What Is This Place?

Posted on by jccarlton

The top image is from the SONO Switch Tower Museum. A treat little place to visit in South Norwalk CT. I occasionally volunteer there from time to time.

I think that I need to update the sticky post. And add some rules.  First the rules.

Comments are very much welcomed. .  If you choose to remain anonymous you MUST provide a actual email address and a real, not Tor IP.  I want to talk to real people who have real personalities. If you want to not have your comment posted just say so and it will never escape moderation. If you want to find me offline my linked in profile is in the “about” post.

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A Snippet

Posted on by jccarlton

I’m sorry about the light posting of late. A week or so I ran into this picture and for some reason decided to write a story about it.

This tripped off one of my creative binges and the story now has 65,000 odd words so far and doesn’t seem to want to stop. The working title is mermaid in the pot.

If people like this chapter I’ll post more. It’s urban fantasy with mermaids, mobsters, secret agents, big projects and hurricanes. And the bad guys are just starting to show up.

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Tech Stuff 75

Posted on by jccarlton

This is a sort of search and discover newsletter of my findings of things that may relate to technology in one way or another. It might be the latest gosh wow tech, it might be something as old of humanity. It might relate to science large or small. It might be art for art’s sake. Or somebody just doing something funky. Because I think that technology is just the representation of human creativity and breaking boundaries. So I’m certainly not going to place boundaries here except that it won’t be the same old, same old. So almost no gadgets or yacking about the latest phone or whatever, unless of course it involves taking them apart or destroying them in unusual ways. Or putting them to work in imaginative ways that most people won’t even think of. So buckle up, it’s going to be a fun ride.

This week, the oldest DOS, an incredible old machine shop that still operates, NBC’s biggest flop, the roundest object and more.

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Art Of The Week: The Garage Kits At Wonder Festival

Posted on by jccarlton

I’ve been trying to get to Wonderfest  in Japan for over ten years now and have been blocked for a number of reasons. Still I am amazed at the sculpting level of some of the garage kit makers year after year.

Here’s some examples from this year’s winter wonderfest.   All from Nekomagic.com

More here:
http://www.nekomagic.com/?cat=1526

many of these are NSFW, so don’t look unless your sure

Thanks to Nekomagic.com for the pics:
http://www.nekomagic.com/

The Wonder Festival wiki page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Festival

The official Wonder Festival page(Japanese)

http://wf.kaiyodo.net/

 

Some video.

The show runners have set up special licensing deals with the anime producers so that figures made from anime can be made and sold without special licensing deals.  So many of the figures made and sold at these shows are anime related.  Many others are original work.  This is only a sample of the works at a typical Wonder Festival.

 

Tech Stuff 74

Posted on by jccarlton

This is a sort of search and discover newsletter of my findings of things that may relate to technology in one way or another. It might be the latest gosh wow tech, it might be something as old of humanity. It might relate to science large or small. It might be art for art’s sake. Or somebody just doing something funky. Because I think that technology is just the representation of human creativity and breaking boundaries. So I’m certainly not going to place boundaries here except that it won’t be the same old, same old. So almost no gadgets or yacking about the latest phone or whatever, unless of course it involves taking them apart or destroying them in unusual ways. Or putting them to work in imaginative ways that most people won’t even think of. So buckle up, it’s going to be a fun ride.
This week: lathe work, Lego Porsche crash test, Human bombs dropped from a B17 and more.

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Ransomware’s Achille’s Heel

Posted on by jccarlton

This is a post series on cybercrime. For more posts click here or the cybercrime tag below.

Apparently the French police have realized the vulnerability of ransomware,  the fact that the extortionists have to communicate with their victims and since the French do not have the vested interest in maintaining the TOR network they went for the actual TOR hardware.

WannaCry communicates with a command and control server hosted on the Dark Web, on a .onion address. Aeris suspects his servers were used as first hops in this connection, hence the reason police seized his property, hosted via French hosting provider Online SAS.

Most Tor servers are configured to log very few details, such as uptime and status metrics, so to safeguard the privacy of its users. Unless Aeris made customizations to default configs, French police have no chance of finding any useful information on the seized servers.

Tens of Tor servers disappeared on the same weekend

In the media storm caused by the wave of WannaCry attacks, this small incident went unreported outside of French media. Aeris also confirmed the seizing of his servers on Twitter.

The investigation is led by France’s cyber-crime investigation unit OCLCTIC (L’Office Central de Lutte contre la Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication).

The activist pointed out that tens of other Tor nodes in France disappeared over the same weekend. In a private conversation with Bleeping Computer, the activist shared a list of 30 servers he is currently investigating regarding these mysterious disappearances.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/french-police-seize-two-tor-relays-in-wannacry-investigation/

As the Bleeping Computer article pointed out, seizing the hardware isn’t going to do the French much good once the servers are cut from the TOR network.  On the other hand, with 30 odd nodes gone just in France, and the possibility that the French could go after other nodes in the EU, it could be that the TOR network in the EU will be essentially shut down.

http://thehackernews.com/2017/06/wannacry-ransomware-tor-relay.html

The people at TOR have taken a “we’re not responsible” take on ransomware and attempted to hide behind common carrier laws to prevent the decriminalization and exposure of the people using the network for criminal means.  It may be that the Wannacry attack was the last straw for many law enforcement agencies.

For anybody wanting to know how to catch people on TOR.

Here’s the week in ransomware.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/the-week-in-ransomware-june-9th-2017-jaff-spectre-and-macransom/