Archive for May 10th, 2013

Week of Gatsby: Day 5.

Friday, May 10th, 2013

I hate being backed into a corner.

One of the reasons I wanted to do “Week of Gatsby” was so I could link to the classic Andy Kaufman routine from “Saturday Night Live”. I didn’t think that would be the problem it turned into.

That clip is not available, in any form, on the Internet, as far as I can tell. NBC Universal, as the copyright holders, seems to aggressively go after anyone who posts SNL clips on YouTube (as is their right, of course).

That clip is also not available, as far as I can determine, in Hulu’s library of SNL clips.

You can watch the entire episode with Kaufman (season 3, episode 13, with Art Garfunkel and Stephen Bishop) on Hulu – if you pay $8 a month for Hulu Plus (or sign up for a free trial). Otherwise, you’re out of luck. I say: to heck with that.

The text of Kaufman’s routine is available from the SNL Transcripts site, but reading the text of a Kaufman routine is like dancing about architecture.

This, however, might make the effort worthwhile: from a Cornell website, the “New Student Reading Project”, some notes on Gatsby. Chapter 7, “Performing Gatsby“, is rather interesting, especially for the comments by some of Kaufman’s contemporaries on his routine.

David Brenner: “And, you know, people would boo the crying. They were New Yorkers.”

(Also: a young Sam Waterson? This I’ve got to see. Was the man ever “young”?)

Posted in 1970s, Books, Gatsby, TV | 4 Comments »

Not Since Nixon.

Friday, May 10th, 2013

The Internal Revenue Service on Friday acknowledged that it flagged political groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names for special scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status, an admission that is fueling long-held suspicions among conservatives that the agency has been singling them out for unfair treatment.

Posted in Clippings, Law, Nixon | Comments Closed

Invisible airwaves crackle with life, bright antenna bristle with the energy…

Friday, May 10th, 2013

On Thursday, Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson received a letter from the State Department Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance demanding that he take down the online blueprints for the 3D-printable “Liberator” handgun that his group released Monday, along with nine other 3D-printable firearms components hosted on the group’s website Defcad.org. The government says it wants to review the files for compliance with arms export control laws known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, or ITAR. By uploading the weapons files to the Internet and allowing them to be downloaded abroad, the letter implies Wilson’s high-tech gun group may have violated those export controls.

As Linoge says, you can’t stop the signal.

Edited to add: Quote of the day:

The right to download CAD files is the right to be free. 😉

—Tam

(Reference explained here for the non SF fans in my audience.)

Posted in Clippings, Guns, Law | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 10, 2013.

Friday, May 10th, 2013

In the first operation, hackers infiltrated the system of an unnamed Indian credit-card processing company that handles Visa and MasterCard prepaid debit cards. Such companies are attractive to cybercriminals because they are considered less secure than financial institutions, computer security experts say.

The hackers, who are not named in the indictment, then raised the withdrawal limits on prepaid MasterCard debit accounts issued by the National Bank of Ras Al-Khaimah, also known as RakBank, which is in United Arab Emirates.

So they raised the withdrawal limits, but shouldn’t it have set off alarms if they tried to withdraw more than the amount on the prepaid card? Or did the people involved change that as well?

…

With five account numbers in hand, the hackers distributed the information to individuals in 20 countries who then encoded the information on magnetic-stripe cards. On Dec. 21, the cashing crews made 4,500 A.T.M. transactions worldwide, stealing $5 million, according to the indictment.

…

After securing 12 account numbers for cards issued by the Bank of Muscat in Oman and raising the withdrawal limits, the cashing crews were set in motion. Starting at 3 p.m., the crews made 36,000 transactions and withdrew about $40 million from machines in the various countries in about 10 hours. In New York City, a team of eight people made 2,904 withdrawals, stealing $2.4 million.

The Times notes this is bigger than Lufthansa. And no guns were involved (at least in the initial heist: one of the people alleged to be behind it was shot dead later on). As a connoisseur of hacks and heists, my hat is off to these guys.

Remember our old friends the Zeta cartel, and their plan to launder money by purchasing quarter horses? Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, not guilty.

Jesus Huitron, an Austin homebuilder and painter, was found not guilty. But José Treviño Morales, brother of two principal leaders within the organization, and three co-defendants were found to have poured millions of dirty dollars from the Zetas cartel into the U.S. quarter horse industry to hide their illicit origins.

Posted in Clippings, Law | Comments Closed