Fruitcake From Robert Scott Expedition Is ‘Almost’ Edible at 106 Years Old
“almost” edible. So pretty much the same as a regular fruitcake.
(Thank you. I’ll be here all week. Try your waitress and remember to tip the veal.)
Headline of the day.
August 14th, 2017TMQ watch.
August 10th, 2017I see a decent amount of traffic in the stats from people looking at old TMQ Watch entries. I'm glad for any traffic, but I wonder if they're actually coming here because they Googled something, or if they're looking for updates on the status of TMQ?
No matter what, there is a TMQ status update. Of a sort. According to Gregg Easterbrook's Twitter, "TMQ relaunch 8-22-17 details soon."
As soon as I get details, I'll post an update. Will I be doing TMQ Watch if TMQ comes back? As always, it depends on where Easterbrook ends up: there are certain sites that shall remain nameless that I won't follow him to. No matter what, I do plan to post at least one update.
Edited to add:
August 21 will be a total eclipse of the sun as the gods wax wroth.
How do you wax your wroth? My family was a big fan of Turtle Wax and Simomiz.
Also, given that solar eclipses are perfectly understandable astronomical phenomena, and have been for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, why is Gregg Easterbrook claiming they are a sign of the gods waxing wroth?
Edited to add 8/11: Easterbrook's Twitter now promises the big reveal for August 15th. I feel the anticipation rising…
Oh, wait. That was just gas from the tacos at Maria's Taco Express. Sorry.
Quote of the day.
August 9th, 2017Obit watch: August 9, 2017.
August 9th, 2017Glen Campbell: NYT. South Texas Pistolero.
History shows again and again…
August 8th, 2017Obit watch: August 8, 2017.
August 8th, 2017For the historical record: NYT obit for Mark White.
Ernst Zündel, scummy Nazi Holocaust denier and the center of two criminal trials in Canada.
Richard Dudman passed away at the age of 99, surprisingly. I say “surprisingly” because, as a journalist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch he led an interesting and dangerous life:
He covered other wars all over the world, including Vietman. He was responsible for the P-D publishing part of the Pentagon Papers. In 1970, he and two other journalists were taken hostage by the Vietcong and spent 40 days as prisoners before being released.
In 1978, he and two other journalists got an “interview” with Pol Pot (though the “interview” was more like Pol Pot haranguing them through translators for several hours). Then someone tried to kill the three journalists.
He had a motto: “Reporter who sits on hot story gets ass burned.”
David E. H. Jones passed away a few weeks ago. That name may ring a small bell for some of you: he was a chemist and professor, as well as a professional writer.
Back in the old days, I used to spend time in the university library reading New Scientist, and Dr. Jones’s column was always the first thing I flipped to.
Obit watch: August 5, 2017.
August 5th, 2017Mark White, former Texas governor.
Headline of the day.
August 3rd, 2017
DEFCON 25 update: August 3, 2017.
August 3rd, 2017Mike the Musicologist tipped me off to this:
Marcus Hutchins, the guy who was in the news earlier this year for defusing the WCry malware, was detained in Las Vegas after DEFCON.
This is still an evolving story, but what I’ve seen from reliable sources (and CNN) is that Hutchins is under federal indictment and charged with creating another piece of malware: Kronos, described as a “banking Trojan”.
The best coverage I’ve seen of this so far is from TechDirt and ArsTechnica. I would keep an eye on those two sites for updates, as this story is still evolving.
I, for one, welcome our New World Order overlords.
August 1st, 2017DEFCON 25 updates: July 31, 2017.
July 31st, 2017Things are going to be a little busy this week, but I do plan to keep an eye out for updates. In the meantime, please enjoy this latest set:
- TJ Horner has a nice blog post up about his experiences hacking voting machines in DEFCON 25’s “Voting Village”.
- “The Adventures of AV and the Leaky Sandbox” (Itzik Kotler and Amit Klein) didn’t catch my attention the first time around, but the abstract sounds intriguing: “In this presentation, we describe and demonstrate a novel technique for exfiltrating data from highly secure enterprises whose endpoints have no direct Internet connection, or whose endpoints’ connection to the Internet is restricted to hosts used by their legitimately installed software. Assuming the endpoint has a cloud-enhanced antivirus product installed, we show that if the anti-virus product employs an Internet-connected sandbox in its cloud, it in fact facilitates such exfiltration.” Slides. White paper. GitHub repo.
- GitHub repo (including slides and white paper) for the Marc Newlin/Logan Lamb/Chris Grayson presentation, “CableTap: Wirelessly Tapping Your Home Network”.
- Here’s some stuff from “Tracking Spies in the Skies” (Jason Hernandez, Sam Richards, Jerod MacDonald-Evoy): North Star Post summary of their presentation. GitHub repo.
- Slides from the David Robinson talk, “Using GPS Spoofing to control time”, are here. Slides contain links to code, per Mr. Robinson. I’ve only had a chance to take a quick look at this, but I’m fascinated.
Obit watch part II.
July 31st, 2017Obit watch: July 31, 2017.
July 31st, 2017Jeanne Moreau, noted French New Wave actress.
(I did not know that she was briefly married to William Friedkin.)
DEFCON 25 updates: July 29, 2017.
July 29th, 2017Third round. I’m not proud. Or tired.
- Slides from Salvador Mendoza‘s “Exploiting 0ld Mag-stripe information with New technology” are here. I think this is the most current version, but I welcome correction.
- Here’s the slides for “macOS/iOS Kernel Debugging and Heap Feng Shui” (Min(Spark) Zheng).
- Mikhail Sosonkin has a series of blog posts up describing vulnerabilities in the HooToo TM6 travel router. I believe this is a longer version of the same material from his “Hacking travel routers like it’s 1999” talk, but I haven’t had a chance to sit down and compare the blog posts with the slides.
- I have yet to find new material on “Open Source Safe Cracking Robots – Combinations Under 1 Hour!” but there’s a BBC article here. Worthy of note, to me: “For example, if one dial is set to open at 14, using 15 and 13 will work as well. It meant the robot could check every third number, making it possible to quickly test the remaining combinations much faster than a human being.” No disrespect intended to the presenters, but that’s exactly the Feynman/Los Alamos technique. (I think they used a different method for getting the number off the third dial, to be fair.) “The only thing we learn from history, is that we learn nothing from history.”
- David Robinson and ZX Security have a GitHub repo up. Here’s NMEAsnitch, a Python tool to detect GPS spoofing. Here are some other related (and some unrelated) tools courtesy of ZX Security.
- GitHub repo for “Snide” Owen’s “Phone system testing and other fun tricks” containing the slides and extras.
- EFF whitepaper, “The Pregnancy Panopticon”, by Cooper Quintin. This is the basis for the Cooper Quintin/Kashmir Hill talk “The Internet Already Knows I’m Pregnant”.
Obit watch: July 28, 2017.
July 28th, 2017John Kelso, columnist for the Austin American-Statesman since Jesus was a corporal, passed away earlier today.
The staff of WCD extends our condolences to his family and friends.