The second most amusing thing I read yesterday:
“less than five seconds”. As a friend of mine put it, that’s “Oops, I clicked on the wrong link. (close)”
(If that’s second, what was the most amusing thing? The MLB RICO story, of course.)
Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category
Bagatelle (#8)
Tuesday, October 9th, 2018Obit watch: September 23, 2018.
Sunday, September 23rd, 2018Over the weekend, I was rewatching parts of “Project Grizzly” and I got to wondering what Troy Hurtubise was up to. I’d kind of lost track of him after the whole “Angel Light” thing.
Sadly, and completely unknown to me until yesterday, Mr. Hurtubise passed away in June, as the result of an automobile accident.
This is a damn shame. I’m extremely skeptical of “Angel Light” and “R-Light” (for obvious reasons), but Trojan armor seems like a logical extension of both the Ursus suits and the protective gear worn by bomb squad technicians. Firepaste doesn’t strike me as being too out there, either. I remember reading a book a while back about a famous magician who helped the Allies develop deception tactics during WWII. In his spare time, this guy also invented something that sounds very similar to Firepaste: the intent was that aircrews who anticipated a crash could apply the substance to exposed flesh and ideally get a little more time to flee a burning aircraft.
We extend our belated condolences to his people, and will pour out a 40 of something Canadian in his memory.
Anne Russ Federman, the last of the three daughters of Joel Russ, founder of Russ & Daughters (formerly Russ’s Cut Rate Appetizers).
I’ve been reading Mark Federman’s book about Russ & Daughters, and I love the story behind the store. I also, as it happens, love me some smoked salmon, and I could go for a little herring, too. Next time I’m in New York City…
Obit watch: September 16, 2018.
Sunday, September 16th, 2018Some from the past day or two:
David Yallop, author and journalist. He was perhaps most famous for In God’s Name: An Investigation Into the Murder of Pope John Paul I which argued that the Pope “had been poisoned by a cabal connected to a secret Masonic lodge that had infiltrated the church and the Vatican Bank.”
Peter Donat, character actor. He was Mulder’s father on “The X-Files”, but he also did a lot of theater: “Over the years he played Cyrano de Bergerac, Prospero, Shylock, King Lear and Hadrian VII.”
Also:
Walter Mischel, of “marshmallow test” fame.
In a series of experiments at Stanford University beginning in the 1960s, he led a research team that presented preschool-age children with treats — pretzels, cookies, a marshmallow — and instructed them to wait before indulging themselves. Some of the children received strategies from the researchers, like covering their eyes or reimagining the treat as something else; others were left to their own devices.
The studies found that in all conditions, some youngsters were far better than others at deploying the strategies — or devising their own — and that this ability seemed to persist at later ages. And context mattered: Children given reason to distrust the researchers tended to grab the treats earlier.
…
In the late 1980s, decades after the first experiments were done, Dr. Mischel and two co-authors followed up with about 100 parents whose children had participated in the original studies. They found a striking, if preliminary, correlation: The preschoolers who could put off eating the treat tended to have higher SAT scores, and were better adjusted emotionally on some measures, than those who had given in quickly to temptation.
The paper was cautious in its conclusions, and acknowledged numerous flaws, including a small sample size. No matter. It was widely reported, and a staple of popular psychology writing was born: If Junior can hold off eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes in preschool, then he or she is headed for the dean’s list.
Quote of the day.
Tuesday, August 21st, 2018I can't wait to become the sysadmin for my fridge.
— Dan Selman (@danielselman) August 21, 2018
(This whole thread is gold, Jerry, comedy gold.)
Your loser update: pre-NFL edition.
Wednesday, August 15th, 2018Actually, this sits at the weird intersection of a couple of things:
You’ve stood by us through it all. We love you for it, and so does @budlight.
These special fridges will unlock celebratory beers when we get our first regular season “W”.#VictoryFridge pic.twitter.com/LgsGNabMpt
— Cleveland Browns (@Browns) August 14, 2018
Which do you suppose is going to happen first: a Browns win, or someone hacks the fridges? My money is on the latter.
Cleveland hackers, you’ve got at least 25 days to prove me right.
More from the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network.
And how about a little musical interlude? We haven’t had one in a while.
Black Hat 2018/DEFCON 26 0 day updates.
Thursday, August 9th, 2018Some of yesterday’s Black Hat presentations:
- “Stress and Hacking: Understanding Cognitive Stress in Tactical Cyber Ops” by Celeste Paul and Josiah Dykstra.
- “Reversing a Japanese Wireless SD Card – From Zero to Code Execution” by Guillaume Valadon. And here’s the GitHub repo.
- “Mental Health Hacks: Fighting Burnout, Depression and Suicide in the Hacker Community” by Christian Dameff and Jay Radcliffe.
