Meddling

It would’ve worked, too, if it weren’t for those meddling kids!

There are 617 posts filed in Meddling (this is page 26 of 62).

Flare flare are you tonight

Ok, so the title is a reference to a staple of the old Hee Haw show.

After speculating that the flares I saw Saturday night might have been launched by the Raleigh Fire Department to gauge the wind currents before the Wide Open Bluegrass fireworks that night, I reached out to department officials this morning to learn if the FD did this sort of thing.

I got a call back this afternoon from the official who approved the city’s fireworks permit and we had a good chat. He told me they don’t normally launch anything to gauge the wind but rely on observed conditions and the weather forecast. He said that the location I guessed the flares were coming from would’ve been too far away from the fireworks site to be useful, anyway.

The bottom line is that the mystery flares are not the work of the fire department, after all. Now I’m really going to have to work to track this thing further.

Color Run sees green, leaves Raleigh seeing red

Color Run in Seattle By Scooter Lowrimore (from Flickr)

Color Run in Seattle By Scooter Lowrimore (from Flickr)


A number of residents of Raleigh’s Historic Oakwood neighborhood were not happy to find their cars were missing from the street Saturday morning. The Color Run, a for-profit road run featuring dyed corn starch packets, had set up for its run through the neighborhood. Unlike most road races, organizers insisted that all the cars be removed from the street, most likely because of the colossal mess the corn starch packets make.

Raleigh Police posted “no parking” notices with as little as 13 hours notice, leaving many residents unprepared. Tow trucks hauled off their cars and stuck them with bills upwards of $150 to get them back. This in addition to the godawfully sticky corn starch that trashed their streets and homes.

Needless to say, residents were livid at their cars being taken and their neighborhood trashed. Council members were summoned and the city has agreed to reimburse residents for their towing charges.

I watched after the run as contractors worked to clear the starchy muck off of Wilmington Street near Polk Street. The contractor used a bleach mixture for this work, pouring this chemical-laden broth into our storm drains for eventual draining into the Neuse River. Nice move. I made a call to the city’s stormwater department when I saw this and begged someone to check it out. The city responded that this was just one of many issues they are collecting about the run.

Several runners question the motives of a for-profit company closing down city streets and using city resources. I watched at the end as a decal-laden Color Run car was loaded onto a tractor trailer that already held about 8 other shiny company vehicles. Apparently business is good!
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Flares over Raleigh

Saturday night at 9:45 PM, Kelly and I were up on the grassy lawn at Red Hat Amphitheater watching Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers play. Kelly pointed over to the northwest sky, above Dawson Street. Floating through the sky were a half-dozen flickering little balls of amber light. I blinked a few times before deciding they were flares. As the concert went on, the flares continued to march slowly south across the sky. There were well over a dozen of them. I’m sure the 911 center got more than one report of UFOs.

After the concert ended, Raleigh started up its fireworks show from the parking deck behind us. I wondered if the flares had been launched to gauge the air currents, as the flares seemed to have been launched from the direction of Fire Station #1 at Martin and Dawson Streets. I’m not sure why they would need to launch over a dozen of them to do this, though. Why wouldn’t one or two be sufficient? And why launch them well over an hour before the fireworks began?

I think I’ll reach out to my (few) contacts at the fire department to see how the whole process of setting up for fireworks, well … works.

Update 2 Oct 5:53 PM: Raleigh Fire Department says the flares aren’t theirs.

Was Goldsboro’s Broken Arrow more broken than announced?

As I mentioned before, I have become captivated by the 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash which resulted in two thermonuclear weapons being dropped in Faro, NC field. This Broken Arrow incident was in the news when a declassified document was released claiming one switch stopped an enormous nuclear detonation (is there any other kind?) from obliterating eastern North Carolina.

My concern when first learning about this incident was that just a flimsy switch protected the first bomb. After reading multiple interviews with Jack ReVelle, it seems the first bomb wasn’t the worry at all. The second bomb has been the one shrouded in mystery and ReVelle’s interviews seem to indicate that this bomb was always the concern.
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Latest Casualty Of NSA Spying Revelations: Web Advertising Based On Tracking Users

I’m so trendy.

As we’ve noted before, Edward Snowden’s revelations about the globe-spanning spying being conducted by the NSA are have all sorts of interesting knock-on consequences. Here’s another: people are starting to worry about being tracked by online advertisers, and taking action to avoid it,

via Latest Casualty Of NSA Spying Revelations: Web Advertising Based On Tracking Users | Techdirt.

Becoming a flasher

Now that our daughter’s in middle school and is involved with extra-curricular activities we needed to get her her own phone, so she inherited my smartphone as I upgraded mine. Having a new phone has provided me the opportunity to try out something I’d been meaning to do for a while: flash my phone with an open-source version of Android.

What’s the worst that can happen? Well, flashing a new ROM onto your phone can turn your sophisticated pocket computer into an expensive doorstop. Known as “bricking” your phone, a mistake in the process can make it inoperative. Fortunately, there are plenty of guides which walk you through the process as well as simple “one-click” programs which will do the dirty work for you. And even if you goof up, you can almost always fix things up again.
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Linux Weekly News discusses 2003 Linux kernel attempted hack

Here’s a technical explanation from a Linux Weekly News contributor on the 2003 Linux Kernel hack.

An attempt to backdoor the kernel
[Posted November 6, 2003 by corbet]

The mainline 2.4 and 2.6.0-test kernels are both currently maintained in BitKeeper repositories. As a service for those who, for whatever reason, are unable or unwilling to use BitKeeper, however, the folks at BitMover have set up a separate CVS repository. That repository contains the current code and the full revision history. It is not, however, the place where new changes are committed. So, when somebody managed to push some changes directly into CVS, Larry McVoy noticed quickly.

Over the years, people have had numerous things to say about BitKeeper and the people behind it. Nobody, however, has accused them of being insufficiently careful. Every change in the CVS repository includes backlink information tying it to the equivalent BitKeeper changesets. The changes in question lacked that information, and thus stood out immediately.
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Revisiting a 2003 attack on the Linux kernel

Back in 2003, someone tried and failed to plant a security exploit into the Linux kernel code in a sophisticated and well-though-out operation. In light of yesterday’s revelations of NSA teams actively working to weaken software security, this incident from a decade ago raises some questions.

It also highlights why having the source code to your software is the only way to be sure it’s secure.

An unknown intruder attempted to insert a Trojan horse program into the code of the next version of the Linux kernel, stored at a publicly accessible database.

Security features of the source-code repository, known as BitKeeper, detected the illicit change within 24 hours, and the public database was shut down, a key developer said Thursday.

An intruder apparently compromised one server earlier, and the attacker used his access to make a small change to one of the source code files, McVoy said. The change created a flaw that could have elevated a person’s privileges on any Linux machine that runs a kernel compiled with the modified source code. However, only developers who used that database were affected–and only during a 24-hour period, he added.

via Attempted attack on Linux kernel foiled – CNET News.

US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet

Shocking, or long suspected?

The files show that the National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have broadly compromised the guarantees that internet companies have given consumers to reassure them that their communications, online banking and medical records would be indecipherable to criminals or governments.

The agencies, the documents reveal, have adopted a battery of methods in their systematic and ongoing assault on what they see as one of the biggest threats to their ability to access huge swathes of internet traffic – “the use of ubiquitous encryption across the internet”.

via US and UK spy agencies defeat privacy and security on the internet | World news | The Guardian.