The WP has a nice tribute to Nick Menza, former drummer of Megadeth, who died Saturday.
You know, I bet we could get DNA off of that saw blade…
Also among the dead: Bill Herz, the last surviving crew member of Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” broadcast.
Katherine Dunn followups: A/V Club. NYT.
Harlan Ellison, the science fiction author and screenwriter, hailed it as “transformative.”
Julius La Rosa, who was a noted singer of the 1950s, but is perhaps most famous for being fired on the air by Arthur Godfrey.
On Oct. 19, 1953 — 23 months after Mr. La Rosa’s debut — Mr. Godfrey retaliated in a morning segment heard only on the radio. Mr. La Rosa had just finished singing “Manhattan” when Mr. Godfrey delivered the sentence in his solemn foghorn voice.
“That was Julie’s swan song,” he said.
…
The dismissal stunned Mr. La Rosa and the Godfrey audiences, whose reaction was largely negative. Most media critics also chastised Mr. Godfrey, whose avuncular image began to crumble.
I was out and about earlier today with my mom and my nephew: we stopped by Hobby Lobby because I was looking for something. I’ll be posting about that something later on, but while we were there, I found one of these and ended up getting a screaming deal on it with the 40% off coupon.
Which is great, but that looks like a manual control box, right? How do you control it with a PC? Lots of soldering and a custom circuit board?
Ah. Nope. They have a USB device interface for the OWI-535. Isn’t that nifty?
But wait! The included software only runs on a PC! How do you control it with a Mac, or a LINUX system?
Surprise! People have reverse-engineered the control protocol! For example, this guy! (I love that blog title, by the way.) It looks like most of the other control examples I’ve found all loop back to Vadim Zaliva’s work documenting the protocol for the OWI-535. (He’s also documented the control protocol for the OWI-007 here.)
And look! Here’s control code in Python. running on a Raspberry Pi! Isn’t that a clever cleaver!
We’ll see if I can get the arm together and working without breaking it. Bad news: I don’t have that much mechanical aptitude. Good news: they claim all you need is needle-nosed pliers, diagonal cutters, and a Phillips screwdriver. No soldering required, which is good. I could probably solder my way out of a paper bag if someone held a gun to my head, but I’ve never been what you could call “good”, or even “competent” at it…
(As a side note, I’ve been trying to get back to “Talkin’ GPS Blues“. Unfortunately, I also decided to upgrade Project e to Ubuntu 15.10…and Bluetooth apparently doesn’t work well on 15.10, at least as of when I completed the upgrade. So once I get Bluetooth working again, and have some more time, I intend to revisit GPS, this time with some skanky Perl, Python, and possibly even Java code. We’ll see.)
Bob Elliott, of Bob and Ray fame. NYT. A/V Club.
Bob & Ray Present the CBS Radio Network.
And now I really want the DVDs of Get A Life
Catching up on a few from the past couple of days.
Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty, for the record. NYT. A/V Club.
Both of the times Mike the Musicologist and I have gone up to Tulsa, Haggerty was a “special guest”. I thought about getting an autograph and maybe even a photo with him – if nothing else, as a present for my brother – but somehow, in all our wanderings around the show (and remember, it is a huge show) we never made it past where he and the other guests were sitting. I kind of regret that now…
Noted Austin public radio personality Paul Ray died on Friday. Statesman. KUTX.
Some 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.
More slides! More stuff!
Nelson Doubleday Jr., heir to the Doubleday publishing empire and former owner of the New York Mets.
I was going to let this go by, but there were a couple of things in the NYT obit that tickled my fancy:
We hope everyone had a good Christmas – or, if you do not celebrate Christmas, a good version of whatever seasonal observance you do celebrate.
In this week’s TMQ, the purge.
No, not that one (though we commend to your attention the “The Purge” episode of “Phil and Lisa Ruin the Movies”), but the annual NFL coaching purge, or as we call it, “Bloody Monday”. After the jump…
Tom Magliozzi, of “Car Talk” fame. NPR. Preliminary LAT obit. A/V Club. Car Talk.
A long time ago, I was a huge fan of “Car Talk”. My Monday nights were not complete without listening to the latest episode, and I tended to get cranky if that schedule was interrupted. (Kids, ask your parents about the time before podcasts.) I even – hold on to your hats, folks – donated money to our local NPR station at one point so I could show my support of “Car Talk”. (Oh, yeah. Like you never did anything stupid when you were young.)
