Flutterby™!

Visibility of even the grain elevator just across the river is obscured

'I’m Possibly Alive Because It Exists:' Why Sleep Apnea Patients Rely on a CPAP Machine Hacker

An Australian hacker has spent thousands of hours hacking the DRM that medical device manufacturers put on CPAP machines to create a free tool that lets patients modify their treatment.

I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.

Some good musings on instant fame and "best of"s...

MeFi thread

Not even close to across the valley, even though the sky is relatively clear

Sucks again

Homeless veteran and New Jersey couple arrested in GoFundMe scam.

According to Coffina, McClure texted a friend less than an hour after the GoFundMe campaign launched, saying the story was "completely made up." McClure did not run out of gas on an I-95 ramp and Bobbitt did not offer his last $20 to help her. In the text exchange, McClure told her friends to "shh about the made up stuff," Coffina said.

Can't see across the valley

And it still looks ugly here

Feeling like there's been a sea change: The number of bitcoin and 419 and phishing scams in my spam inbox is being eclipsed by the LinkedIn recruiter requests...

Today in things that could have been phrased better: Seatbelts are awesome, but let's put a concerted effort towards not getting into situations where they'd save our lives.

Card skimming malware removed from Infowars online store — Infowars online store hit by brief Magecart incident that lasted around 24 hours. Less than 1,600 users may have been affected.

Infowars Infected With Credit Card-Stealing Malware, Alex Jones Claims It’s a Conspiracy

New York Times: Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis. How Facebook pushed the "funded by Soros" conspiracy theories, killed sex workers with FOSTA and SESTA, pushed anti-Google and Apple stories on the NTK Network, and more.

Is broadband responsible for falling teenage pregnancy rates? — Researchers find corresponding decline in STI transmission as high-speed internet access rolls out

Melanie Guldi from the University of Central Florida and Chris Herbst from Arizona State University conclude that “at least 13% of the total decline in the teen birth rate between 1999 and 2007 can be explained by increases in high-speed internet access” in the US.

Looks like the paper is at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-016-0605-0 with an earlier version at http://ftp.iza.org/dp9076.pdf

More smoke reference

It's actually bright out, and we can almost see across the valley. Err... With picture this time.

Visibility a little better this morning.

Visibility a little better

Weed Seems to Protect Your Liver From the Effects of Hard Drinking

Cannabis use is associated with reduced prevalence of progressive stages of alcoholic liver disease. https://doi.org/10.1111/liv.13696

Bonus: Weed May Play a Role in Weight Loss — Studies have shown that cannabis users are less obese than nonusers. Scientists are trying to figure out why.

It ended in 1767, yet this experiment is still linked to higher incomes and education levels today:

Jesuits arrived late to the Guarani people’s homeland where Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina meet. But their missions thrived until 1767, when King Charles III of Spain expelled all Jesuits from the Spanish Empire.

Yet even 250 years later, people living near the ruins of Jesuit missions complete 10 to 15 percent more years of education and earn 10 percent more than residents of equivalent towns without missions, according to a study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Reddit: Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People:

Edit: I guess my tone-projection is off. A lot of people seem to be put-off by my usage of the word "insane." I intended that as tongue-in-cheek and did not mean to imply that any of them literally have diagnosable mental illnesses. I have a lot of respect for all of the individuals I listed and they seem like nice people, I was just trying to make a point about how unusual their behavior is.

And it's gotten worse again

Police: Woman remotely wipes phone in evidence after shooting

Police believe Juelle L. Grant, 24, of Willow Avenue [Schenectady, NY], may have been the driver of a vehicle involved in an Oct. 23 drive-by shooting on Van Vranken Avenue, near Lang Street, so they obtained her phone, according to police allegations filed in court. No one was injured in the shooting.

After police took her iPhone X, telling her it was considered evidence, "she did remotely wipe" the device, according to police.

On the one hand, this is pretty clearly destruction of evidence. On the other hand, what if this was triggered by some sort of deadman switch... If the phone gets wiped because you didn't stop the wipe process, does that count?

Still breathing smoke...

Good guy with a gun shot by police: Officer shoots, kills armed security guard outside south suburban bar

After security asked a group of drunken men to leave Manny’s Blue Room Bar around 4 a.m. Sunday, witnesses said someone came back with a gun and opened fire. Security returned fire, and according to witnesses, 26-year-old armed security guard Jemel Roberson apprehended one of the men involved outside.

"He had somebody on the ground with his knee in back, with his gun in his back like, 'Don’t move,'" witness Adam Harris said.

No points for guessing the color of the security guard's skin.

Using Wi-Fi to “see” behind closed doors is easier than anyone thought:

VentureBeat: Mapping tech adds truth to election debate. Some ramblings from Eric Gundersen, founder of MapBox.

Exploit developer discovers security vulnerability in VirtualBox and publishes a full guide to exploiting it.

Zelenyuk has published full details of the exploit on GitHub, and says that the vulnerability affects VirtualBox 5.2.20 and earlier. The only requirements to take advantage of the vulnerability are that the network card is an Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM), and that VirtualBox is set to NAT mode.

Seems pretty specific, but careful...

LA band Threatin faked a fanbase to land a European tour that no one attended:

To do it, the band’s frontman and leader, Jered Threatin, posed as a nonexistent booking agent / promoter to land the gigs, used faked live footage of allegedly packed shows in L.A., bought Facebook likes, event RSVPs and YouTube views and lied about ticket sales numbers to swindle venue owners and talent buyers into taking on the shows.

