Random stuff worth reading on the internet thread

[smokymountainrain]

Hard to talk about innovators in the passing game while mentioning Leach and Mumme, without mentioning Jack Pardee/John Jenkins and those late 80s/early 90s Houston teams with Ware and Klingler. Perhaps the article mentioned them - I didn't read it.

[MarkGrace]

John Malkovich re-creates iconic portraits.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/23/showbi...html?hpt=hp_c3

[TripletDaddy]

those are cool

[YOhio]

https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bofm?lang=eng

[Sullyute]

those are cool

I could have done without the yoko ono remake.

[creekster]

John Malkovich re-creates iconic portraits.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/23/showbi...html?hpt=hp_c3

That speaks to a very healthy ego

[Surfah]

The original Orthodox Jewish hit squad:

He's no longer orthodox.

[Art Vandelay]

John Malkovich re-creates iconic portraits.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/23/showbi...html?hpt=hp_c3

[Donuthole]

This Grantland piece is fascinating. I'm no Japanophile, nor am I very interested in sumo wrestling. But I really enjoyed this.

http://grantland.com/features/sumo-w...elist-seppuku/

Not quite as much as I enjoyed the piece he wrote about following the Iditarod in an airplane, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit.

[MarkGrace]

The Sony leak has provided lots of stuff worth reading on the internet. Some very entertaining stuff. This one this morning cracked me up: http://defamer.gawker.com/channing-t...-he-1670777558

[Color Me Badd Fan]

The Sony leak has provided lots of stuff worth reading on the internet. Some very entertaining stuff. This one this morning cracked me up: http://defamer.gawker.com/channing-t...-he-1670777558

If you recall, there was a story a few months ago that the US had tapped Angela Merkel's phone. Last week, there was an update to the story and now it's suspected that the Russians were behind it and wanted to make it appear that the Americans did it.

Now people are thinking the Sony hack was also accomplished by the Russians. While I can see the North Koreans having the motivation, I don't see the ability. I can certainly see the Russians having some motivation along with the ability.

[falafel]

This is an interesting story on The Intercept (the same website that had the three part interview with Jay from the Serial podcast) about a crazy murder conviction in Vegas 15 years ago. An 18 year old woman from Panaca is convicted of murdering a homeless man in Las Vegas, cutting off his penis, and slashing his anus, despite zero physical evidence tying her to the scene, no eye witnesses, mountains of evidence left untested (including blood and semen from the scene).

[Art Vandelay]

The story of Silk Road is fascinating, on its own. A Mo grandpa from Spanish Fork being a central figure, makes it doubly interesting.

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/

[Lost Student]

The story of Silk Road is fascinating, on its own. A Mo grandpa from Spanish Fork being a central figure, makes it doubly interesting.

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/silk-road-1/

Part 2. The epilogue was kind of shocking.

[Walter Sobchak]

Back when this hit the fan, there was a lot of discussion about whether or not Tarbell was using an alternate explanation to explain how he found the IP address of the Silk Road server in Iceland. Some believe Tarbell's explanation is FOS and his story is a "parallel construction" meant to obscure the real methods used. For example, see here:

Many in the Internet community have officially called baloney [that’s a technical term] on the government’s claims, and these latest apparently contradictory revelations from the government are likely to fuel speculation that the government is trying to explain away some not-so-by-the-book investigative methods.

“I find it surprising that when given the chance to provide a cogent, on-the record explanation for how they discovered the server, they instead produced a statement that has been shown inconsistent with reality, and that they knew would be inconsistent with reality,” Weaver said. “”Let me tell you, those tin foil hats are looking more and more fashionable each day.”

Also here:

As an expert in such topics as sniffing passwords and masscaning the Internet, I know that tracking down the Silk Road site is well within the NSA's capabilities. [...]

I know the Tarbell declaration is gibberish. Reading the configuration and logs, I know that it doesn't match the Tarbell declaration. That's not to say that the Tarbell declaration has been disproven, it's just that "parallel construction" is a better explanation for what's going on than Tarbell actually having found the Silk Road server on his own.

So, in other words, take the Wired's retelling of Tarbell's account with a grain of salt.


Speaking of the NSA, they are becoming scary omnipotent... the "Equation Group" in particular:

Beyond the technical similarities to the Stuxnet and Flame developers, Equation Group boasted the type of extraordinary engineering skill people have come to expect from a spy organization sponsored by the world's wealthiest nation. One of the Equation Group's malware platforms, for instance, rewrote the hard-drive firmware of infected computers—a never-before-seen engineering marvel that worked on 12 drive categories from manufacturers including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate.

The malicious firmware created a secret storage vault that survived military-grade disk wiping and reformatting, making sensitive data stolen from victims available even after reformatting the drive and reinstalling the operating system. The firmware also provided programming interfaces that other code in Equation Group's sprawling malware library could access. Once a hard drive was compromised, the infection was impossible to detect or remove.