Archive for the ‘Radio’ Category

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Obit watch: July 20, 2018.

Friday, July 20th, 2018

Adrian Cronauer, the inspiration for “Good Morning, Vietnam”.

Mr. Cronauer, who in reality was not quite the wild man the film suggested — later in life he worked for Republican causes and became a lawyer — admitted to some unease when he first saw the screen portrayal. But he got over it.
“Finally I said: ‘Wait a minute. It was never intended to be a biography. It’s a piece of entertainment. Sit back, relax and enjoy it,’ ” he said. “And that’s what I did.”

Annabelle Neilson. I can’t stand celebrity for celebrity’s sake, and I don’t worship celebrities in general. But there’s something about this story I find touching.

Ms. Neilson was severely dyslexic and, after being badly bullied, left school at 16. A vicious assault during a gap-year visit to Perth, Australia, left her with injuries requiring reconstructive surgery, and she soon began struggling with drug addiction.

She eventually got over her heroin problem, became a model, and was introduced to fashion designer Alexander McQueen. She went on to become his model, muse, and girlfriend until his death in 2010.

In 2014, Ms. Neilson became a star of the Bravo television series “Ladies of London,” and for two seasons viewers watched her recovery from a 2013 horseback riding accident that had left her with a broken back and pelvis.

She also wrote children’s books. Ms. Neilson was 49 when she died.

Posted in Books, History, Movies, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

Let’s go!

Friday, July 13th, 2018

More car related updates and thoughts.

First of all, RoadRich left an excellent and thoughtful comment on the last post which you should go read.

(more…)

Posted in Bluetooth, Cars, Endorsements, Geek, Radio | Comments Closed

Here in my car…

Thursday, July 5th, 2018

I 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:

(more…)

Posted in Android, Apple, Bluetooth, Bookmarks, Cars, Geek, Radio | 1 Comment »

Dumber than a bag of hair.

Tuesday, June 19th, 2018

I 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!

I scripted the attack up to scan for Tapplocks and unlock them. You can just walk up to any Tapplock and unlock it in under 2s. It requires no skill or knowledge to do this.

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.

The Vangelis Stykas admin interface attack.

Sophos “Naked Security” blog: part 1. Part 2.

Posted in Bluetooth, Geek, Locks, Radio, Stupid | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 11, 2018.

Friday, May 11th, 2018

Sammy Allred, noted musician and later local radio host.

Allred’s band, the Geezinslaw Brothers – who once opened for Sun Records-era Elvis Presley – were regulars on the “Louisiana Hayride” radio show based in Shreveport in the late 1950s.
James White, owner of the Broken Spoke restaurant where the Geezinslaw Brothers played, told the American-Statesman in 2007 he remembered the first time he saw them perform on a flatbed truck in 1954 at the opening of the Twin Oaks shopping center in South Austin.

…

Allred, a member of the Texas Radio Hall of Fame, joined KVET-FM in 1969, and in 1990 joined Bob Cole for a morning show that played country music before Allred was fired from KVET in 2007.

Posted in Music, Radio | Comments Closed

Random notes toward an after action report: Dallas.

Tuesday, May 8th, 2018

This is a catch-all for random and undifferentiated thoughts that didn’t make it into my previous NRAAM reports. I’ll put in a jump, since this is running long…

(more…)

Posted in asus_eee, Bluetooth, Books, Clothing, Geek, Guns, Hats, linux, Mixology, Photography, project_e, Radio, Shirts | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 18, 2018.

Wednesday, April 18th, 2018

Carl Kasell. NPR.

I don’t listen to NPR much these days, but I did kind of like Kasell. And:

He loved magic tricks, and at one memorable company holiday party, he sawed Nina Totenberg in half.
“We laid her out on the table, got out that saw and grrrr … ran it straight through her midsection,” he recalled. “She said it tickled and she got up and walked away in one piece.”

Right away, I knew that Carl had far more up his sleeve than his inimitable gravitas and the random playing cards he keeps there for his magic tricks (if you ever want to know true joy, ask Carl to do magic for you).

I have this mental image of Carl and Harry standing around in heaven, trying to top each other with card tricks.

Barbara Bush, for the historical record. WP. (Edited to add: Lawrence.)

Posted in Magic, Obits, Radio | Comments Closed

Obit watch: April 16, 2018.

Monday, April 16th, 2018

It was another busy weekend: birthday dinner, BAG day (post forthcoming), lots of running around…so let us get caught up.

Art Bell, noted radio host.

For more than two decades, Mr. Bell, who was 72 when he died April 13 at his home in Pahrump, Nev., stayed up all night talking to those people on the radio, patiently encouraging them to tell their stories about alien abductions, crop circles, anthrax scares and, as he put it, all things “seen at the edge of vision.”

I used to listen to a lot of late night radio, but my time preceded Art Bell. I know someone whose job requires them to drive in sometimes late at night, and back in the day they were an Art Bell listener.

