Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category
Worse than Ashley Madison?
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2015Random notes: November 1, 2015.
Sunday, November 1st, 2015In case anyone was wondering, the hand surgery went about as well as I expected: in that, I lived through it and didn’t die on the table from a bad reaction to the anesthesia or something else. My left hand is still wrapped tightly, but I’m approaching maybe 1 1/3 hand functionality. At this point, I’m off painkillers and it really doesn’t bother me: the itching is more disturbing than anything else.
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I’d managed to avoid breaking any bones or surgery requiring more than a local anesthetic for over 50 years. So much for that record.
I think what bothers me the most was the loss of continuity of consciousness, if that makes any sense. What I mean: one moment, they’re telling me that they’re going to put a sedative in my IV line. Next thing I know, they’re telling me the surgery is over and I’m okay. It just feels…weird, for reasons I can’t articulate. It’s not like going to sleep: it feels more like a gap during which I stopped processing memories. I need to think through this some more.
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I haven’t seen this covered elsewhere yet, and I’d really like to see coverage in someplace I trust more than the WP, but: the FBI is switching back to the 9mm, and away from the .40.
This also means new pistols for the FBI, and that’s going to be a windfall for somebody. It also won’t shock me to see the current administration attempting to use the procurement process to advance their political goals…
Heh.
A few random things I found interesting.
Monday, September 14th, 2015Some by way of the Hacker News Twitter, others from elsewhere.
Nice appreciation of Elmore Leonard from The New York Review of Books.
Brian Krebs goes to Mexico in search of Bluetooth ATM skimmers, part 1.
Fun with software defined radio, or scanners live in vain.
NFL loser update resumes tomorrow.
Art (Acevedo), damn it! watch. (#X of a series)
Friday, September 11th, 2015In the time I’ve been doing the Art (Acevedo) watch, I don’t think I’ve ever put up a photo of the chief. Some of the articles I’ve linked to may have had photos, but I don’t if people click through, and I don’t think there’s ever been one here.
Until now.
Darth Acevedo pic.twitter.com/F9XjGbwOsn
— Philip Jankowski (@PhilJankowski) September 11, 2015
Yes, the chief is kind of a geek.
Also:
“Do not get in my way.” If someone does, could they be charged with obstruction of justice?
Oliver Sacks.
Monday, August 31st, 2015NYT. Michiko Kakutani appreciation. LAT. WP. A/V Club.
“The Oliver Sacks Reading List” from The Atlantic.
I like what Kakutani says, and I don’t think I could say it any better:
Dr. Sacks was a personal hero of mine. Unlike most of my personal heros, I actually did get to meet him once. He probably wouldn’t have remembered it, even if he wasn’t famously “face blind”…
DEFCON 23 notes: August 12, 2015.
Wednesday, August 12th, 2015More slides! More stuff!
- Brent White’s slides from “Hacking Web Apps” are here.
- Sean Metcalf has slides from both the DEFCON 23 and Black Hat versions of his “Red vs. Blue: Modern Active Directory Attacks & Defense” talk up here. According to Sean, the DEFCON 23 version is slightly different from the Black Hat version.
- Not exactly slides, but Mike Ryan has a post up at his blog that summarizes part of his presentation with Richo Healey, “Hacking Electric Skateboards: Vehicle Research For Mortals”. Actually, his whole blog, while small, has some really good Bluetooth related stuff that I want to bookmark. In addition, there’s a GitHub repo with Healey and Ryan’s skateboard code.
DEFCON 23 notes: August 11, 2015.
Tuesday, August 11th, 2015The Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek paper, “Remote Exploitation of an Unaltered Passenger Vehicle” is here. Sorry I don’t have much to say beyond that; I’ve been frantically busy all day and haven’t had a chance to review their paper (or much of anything else) yet. But I did want to get this up, because I’ve been waiting for it.
(Also, one of my cow-orkers owns a vulnerable vehicle, and I’ve been giving him a little bit of grief about that. Only a little bit, though, because he has problems with the vehicle that go beyond Miller and Valasek’s work.)
DEFCON 23 notes: August 10, 2015.
Monday, August 10th, 2015- Slides and code from Samy Kamkar’s “Drive It Like You Hacked It: New Attacks and Tools to Wirelessly Steal Cars” are up here.
- Jeremy Dorrough has a GitHub repository with slides and ancillary material from his presentation, “USB Attack to Decrypt Wifi Communications”.
- This is a better link for the slides from the Runa Sandvik and Michael Auger talk about the TrackingPoint rifles. That set of slides includes links to YouTube videos, which may add some additional context to Sandvik and Auger’s work. (I’m writing this at lunch and haven’t had a chance to watch the videos yet.)
- Dan Kaminsky has a blog entry up that includes the slides from his “I want these * bugs off my * Internet” talk.
- I haven’t found slides yet, but the tools from “Security Necromancy: Further Adventures in Mainframe Hacking” are up at Solder of Fortran’s site and Big Endian Smalls’ site.
More when I have it; possibly tonight or tomorrow.
DEFCON 23: -2 day notes
Tuesday, 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?
Wings clipped.
Friday, July 3rd, 2015The St. Louis Cardinals fired director of scouting Chris Correa yesterday.
Why do I bring this up? Granted, it is sportsfirings.com, but I don’t cover every minor executive firing.
But this is special. Correa is apparently the team’s first sacrifice in the great hacking scandal.
St. Louis attorney Jim Martin, a former federal prosecutor who is conducting the Cardinals’ internal investigation, declined to say if Correa’s dismissal was linked to the FBI case.
However, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that Correa acknowledged breaking into the database to determine whether the Astros had stolen proprietary data from the Cardinals.
If he actually did admit “breaking into the database”, I think being fired is probably the least of his problems…
Today’s bulletin from the Department of WTF?! (#7 in a series)
Tuesday, June 16th, 2015I was going to make a “how parenthetic do you have to be” joke, but the Astros are actually doing okay this year. The Times story seems to be spinning it as the Cardinals being worried about their secrets being compromised:
“Luhnow” is Jeff Luhnow, the current Astros general manager and previously a high-ranking member of the Cardinals management team.
I care very little about baseball, but this should be fascinating to watch. As the papers note, this is the first known instance where one team attempted to hack another team’s computer network for competitive advantage. Ignoring the possibility of some people being convicted of actual Federal crimes, what’s MLB going to do about this? Lifetime bans for anyone proven to be involved?
Ironic or not?
Wednesday, May 6th, 2015“Ironic or not?” is a game I used to play with one of my cow orkers at Four Letter Computer Corporation.
During the Great Bobblehead Scandal of 2012, I bought a John Wilkes Booth bobblehead.
I had it on my desk at work until this morning, when I accidentally knocked it onto the floor and…
Yes, Booth broke his ankles. Much like the actual John Wilkes Booth did when he got his foot tangled in the bunting while leaping out of the presidential box at Ford’s Theater.
(Or maybe he broke his leg. Or maybe he didn’t break anything at all in the leap, but his horse injured him later. I’m a little dubious about that story; the evidence for that seems to be “he didn’t run like he had a broken leg”. Well, maybe, but given that he’d just killed the president and was fleeing the scene, adrenaline may have done a great job of hiding a broken leg.)
What really kind of totes my goat is that Booth fell maybe three feet (if that) onto a carpeted office floor. Note to self: don’t buy stuff from “The Bobblehead LLC”.
Ironic or not? Before you answer…