Archive for June, 2018

Musical interlude.

Friday, June 29th, 2018

Apropos of nothing in particular.

Harlan Ellison.

Friday, June 29th, 2018

LAT. LAT tribute by John Scalzi. Appreciations. The WP just reprinted the AP obit, but they did also run a nice retrospective. Lawrence.

The paper of record has not yet seen fit to publish an obit for Mr. Ellison (or, for that matter, Gardner Dozois.)

Edited to add: NYT partial obit. “A complete obituary will appear soon.”

Other people knew him better and probably have smarter things to say. This one is hard for me, because his stories and essays and criticism have been a huge part of my life for about 40 years now.

It is sometimes said that everyone in science fiction has their own Harlan Ellison story, which they will be glad to tell you anytime his name comes up. Here’s mine: I worked on a couple of Ellison projects a while back. (Basically, I was just retyping his manuscripts into a computer for later typesetting, etc.) While working on those projects, I talked to him a couple of times on the phone. I think he knew that I was nervous talking to him, but he never treated me with anything but respect and courtesy.

I think we would have disagreed on most major issues of the day, but he was a great and underappreciated writer, and I will miss him.

Quick update from the police beat.

Friday, June 29th, 2018

Remember the fentanyl laced flyers from earlier this week?

Turns out it wasn’t fentanyl after all:

More than a dozen flyers placed on Harris County Sheriff’s Office vehicles have tested negative for fentanyl after a sergeant was hospitalized earlier this week from touching a paper originally believed to be laced with the sometimes-deadly opioid.
The Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences tested 13 flyers, as well as clothing items and blood and urine samples from the sergeant who had symptoms related to drug-exposure. Those tests were all negative.

Apparently the initial positive was from a field test. This raises some questions that I just don’t have time to discuss right now, but which I sort of alluded to in the first post, and which I’d like to come back to later.

Edited to add: Well well well. Since I posted this update, the HouChron article has itself been updated with quotes from the sheriff’s office about the field test kits.

The Houston Chronicle reported in July 2016 that 298 people had been convicted of drug possession, even though complete lab tests later found no controlled substances in the samples tested at the scene.
All 298 people pleaded guilty to felony and misdemeanors before the field samples had been tested in the county’s forensic laboratory. Many of those people pleaded guilty based on the initial testing kits indicated the substance recovered at the scene was positive for drugs. Those test kits cannot be used in trial as evidence under Texas law.

Obit watch: June 28, 2018.

Thursday, June 28th, 2018

Daisy Kadibil, Aboriginal Australian.

When she was eight…

Daisy was taken from her home in Jigalong, an Indigenous community in the Pilbara region in northwestern Australia, where she had grown up. A sister, Molly, and a cousin, Gracie, were also seized, and all three girls were sent to an Indigenous settlement near the Moore River, just north of Perth, the nearest city, about 800 miles to the south.
There, longing for home, they sought to escape. In 1931 they succeeded, embarking on foot on a treacherous nine-week trek north across rough terrain and using as their guide a barbed-wire fence that had been built to keep rabbits away from pastureland — an astonishing feat that inspired a book and the acclaimed 2002 Australian movie “Rabbit-Proof Fence.”

Daisy was the last survivor of the three.

For the historical record: Joe Jackson.

Memo from the police beat.

Tuesday, June 26th, 2018

Oddly, this one is mostly Houston based this time, though there is an APD connection that I’ll mention at the end.

Somebody put flyers on some Harris County Sheriff’s cars parked outside of one of their buildings.

The flyers promoted the organization Targeted Individuals, an organization which believes that the “Deep State” targets certain individuals.
The group believes the FBI and CIA purposefully inflict mental, physical and emotional stress on enemies of the “Deep State,” in part, by shooting microwave technology at their heads in order to cause brain damage, according to the group’s website.

I think this is their website. At least this is the one linked in the HouChron article. There’s another site called “Targeted Individuals” which seems to cover similar ground. I haven’t had time to dig deeply into either of these sites yet, though I’m generally familiar with the whole beaming microwaves/gangstalking/etc. theory.

But that’s not what makes this story weird. A deputy with HCSO went out, found one of the flyers on her car window, and removed it.

Apparently, the flyer was laced with fentanyl.