And then, of course, nobody showed up, because their Facebook followers were all fake accounts from Brazil, and ...

Jupyter Notebooks of all sorts of climate data! http://openclimatedata.net/

Damn it, Apple, what coordinate space are you using for the origin of NSDraggingImageComonent.frame?

Assert yourself - some notes on programming defensively and hiding bugs. Some good stuff to think about, especially as we're moving into a world of high failure probablistic systems (eg: distributed and networked)

Can't see across the valley now.

SPLC lawsuit: Family detained, searched in Mississippi because they ‘looked’ Latino

Remember all of those Belisarius Productions and Glen A. Larson TV shows back in the '80s where an out of control Southern sheriff was the villain? Those were not supposed to be aspirational.

Man without pants falls through Waffle House ceiling

A Man Without Pants Fell Through the Roof of a Waffle House During a Botched Burglary, Police Say

"Man Without Pants" is going to be the name of my cover band, but we're gonna have to update the lyrics to "Safety Dance".

Could've sworn I'd linked this previously, but if so it bears repeating: Ken Cheng @kenchengcomedy:

terrorism is one of the only areas where white people do most of the work and get none of the credit

12 dead in the worst shooting in the United States in two weeks (Actually, I guess 12 deaths makes it worse than the Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting). Including a good guy with a gun. A sheriff’s deputy was about to retire. Instead, ‘he died a hero’ in Thousand Oaks.

12 people killed, including sheriff’s deputy, in ‘horrific’ California bar shooting

The Marine Corps said Long served between August 2008 and March 2013. He served as a machine gunner in Afghanistan from November 2010 to June 2011 and became a corporal two months later. Dean said Long lived in Newbury Park, Calif., a town near Thousand Oaks. Police have had “several contacts” with Long over the years, Dean said, most of them for minor events including traffic accidents.

In April, deputies were called to Long’s home for a disturbance call, Dean said.

White male with mental illness problems and a history of domestic violence, then.

Pretty much sums up the caravan: The Nib — Sneak Attack

Markov chains are weird.

Motel 6 Agrees To Pay Millions After Giving Guest Lists To Immigration Authorities

Your regular reminder that BGP hijacking is still a thing and you should be using end-to-end encryption for everything because you never know where your Internet traffic is going to go...

Strange snafu misroutes domestic US Internet traffic through China Telecom

This weekend I went to North Bay Python. It's a great tech conference, walking distance from home, but was essentially away for the weekend. I came home on Sunday evening, Charlene was doing something, the phone was ringing, I went to pick it up and she shook her head and said "Don't answer it, it's been like this all weekend."

(Let the record show I did answer it. My bad.) One of the calls that Petalumans were getting showered with was a nasty attack against D'Lynda Fischer, one of the council candidates. The attack was presumed to have come from the Michael Regan campaign, because there were 3 candidates viable for the 3rd council slot, and his politics are the most orthogonal to the other two. And he's generally been associated with the folks who tend toward such things.

We were at an election night party last night, and somewhere around 8:30 mashed reload on the Sonoma County Registrar of voters web site, and with about 12k absentee ballots counted the results showed Michael Regan in 3rd place (for 3 slots), with D'Lynda and Dennis pretty much tied at 4th. This morning, with a little over 17k total ballots counted (in a city whose total population is 58k) D'Lynda has a roughly 100 count lead, 14.1% to Regan's 13.9%.

My guess is that the nasty politics backfired and motivated late voters. Seems like we might be entering into a new era of politics in the meta-game.

Got a message from 413-829-0127, SMS thread in the comments...

The Strangest Form of White Flight — The wealthy residents of Eagle's Landing are voting Tuesday on whether to secede from the metro Atlanta city of Stockbridge, just after a black mayor and an all-black city council took office. So much weirdness about this story.

“I serve on the Henry County zoning board,” said Consiglio, “and so I kept seeing all of these places like Bojangle’s, Waffle Houses, dollar stores, and all this going up in our county. And I was like, why can’t we get a Cheesecake Factory, or a P.F. Chang’s or a Houston’s? We have areas that have high incomes, so what’s the deal?”

Donald Trump: "The Democrat plan would obliterate Obamacare." (Twitter video).

Related: Eric Trump: Obama has a ‘personal problem’ with my dad

The president's son also complained that Obama was "taking credit for a lot of my father's accomplishments."

Solid state of fear: Euro boffins bust open SSD, Bitlocker encryption (it's really, really dumb) — Security experts frantically facepalming at stupid design

A paper [PDF] drawn up by researchers Carlo Meijer and Bernard van Gastel at Radboud University in the Netherlands, and made public today, describes these critical weaknesses. The bottom line is: the drives require a password to encrypt and decrypt their contents, however this password can be bypassed, allowing crooks and snoops to access ciphered data.

Seems to impact several models of Crucial and Samsung SSDs, and Bitlocker.

There's also the more general problem that architecture should allow unencrypted data on as few external buses as possible, so any solution which puts the encryption in the disk hardware is a bad idea. But this is pretty much dong nothing.

So Australia put together a "My Health Record" thing that sounds like it was really poorly thought-out: My Health Record: The Case For Opting Out.

Uptake as opt-in was slow, so they went opt-out. My Health Record system crashes as Australians rush to opt out.