Whipped Cream Difficulties

Les McKeown, of the Bay City Rollers.

I have not found a mainstream source for this yet, but it seems to have been confirmed in various places: Dan Kaminsky, noted security researcher.

His politics were not mine, and he was not a personal friend or even acquaintance of mine. But I was lucky enough to see him speak at DEFCON and Black Hat a few times, and the guy was wicked smart. Especially when it came to TCP/IP and DNS: man probably forgot more about DNS than I’ll ever know. (One of my favorite talks involved him demonstrating how he could run streaming audio, in real-time, over the Internet…by embedding data in DNS queries. I believe this was that talk.)

There’s a good Hacker News thread here, and an obit from The Register here.

When your Register hack asked Kaminsky why he hadn’t gone to the dark side and used the flaw to become immensely wealthy – either by exploiting it to hijack millions of netizens’ web traffic, or by selling details of it to the highest bidders – he said not only would that have been morally wrong, he didn’t want his mom to have to visit him in prison.

The Reg obit also includes a link to a playlist of Mr. Kaminsky’s talks on YouTube.

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