Tim O’Connor, character actor. He had a long-running role on the “Peyton Place” TV series, and also did guest shots in just about everything. (Including “Mannix”.)

Milos Forman, one of the great directors. (“Amadeus”, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”)

And finally, R. Lee Ermey. Borepatch.

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#49 in a series)

Thursday, April 12th, 2018

I haven’t been covering the corruption trial of former Texas congressman Steve Stockman as well as I could have. Not because of my own political sympathies (though I’m sure there are people who won’t believe that), but simply because of flat-out being busy three nights a week and having a series of full weekends.

Anyway, the verdict is in: guilty on 23 out of 24 counts.

Stockman was charged with “masterminding a wide-ranging fraud scheme that diverted $1.25 million in charitable donations from wealthy conservative philanthropists to cover personal expenses and campaign debts”. Specifically, he was convicted of mail and wire fraud, the ever popular “conspiracy”, “making false statements to the Federal Elections Commission”, and money laundering. The acquittal was on a single count of wire fraud.

Prosecutors presented a meticulously documented case, featuring flow charts and canceled checks, to illustrate how the two-time Republican lawmaker funneled charitable donations through a series of sham nonprofit organizations and shell bank accounts to spend on an array of personal expenses that included his brother’s homemade Advent books, a dolphin watching trip and an amateur spy operation that trailed a perceived GOP rival around the statehouse in Austin.

Two of his aides, Jason Posey and Thomas Dodd, took plea bargains and rolled on Stockman.

Posey testified that he and the former congressman knew they were breaking the law by concealing the source of the funds. But Stockman instructed him to push forward with his plans to spend charitable money on hotel rooms, plane flights and burner phones for secret conversations, and he complied.

I’m sorry, but the fact that they bought burner phones fills me with delight.

Stockman could get “a maximum of 20 years in prison on each of the fraud charges alone” but we all know that’s unlikely to happen, right?

Posted in Law, Phones, Politics, Radio, Texas | Comments Closed

Is safe! Is not safe!

Monday, December 11th, 2017

Another thing I haven’t had a chance to blog before now:

Vaultek makes gun safes. Among their models is the VT20i, which has a fingerprint reader and Bluetooth. You can use Bluetooth and an app to unlock the safe.

And, yes, you already know where this is going, don’t you?

In this case, the responsible party is Two Six Labs. This is a pretty fascinating takedown.

High points:

  • “The manufacturer’s Android application allows for unlimited pairing attempts with the safe. The pairing pin code is the same as the unlocking pin code. This allows for an attacker to identify the shared pincode by repeated brute force pairing attempts to the safe.”
  • “There is no encryption between the Android phone app and the safe. The application transmits the safe’s pin code in clear text after successfully pairing.”
  • “An attacker can remotely unlock any safe in this product line through specially formatted Bluetooth messages, even with no knowledge of the pin code…the safe does not verify the pin code, so an attacker can obtain authorization and unlock the safe using any arbitrary value as the pin code.”

Even if you aren’t into guns, or safes, or gun safes, I think this is a pretty good “how do I go about banging on a Bluetooth device” primer.

Somewhat to their credit, Vaultek says they are offering a patch, though it looks like you’ll have to send your safe back to get it. (Vaultek says they’ll cover shipping both ways, which can’t be cheap.)

Edited to add: something from Vaultek’s site on this issue:

Either of these methods are not easily captured and require several factors to execute including time, the right equipment, and close proximity to the safe.

They also refer to the attack as requiring “special equipment”. The “special equipment” is an Ubertooth, which you can get here and here, among other places.

As for proximity, that’s a good question that Two Six Labs didn’t address: with the right antenna and Bluetooth adapter, how far away can you be to make a successful attack? Does anyone remember the “Picking Bluetooth Low Energy Locks from a Quarter Mile Away” talk from DEFCON 24?

(Yes, door locks have to be accessible from the outside, while your gun safe is almost certainly inside. Modern construction almost certainly attenuates the signal some. But how much? Could I drive through the neighborhood with a Sena UD100 or something very much like it, just sniffing for Vaultek safes? And then come back later to attack them?)

Posted in Android, Bluetooth, Guns, Radio | Comments Closed

DEFCON 25 updates: July 31, 2017.

Monday, July 31st, 2017

Things 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.

Posted in DEFCON, DEFCON 25, GPS, Planes, Radio | Comments Closed

DEFCON 25/Black Hat updates: July 27, 2017.

Thursday, July 27th, 2017

Round 1:

Edited to add more:

  • Karla Burnett’s “Ichthyology: Phishing as a Science” is actually relevant to my professional life. White paper.
  • Slides and the white paper for “Hacking Hardware with a $10 SD Card Reader” (Amir Etemadieh, CJ Heres, and Khoa Hoang) are here.

Posted in DEFCON, DEFCON 25, Geek, Guns, Radio, WiFi | Comments Closed

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