I was too young to remember Frank Gifford‘s playing days, but I do have fond memories of him from Monday Night Football in the 1970’s.
Interesting bit of trivia:
Obit watch: August 10, 2015.
August 10th, 2015DEFCON 23 notes: August 7, 2015.
August 7th, 2015I kind of skipped over yesterday, because Thursday is traditionally slow. And it is a little early for stuff to be up today, plus many of the good presentations are scheduled for tomorrow.
But! BlackHat 2015! Not everything from BlackHat gets duplicated at DEFCON, and vice versa, but there’s always some overlap. Some things that are already up:
- “When IoT Attacks: Hacking a Linux-Powered Rifle”, the Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger talk about the TrackingPoint rifles. Slides here.
- Colby Moore’s “Spread Spectrum Satcom Hacking: Attacking The GlobalStar Simplex Data Service”, one of the talks I was interested in. Slides. Summary.
- “Switches Get Stitches”, by Cassidy, Leverett, and Lee, about vulnerabilities in industrial Ethernet switches. This was one of my backup talks, in case the primary was full. Slides.
- I mentioned Sean Metcalf’s “Red vs. Blue: Modern Active Directory Attacks & Defense” in passing. Slides. White paper.
- Not one I think I mentioned, but Marina Krotofil’s “Rocking the Pocket Book: Hacking Chemical Plant for Competition and Extortion” might be of interest to some of you. Slides. White paper.
There are a couple of other overlaps I’ve found (specifically the Josh Drake presentation on Stagefright and the Valasek/Miller car exploit) but those don’t have any slides or other material attached yet.
More links and stuff as and when I find it and am able to post.
Edited to add: Just noticed this on the DEFCON 23 site. Download the conference CD optical disc here. Woo hoo woo hoo hoo. (The .rar file is 419 MB. Good thing I work for a networking company.)
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#23 in a series)
August 6th, 2015In great haste, because I’m near the end of my lunch hour and wanted to get this up:
By my count, the first mention of her party affiliation occurs 15 paragraphs into the story.
(Hattip on this to Mike the Musicologist, who has been doing a better job of watching the Kane mutiny than I have.)
Obit watch: August 6, 2015.
August 6th, 2015I’ve seen some mentions of this elsewhere, but I wanted to go ahead and link to the NYT obit for John Leslie Munro, last of the Dambusters.
I also kind of want to see “The Dam Busters” now. I’m pretty sure it was on TV when I was a kid, but somehow I never caught it. And it doesn’t look like Amazon has it on instant video…
For hysterical raisins: reprinted LAT obit for Marilyn Monroe.
Your Samantha Dean update: August 5, 2015.
August 5th, 2015Our old friend, ex-APD officer VonTrey Clark (previously) is in custody in Indonesia.
Yes, I know: I quoted the news reports as stating that Indonesia does not have an extradition treaty with the US. But, according to the reports I’ve seen, Clark is currently being held by Indonesian authorities because his visa isn’t in order.
And in spite of the fact that there is no formal extradition treaty, Indonesia apparently is planning to return Clark to the United States.
“He was arrested last Friday by investigators in Bali,” the secretary of Interpol’s national central bureau for Indonesia, Brigadier-General Amhar Azeth, told AFP.
“He is wanted for murder.”
Flames, hyenas, chow: August 5, 2015.
August 5th, 2015I got dragged into something literally the moment I hit the door at work this morning. Not that I’m bitter or anything. But it did mean that my blogging time was cut short.
This, in turn, meant that Lawrence beat me to the latest developments in the Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow case. Really, I was going to blog that. But, to summarize:
More:
I suppose it could be selective prosecution. Then again, it could be: if you have a choice between indicting the guy who took bribes, and the guy who took bribes and engaged in gun running, who are you going to pick?
Also possibly of interest:
Chiu and Chow were involved in a dispute: Chiu pulled funding for the Night Market after finding out Chow was involved with it.
“a corpse eating a vegetarian dinner”? Perhaps that makes more sense in the original Klingon.
Obit watch: August 5, 2015.
August 5th, 2015Noted historian and author Robert Conquest has passed away at 98.
The scope of Stalin’s purges was laid out: seven million people arrested in the peak years, 1937 and 1938; one million executed; two million dead in the concentration camps. Mr. Conquest estimated the death toll for the Stalin era at no less than 20 million.
“His historical intuition was astonishing,” said Norman M. Naimark, a professor of Eastern European history at Stanford University. “He saw things clearly without having access to archives or internal information from the Soviet government. We had a whole industry of Soviet historians who were exposed to a lot of the same material but did not come up with the same conclusions. This was groundbreaking, pioneering work.”