- “Open Sesame: Picking Locks with Cortana“. “Exploiting the ‘Open Sesame’ vulnerability attackers can view the contents of sensitive files (text and media), browse arbitrary web sites, download and execute arbitrary executables from the Internet, and under some circumstances gain elevated privileges.”
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:
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.
Let’s go!
Friday, July 13th, 2018More car related updates and thoughts.
First of all, RoadRich left an excellent and thoughtful comment on the last post which you should go read.
Here in my car…
Thursday, July 5th, 2018I bought a new to me car last Saturday. It’s a 2006 Honda Accord EX-L that had 82,000 miles on it (not bad, in my opinion, for a 12 year old car) and has quite few features I like: leather interior, sun roof, cabin air filter, power seats, and even seat heaters for that one month a year when those are actually useful in Texas. (Also ABS. I’m not clear on whether it has traction control or not. I checked the Honda-Tech VIN decoder and while it is useful, it doesn’t talk about traction control.)
Now that I have the car, I splurged on a couple of things. I got a dashcam for it: the Papago GoSafe 535, which is what the Wirecutter currently recommends. That one has gone up by about $13 in the couple of days since I ordered it, and it really wasn’t my first choice. I wanted the Spy Tec G1W-C, which was a previous Wirecutter choice that I bought for my mother’s car and have been happy with. But by the time I was ready to order, Amazon had sold out of the Spy Tec.
My other splurge item was a LELink Bluetooth Low Energy BLE OBD-II car diagnostic tool. Why? Several reasons:
Dumber than a bag of hair.
Tuesday, June 19th, 2018I missed the first part of this story last week, but I caught the second part when it came across the Hacker News Twitter feed.
There is a company called Tapplock that makes a $99 “smart” padlock. No, this isn’t the same company that makes a “smart” padlock that’s “completely invincible” to anybody that doesn’t have a screwdriver. Different company, different lock.
But it does have a fingerprint scanner and Bluetooth.
Part 1:
Among other features, you can set up multiple fingerprint profiles, so you can enable multiple people to unlock the padlock with their fingerprints.
Except: their protocol doesn’t gracefully handle revocation. The lock communicates over HTTP: there’s no encryption, and…
I could see that a string of “random” looking data was sent to the lock over BLE each time I connected to it. Without this data, the lock would not respond to commands.
But it was also noted that this data did not change, no matter how many times I connected. A couple of lines of commands in gatttool and it was apparent that the lock was vulnerable to trivial replay attacks…
…I shared the lock with another user, and sniffed the BLE data. It was identical to the normal unlocking data. Even if you revoke permissions, you have already given the other user all the information they need to authenticate with the lock, in perpetuity.
But wait, there’s more! It turns out that that random data, that unique key…is derived directly from the lock’s MAC address! The one that’s constantly broadcast by the lock so you can access it over Bluetooth!
Part 2:
But wait, there’s more! Another security researcher, who didn’t have a Tapplock (“I am out of IoT budget for this month as my wife has -kindly- informed me”), decided to play around with the Tapplock’s cloud based admin tools…
…and discovered that, once you logged in with a valid account, you could access any other account simply by incrementing the account ID.
As a result, Stykas could not only add himself as an authorised user to anyone else’s lock, but also read out personal information from that person’s account, including the last location (if known) where the Tapplock was opened.
Incredibly, Tapplock’s back-end system would not only let him open other people’s locks using the official app, but also tell him where to find the locks he could now open!
References:
The Pen Test Partners initial attack.
Some days you get the bull…
Friday, June 15th, 2018I’m not a huge fan of bull riding (though I do think it is much more interesting than soccer), and I don’t care much for “People” magazine.
But, as an amateur medical geek, when I see a phrase like “first person to survive the procedure at the hospital this century”, it kind of makes me take notice.
Wyatt Bruesch was competing in an Idaho rodeo when the bull he was riding bucked him off and trampled him fatally.
The emergency department decided on a hail mary pass: an “emergency department thoracotomy.”
Here’s the Trauma.org page on the subject (it’s also linked in the article itself).
Emergency department thoracotomy is a life-saving procedure in a select group of patients. Exactly who these patients are is a matter of some controversy in the trauma literature. There is a significant amount of published data on the indications for and outcomes of resuscitative thoracotomy. However the results of interventions varies widely, as does each unit’s experience, puclished data ranging for 11 patients in 10 years to 950 patients in 23 years…
Overall survival of patients undergoing emergency thoracotomy is between 4 and 33% depending on the protocols used in individual departments. The main determinants for survivability of an emergency thoracotomy are the mechanism of injury (stab, gunshot or blunt), location of injury and the presence or absence of vital signs.
Anyway:
Acting quickly, trauma surgeon Jorge Amorim cut Wyatt’s chest open and massaged his heart by hand to get it beating again.
