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.
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.)
Running a little behind. These are all pretty much just for the hysterical record: they’ve been well covered elsewhere, and I just don’t have a lot to add.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I 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.
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.
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.)
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.