Then our local station changed the schedule around so “Car Talk” was on at an inconvenient time, and I kind of dropped away from it. Then Tom and Ray started taking truly idiotic political positions (for example, advocating a federally enforced limit on horsepower to weight ratios) and I stopped being a “Car Talk” fan. As a matter of fact, I began to find the show grating. Not quite “I’d rather listen to Prairie Home Companion” grating, but grating enough. And frankly, I don’t understand why it is still on the air, since it has been nothing but re-runs since 2012. (Actually, I think I do understand why: I guess it brings in the bucks at pledge time.)
On the other hand, 77 is too damn young. Alzheimer’s sucks. I do kind of want to hear the tribute show. And he had a great beard.
Wired has an article based on the “Weaponizing Your Pets: The War Kitteh and the Denial of Service Dog” presentation which will take place on Sunday. I didn’t write about this yesterday because (and with all due respect to the presenter) it just didn’t strike me as being very interesting. You attached a WiFi scanner to a cat and let it roam around the neighborhood? Not sure I see anything novel there, except maybe if you made the WiFi rig very small. (You could have done the same thing with Kismet on a Nokia N810 years ago. You still can, if you can find a Nokia N810, which isn’t that hard, and if you can figure out a way to secure it to your pet.)
In other news, here are the presentation links I’ve been able to find so far. I’ll try to update this post during the day. If you are a presenter who would like your talk listed (even if it wasn’t on my list) or if there’s a talk you’d like for me to find, please feel free to leave comments or send email to stainles [at] sportsfirings.com.
That’s everything I’ve been able to find from yesterday. We’re only about 30 minutes into today’s sessions. And while looking for links, I ran across this tidbit: DEFCON ordered 14,000 badges this year. They were gone by 6 PM yesterday.
DEFCON 22 sort of fires up today, though the real action doesn’t begin until Friday.
I’m not in Vegas again this year, for boring (money) reasons. Frankly, I’m also feeling a little burnt out. I miss Vegas (well, mostly, I miss Lotus of Siam) but I’m not sure I really miss dealing with that many people crammed into that small a space. I’m also not so sure that what happens at the conference makes that much of a difference any more. It seems like, to borrow the words of another better writer, “Nothing works and nobody cares”.
Or maybe that’s the depression talking. And the fact that my current employer made all of the videos from last year’s DEFCON available internally within a week of the conference.
So. If I was at DEFCON, what would I be attending?
As I said earlier, Thursday is usually kind of slow. I suspect I’d go to the “Data Protection 101 – Successes, Fails, and Fixes” talk; it sounds kind of basic to me, but you never know what you might learn. “Practical Foxhunting 101” also intrigues me. I went transmitter hunting with a friend of mine many many years ago, and I maintain a somewhat more than academic interest in the subject.
“Paging SDR… Why should the NSA have all the fun?” sounds like fun. Basically, this appears to be “how to decode pager traffic with cheap hardware so you can pretend to be Lester Freamon for fun and profit”. On the other hand, this conflicts with “RF Penetration Testing, Your Air Stinks“, a how-to talk for radio frequency penetration testers. I suspect I’d go to this one, and grab the slides from the pager talk later.
I know SCADA and the cloud are hot topics, but I’m not sure I’d go to either “AWS for Hackers” or “Protecting SCADA From the Ground Up“, simply because neither topic interests me that much. Nothing personal, presenters; they just don’t turn my crank.
I like the idea behind “Anatomy of a Pentest; Poppin’ Boxes like a Pro” and would be more likely to hit that than “One Man Shop: Building an effective security program all by yourself“. If I was working in a small organization, though, I’d probably go to “One Man Shop” instead.
Neither “Standing Up an Effective Penetration Testing Team” nor “In the forest of knowledge with 1o57” interests me that much, so I’d take another break here.
I’m slightly more interested in “Reverse Engineering Mac Malware” than I am in the Honeynets talk. And “RFIDler: SDR.RFID.FTW” sounds exciting: “We have created a small, open source, cheap to build platform that allows any suitably powerful microprocessor access to the raw data created by the over-the-air conversation between tag and reader coil. The device can also act as a standalone ‘hacking’ platform for RFID manipulation/examination.”
This is shaping up to be longer than I expected, so I’m going to break it into two parts. I will try to get a second part up tonight and at least cover the Friday and Saturday talks I’m interested in, if not all the way through to Sunday.
The full schedule is here, if anyone wants to look at it and make requests. I welcome comments from presenters and other people who are at DEFCON. And I will be trying to monitor twitter feeds and posting presentation links as I find them.