“He basically saved his life,” McRoberts said. “He also did something else. Dr. Amorim reached into the chest cavity and squeezed and held the hilum of the lung where the great vessels come into the lung. He continued to squeeze for 15 minutes, which stopped the bleeding as Wyatt was rushed to an operating room.”
Mr. Bruesch is at home, recovering. In addition to the injuries that required an emergency thoracotomy, he also broke three ribs and eight vertebrae. In spite of this, he says he’s going to continue bull riding.
Meanwhile, in Pocatello, there’s a trauma surgeon shopping for a wheelbarrow to carry his giant brass testicles.
Overthinking it.
Thursday, May 31st, 2018Headline:
Please Don’t Roast Marshmallows Over the Erupting Hawaii Volcano, USGS Warns
At first, this sounds like a bunch of joyless fun suckers sucking all the fun out of life. But USGS’s argument actually makes sense: the H2S and SO2 present around a volcanic eruption would probably make the marshmallows taste bad.
But the idea of using something other than an open campfire to toast marshmallows has a certain appeal. What you want in the ideal toasted marshmallow is for it to be evenly browned, not burned. You’re looking for that perfect Maillard reaction all over the marshmallow. And that’s really hard to get in a campfire context.
So why not use an indirect heat source? Could you use something like a heat lamp or some sort of radiant heater to toast marshmallows, instead of radiated heat from hot molten rocks? Why not? Even better, what if your marshmallow toasting stick had a motor in it? Just some sort of small battery powered one that, when you pushed a button, rotated the marshmallow at a uniform speed over the indirect heat source until it was evenly browned.
I thought I’d check Amazon and…well…I found this, which instantly turned me off the whole idea. I’m not sure why: maybe the whole idea of a dedicated electric S’mores maker just seems antithetical to the whole idea of S’mores.
Maybe part of the appeal of a toasted marshmallow isn’t just the striving for an even Maillard reaction, but also the added flavors of wood smoke and the great outdoors.
Or, maybe, I’m just overthinking it.
(But I strongly encourage at least one of my readers to purchase this and report back on the contents.)
Obit watch: May 28, 2018.
Monday, May 28th, 2018For the historical record: Alan Bean. NYT. NASA.
I'd like to share the story of a personal interaction I had Alan Bean, Apollo Moon-walker and artist. In 2010, I needed more information about something Alan had seen when he was on the Moon. I was researching how rocket exhaust blows soil and dust during lunar landings. /1
— Dr. Phil Metzger (@DrPhiltill) May 27, 2018
Gardner Dozois, one of the great figures of science fiction, passed away yesterday. Michael Swanwick. Lawrence.
He was a fantastic writer: “Dinner Party”, “A Special Kind of Morning”, “Chains of the Sea”, “The Peacemaker”, “Flash Point”, “Solace”.
He didn’t write as much as I would have liked, because he became an editor. Well, not just an editor, but one of the greatest editors science fiction ever saw. He edited Asimov’s Science Fiction for 20 years, “… winning the Hugo Award for Best Professional Editor 15 times in 17 years from 1988 to his retirement from Asimov’s in 2004.” He also edited thirty four volumes of the massive Year’s Best Science Fiction collection: “Stories selected by Gardner Dozois for the annual best-of-year volumes have won, as of December 2015, 44 Hugos, 41 Nebulas, 32 Locus, 10 World Fantasy and 18 Sturgeon Awards.”
He was also a personal friend of mine. I wrote about this a little, a long time ago, and I’m still more than a little raw over Gardner’s death. During the 90s, we spent a lot of time online in the old Delphi system. There was a regular Wednesday night book-ish SF chat. And then Gardner and his life partner Susan Casper and some other folks (not named here for their privacy) and I had a smaller, private chat at 11:59 on Friday night, where we commiserated over each other’s struggles and celebrated our successes. We were all a lot younger then, and could stay up until 2 or 3 AM solving the problems of the world.
Gardner was also a veteran, though he didn’t see combat. I would retell the safety column story here, but I can’t do it justice: maybe someone else can. I will say that one of my enduring memories of Gardner is “…OR YOU WILL DIE!”
The ending of “A Special Kind of Morning” has always resonated with me, ever since I first read it.
So, empathy’s the thing that binds life together, it’s the flame we share against fear. Warmth’s the only answer to the old cold questions.
So I went through life, boy; made mistakes, did a lot of things, got kicked around a lot more, loved a little, and ended up on Kos, waiting for evening.
But night’s a relative thing. It always ends. It does; because even if you’re not around to watch it, the sun always comes up, and someone’ll be there to see.
It’s a fine, beautiful morning.
It’s always a beautiful morning somewhere, even on the day you die.
You’re young—that doesn’t comfort you yet.
But you’ll learn.
It was a beautiful morning yesterday, Gardner.
This is not quite an obit, but seems fitting: in memory of PFC Joshua Fleming.