She initially did not think anything of it but soon started to feel light-headed and showed other fentanyl-related symptoms.
She was rushed to the hospital and is expected to survive as authorities investigate the flyers’ origination. She was released around 4:30 p.m., authorities said.

My first thought was: “How do they know?” Could it just have been heat-related stress or some other condition, and everyone jumped to the conclusion it was fentanyl? According to the HouChron, at least one flyer (I assume it was the one the deputy handled) “tested positive” for fentanyl, and the remaining flyers are being analyzed by the county forensic lab. No idea if the positive test was a field test, or something more sophisticated.

If someone is actually putting drug-laced flyers on cars in an effort to hurt or kill police officers, that’s a pretty serious escalation. I’m hoping it isn’t true, but in the meantime: paranoia and gloves are your friends.

A while back, I wrote about the cases of Terry Thompson and his wife. Briefly: Terry Thompson confronted a man for public urination at a Denny’s and pinned him to the ground. His wife, a HCSO officer at the time, helped him hold the man down. (The wife has since been fired.) The man passed out and died three days later. Mr. Thompson and his wife were charged with murder.

Terry Thompson’s trial was last week. It ended in a mistrial. The Harris County DA announced yesterday that they plan to retry the case. But:

Although all the jurors agreed deadly force was justified under the circumstances, [Scot] Courtney [Thompson’s attorney – DB] said, one refused to find him not guilty of the murder charge.
“One of the jurors said that he could not, he would not vote not guilty – and he hung up the jury for a day,” Courtney said. “It’s disappointing that a juror was seated and swore an oath to follow the law and then ultimately didn’t.”
On the lesser charge of manslaughter, 10 jurors voted not guilty and on the count of criminally negligent homicide eight voted not guilty, Courtney said.

And finally, noted for the record and without much comment, because I just don’t know what to make of it:

A lawsuit has named Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo, the City of Austin and Travis County as defendants in a class action complaint accusing them of failing women who were sexually assaulted.

Others named in the lawsuit include Travis County District Attorney Margaret Moore, former Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley, and Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez.

Hyenas on fire.

Tuesday, June 26th, 2018

Quick update on (now former) state Senator Carlos Uresti:

12 years in prison.

(Previously. Previously. Previously.)

(Note how far down you have to scroll in the article before former Senator Uresti’s party affiliation is mentioned.)

Headline of the day.

Tuesday, June 26th, 2018

Rare alligator named Snowball stolen from TV stars during intentionally set fire, deputies say

Obit watch: June 26, 2018.

Tuesday, June 26th, 2018

For the record: Richard Benjamin Harrison, of “Pawn Stars” fame.

Deanna Lund, noted for “Land of the Giants”.

The sexy Lund had appeared as a redheaded lesbian stripper opposite Frank Sinatra in Tony Rome (1967) and as Anna Gram, a moll working for The Riddler (John Astin), on ABC’s Batman, leading to her being cast on the show.

Obit watch: June 23, 2018.

Saturday, June 23rd, 2018

It’s been a rough week and I got sidetracked yesterday. For the record: Charles Krauthammer. NYT. WP.

Thread:

Obit watch: June 21, 2018.

Thursday, June 21st, 2018

NYT obit for Matt “Guitar” Murphy.

Richard Valeriani, noted NBC news correspondent.

The paper of record still has not published an obit for Gardner Dozois.

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.

Art, damn it, art! watch (#55 in a series)

Tuesday, June 19th, 2018

I haven’t done one of these in a while. But there’s news!

Christo has a new project! Actual NYT headline:

Christo’s Latest Work Weighs 650 Tons. And It Floats.

“The London Mastaba,” Christo’s first major outdoor work in Britain, is now floating (through Sept. 23) in the middle of the lake in Hyde Park. A trapezoidal pyramid of 7,506 painted and horizontally stacked barrels, it’s 66 feet tall — as tall as the Sphinx in Egypt — and weighs roughly 650 tons. Named after a flat-roofed structure with sloping sides that originated some 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (the word “mastaba” means “bench” in Arabic), it’s a test for a mastaba roughly eight times as high that Christo hopes to put up in the desert in Abu Dhabi.

Photos at the link. As is usual for Christo projects, this was entirely self-funded at an estimated cost of three million pounds.