I expect Lawrence will have more to say later, but I do want to tell my favorite Conquest story. When his publisher was going to issue a new edition of The Great Terror: A Reassessment
Edited to add: Lawrence’s obit is now up.
DEFCON 23: -2 day notes
August 4th, 2015DEFCON 23 starts Thursday. Black Hat USA 2015 starts tomorrow.
Once again, it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it out to Vegas. Once again, I’m going to try to cover things from 1,500 miles away. It isn’t completely clear to me that anyone other than me is getting any benefit from this, but I’ve been doing this for long enough that I have a hard time stopping now.
Here’s the schedule. There are several presentations that are already getting media attention:
- “When IoT attacks: hacking a Linux-powered rifle” got a write-up in Wired, and notice from Tam. I’ll admit that I’m interested in this research, as it represents the intersection of two of my interests. But given the current state of TrackingPoint, is this more like “knowing how to hot-wire a Tucker Torpedo” than a Ferrari Enzo?
- “Hacking Smart Safes: On the ‘Brink’ of a Robbery” also got a Wired writeup, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen coverage elsewhere; I just can’t find it right now.
- And Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek got a lot of press coverage off of their “Remote Exploitation of an Unaltered Passenger Vehicle” paper. Another Wired article (I know, I know, but this one is first-hand.) NYT article on the recall triggered by Valasek and Miller’s research. I have to admit, I’m impressed; usually, only people named “Nader” manage to get 1.4 million cars recalled.
So what would I go see if I was there? What sounds interesting to me?
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#22 in a series)
August 4th, 2015For those who were wondering when I was going to put up Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, here you go. Not even paywalled, as of this writing.
(I probably should have put this up yesterday, but the workday was frantically busy, and I came home and collapsed after dinner. Sorry.)
Of course, these are just charges, he’s entitled to the presumption of innocence, yadda yadda yadda.
Obit watch: August 4, 2015.
August 4th, 2015Vincent Marotta Sr., a great American.
Mr. Marotta was one of the inventors of the Mr. Coffee machine.
Smoke, smoke…
July 31st, 2015I thought the barbecue wars were over. Or, at least, we were at the point where the Treaty of Franklin’s was being negotiated.
Nope.
(I think this link will bypass the paywall. If not, Austin Eater’s story is here.)
Attend the tale.
July 28th, 2015This one goes out to Mike the Musicologist:
“Sweeney Todd”, the “prog-metal” version.
(Can someone explain to me what “prog-metal” is, anyway?)
It could be worse. It could be disco.
Obit watch: July 28, 2015.
July 28th, 2015Noted true crime writer Ann Rule passed away on Sunday. LAT.
(Hattip: Mom.)
The Ann Rule origin story is well known to true crime buffs, but since I’m not sure how many of those read this blog, I’ll recap it here: in the 1970’s, she was working at a suicide hotline and writing under pseudonyms. She became interested in some Seattle area murders and started investigating them; ultimately, it turned out those murders were committed by a close friend who worked with her on the hotline…
…one Mr. Ted Bundy. The Stranger Beside Me
Edited to add: WP article which goes into more detail about Bundy and Rule.
Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#U of a series)
July 24th, 2015The latest APD firing: Officer VonTrey Clark.
It seems unlikely that former officer Clark will be appealing his firing for two reasons:
1. He is allegedly in Indonesia. Thing I did not know: Indonesia does not have an extradition treaty with the US. Good to keep in mind…
2. Former officer Clark has bigger problems.
I haven’t written much about this for various reasons, including the lack of non-paywalled links and the fact that the story is just sad and awful. But I might as well try to summarize here.
A woman named Samantha Dean was killed in February. She worked in victim services for the Kyle PD and was seven months pregnant.
The police have been investigating her murder for months now. Apparently, they now believe her baby was the product of an affair with former officer Clark. Clark has not, to the best of my knowledge, been charged with any crime. What I’ve picked up so far is that investigators think Clark arranged for other associates of his to commit the murder, and I suspect that they’re trying to get at least one of those associates to roll.
In the meantime, APD fired Clark for “withholding information during an internal investigation and associating with known felons”.
Here are a couple of half-decent stories from local TV stations KEYE and KVUE. The KEYE story contains a lengthy response from Clark’s attorney: in case you were wondering, Chief Acevedo’s allegations are “slanderous” and consorting with known felons is a “trifling policy violation”.
Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#T of a series)
July 22nd, 2015You may recall Blayne Williams, the APD officer who was suing the department for not promoting him, even though he’d been suspended twice and fired once.
Officer Williams has been fired again. I apologize that I can’t find a non-paywalled Statesman link, but the first two paragraphs of the story and the “story highlights” I think convey the gist of the story.