Category Archives: Uncategorized

Health Attacks

Whaa?

According to medical records reviewed exclusively by CBS News, a U.S. doctor who evaluated American and Canadian diplomats working in Havana diagnosed them with conditions as serious as mild traumatic brain injury, and with likely damage to the central nervous system.

The diplomats complained about symptoms ranging from hearing loss and nausea to headaches and balance disorders after the State Department said "incidents" began affecting them beginning in late 2016. A source familiar with these incidents says officials are investigating whether the diplomats were targets of a type of sonic attack directed at their homes, which were provided by the Cuban government. The source says reports of more attacks affecting U.S. embassy workers on the island continue.

Stupid

Trying to avoid one kind of social media backlash, ESPN has stumbled into another with Asian announcer Robert Lee no longer assigned to call the University of Virginia’s home football opener in Charlottesville.

Really.

“We collectively made the decision with Robert to switch games as the tragic events in Charlottesville were unfolding, simply because of the coincidence of his name,” ESPN said in a statement. “In that moment it felt right to all parties. It’s a shame that this is even a topic of conversation and we regret that who calls play by play for a football game has become an issue.”

This has to be a joke.

Updated:
No, not a joke, but not exactly as described by the piece above.

ESPN writes:

“This wasn’t about offending anyone. It was about the reasonable possibility that because of his name he wold be subjected to memes and jokes and who knows what else. Think about it. Robert Lee comes to town to do a game in Charlottesville. The reaction to our switching a young, anonymous play by play guy for a streamed ACC game is off the charts — reasonable proof that the meme/joke possibility was real.

So, when the protests in Charlottesville were happening, we raised with him the notion of switching games. Something we do all the time. We didn’t make him. We asked him. Eventually we mutually agreed to switch.

No biggie until someone leaked it to embarrass us and him. They got their way.

No politically correct efforts. No race issues. Just trying to be supportive of a young guy who felt it best to avoid the potential zoo.”

GPS spoofing

Why are US Navy ships running into other ships?

One theory is that Russia has developed a way to spoof GPS signals. Imagine the chaos that would cause, if our military suddenly didn't know where it was...

And, imagine the chaos that would cause if a highway full of GPS-dependent driverless cars suddenly didn't know where they were.

GPS spoofing previously required considerable technical expertise. Humphreys had to build his first spoofer from scratch in 2008, but notes that it can now be done with commercial hardware and software downloaded from the Internet.

Nor does it require much power. Satellite signals are very weak – about 20 watts from 20,000 miles away – so a one-watt transmitter on a hilltop, plane or drone is enough to spoof everything out to the horizon.

If the hardware and software are becoming more accessible, nation states soon won’t be the only ones using the technology. This is within the scope of any competent hacker. There have not yet been any authenticated reports of criminal spoofing, but it should not be difficult for criminals to use it to divert a driverless vehicle or drone delivery, or to hijack an autonomous ship. Spoofing will give everyone affected the same location, so a hijacker would just need a short-ranged system to affect one vehicle.

But Humphreys believes that spoofing by a state operator is the more serious threat. “It affects safety-of-life operations over a large area,” he says. “In congested waters with poor weather, such as the English Channel, it would likely cause great confusion, and probably collisions.”

Oh yes. This will happen.

(h/t BJ)

Continuing to be Useless

I complained to Verizon about my robocall problem. They offered to sell me a monthly service that would put pictures next to the incoming calls - pix taken from my contacts list - so I can see if I want to answer the call or not. WTF.

Or, they said I could just change my number.

Idiots.

[He] Went To North Korea

What You've Heard Vs. What [he] Saw...

I'm not about to argue that the country is secretly a paradise. But if we reduce North Korea to a state run by cartoon supervillains, it becomes equally absurd and dangerous. Their government may be atrocious, but there's still a clear logic to their actions -- to dismiss them as lunatics invites the paranoid fantasy and anxiety that nuclear war is just a bored Kim Jong-un's whim away. Unfortunately, our tour didn't get the chance to sit in on any high-level strategy meetings, but that same line of thought extends to everything there. It may be foreign, and it may often be cruel, but it's not a dark fantasyland -- there's a reason for all of it, even if that reasoning rarely accounts for human happiness.

Even mere sightseeing debunked a good chunk of what floats around online. There is, for example, a theory that Pyongyang's metro station consists of just two stops that run only when tourists visit. Well, I rode through six stops, and I can't imagine that the government has nothing better to do with its time and resources than to make hundreds of actors pretend to ride it with us for the benefit of a motley collection of visiting writers, teachers, and computer programmers. Shockingly, it turns out that dictatorships are capable of maintaining basic public transportation, presumably because they like it when their people make it to work on time. But that's all part of the biggest myth about North Korea ...