos resident who donated $5,000 to the safety alliance group last fall, during Smith’s re-election bid for a sixth term.

Posted in California Über Alles, Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Black Hat/DEFCON 27 links: August 13, 2019.

August 13th, 2019

I had a lot of trouble finding this on the site, but: the DEFCON 27 media server is here.

I’ve got to wrap this up for now, as my lunch hour is almost over. I may try to do a second post tonight, if I find enough additional material to justify one. Otherwise, please share, enjoy, comment, and thank any presenters whose work you found particularly enjoyable or valuable.

Posted in DEFCON, DEFCON 27, Photography, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: August 13, 2019.

August 13th, 2019

Dorothy Olsen. She was 103 when she passed away on July 23rd.

You’ve probably never heard of her, but she was one of the WWII Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASPs). The WASPs ferried military aircraft from manufacturing plants to points where they could then be flown overseas.

Transporting and testing the latest models, towing targets and transferring captured enemy planes, the WASPs collectively flew an estimated 60 million miles from 1942 to 1944. Thirty-eight died in accidents during training or on duty.
From her base in Long Beach, Calif., Mrs. Olsen flew 61 missions for the Sixth Ferry Group in nearly two dozen models, including P-38s, P-51s and B-17s. She flew them to West Coast airfields to be deployed in the Pacific, or to Newark to be deployed in Europe.

The WASPs were initially considered to be civil service employees and not military.

The WASPs were finally recognized as veterans eligible for benefits in 1977 under President Jimmy Carter. In 2010 they received as a group the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the nation’s two highest civilian awards.

According to the paper of record, Ms. Olsen’s death leaves 38 surviving WASPs.

Henri Belolo, co-founder (with Jacques Morali) of the Village People.

I love the caption on that first photo.

Posted in History, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: August 2019.

August 12th, 2019

Looks like the NFL is getting fired up again.

Yes, the loser update will return this year. We haven’t sat down to consider which teams are likely candidates for the Owen-16 trophy, but maybe we’ll get some time to do that between now and the start of the regular season.

But we are sure everyone is asking this question: what of Gregg Easterbrook and “Tuesday Morning Quarterback”? Has he found a new home, since the “Weekly Standard” folded up their tent and headed into the long dark night? And what of “TMQ Watch”? Will that be a recurring feature next year?

To answer the last question first: sadly, no. No “TMQ Watch” in 2019. Why?

Not our choice, Easterbrook’s. We may try to keep an eye on his Twitter feed for noteworthy items relating to the NFL. But we’ve found that Easterbrook’s Twitter feed is a reliable way of pressure testing our cerebral arteries, so we don’t recommend making bets on how much and how often we’ll be doing that.

Posted in Admin, Books, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 2 Comments »

Bagatelle (#13)

August 10th, 2019

Every now and then, I see a story in one of the papers and think to myself, “Dick Wolf’s going to get an episode of ‘Law and Order: Kinky Sex Crimes’ out of this one.”

Today is the first time I’ve ever thought “Dick Wolf’s going to get an entire season of ‘L&O:KSC’ out of this story.”

Posted in Bagatelle, Law, TV | Comments Closed

Black Hat/DEFCON 27 links: August 9, 2019.

August 9th, 2019

Some more stuff I’ve stumbled across from Black Hat:

I expect to be somewhere between slightly and highly busy this weekend, so updates will be catch as catch can. It might be Monday before I can pull more stuff together, but I’ll try as best as I can to get updates before then.

Posted in Apple, DEFCON, DEFCON 27, Planes | 1 Comment »

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