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Last of Secret JFK Files Slated for Release This Fall

Fresh Air interview with Philip Shenon, author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, airing now. Will edit link in later.

Walmart is apologizing after a display seemed to market guns as back-to-school items

Walmart apologizes for sign marketing guns as back-to-school items

Did Walmart Place a Sign Over a Gun Display Urging Kids to 'Own the School Year Like a Hero'?

The official Kek cult attire is now a trenchcoat.

FBI agents raided Manafort's home in July

Model says she was freed after 'deep web' kidnapping in Italy: Police

The alleged abductors used encrypted accounts to ask the model’s agent for $300,000 to stop the auction from taking place, claiming to work on behalf of something called the "Black Death Group," which operates within the so-called deep web, police said.

The deep web, or "dark web," is a network of websites that cannot typically be found by search engines, and are often protected through encryption. Billions of dollars in drugs, weapons and other items have been illegally traded on the sites.

Investigators discovered evidence that the suspect, Herba, may have previously organized several online auctions of abducted women, through ads he allegedly described the women and set starting prices. Police said it is unclear whether he actually abducted the women or whether they had ever really been for sale.

Italian police described Herba as a "dangerous subject with aspects of mythomania," which is a pathological inclination to exaggerate.

"It is unclear ... whether the young people were really kidnapped or whether the man invented everything," Deputy Prosecutor Paolo Storari said at a press conference. "The man also presented himself as a professional killer."

Mythomania, they say.

Update: Milan kidnap case: Chloe Ayling 'held to pay for cancer treatment'

So far I don't see why it's any better than Objective-C. Perhaps I'll find that out later.

I just resumed iOS App development after quite a long hiatus. My iPhone was stolen and my MacBook Pro dropped dead just a couple weeks after AppleCare expired.

Now I have a Mac Mini and an iPhone 7. (The 7 Plus is too large to hold comfortably.)

I've been working on Warp Life since time began.

Some of the APIs I use have been deprecated. I'm unfamiliar with their replacements, and have found that all the tutorials are in Swift.

My current job is a consulting contract. While my clients and I really like each other, when I finished all their projects I'll be out of work again.

I hope to get a job as an iOS App Developer. Just to be considered for that role, one has to have published at least one App in the App Store. Having a stellar resume doesn't help one bit - you need that one published App, even if it's totally braindead.

I've got at least six months before I have to look for a new client.

Is There a Giant Planet Lurking Beyond Pluto?

Not much new here, but this looks promising:

Michael Medford and Danny Goldstein, graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, think they have a solution to that problem. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of images covering the search area for Planet Nine—all shot from 2009 to 2016 using a 1.2-meter telescope in the mountains north of San Diego—their system will combine multiple images in an ingenious way that should brighten the faint flickers of light from Planet Nine enough to distinguish them from background noise.

“Because the planet is moving with respect to the background stars, you can’t just add overlapping images together,” Medford points out. Instead, their software selects each of the many distinct plausible orbits for Planet Nine, projects the planet’s movement onto the relevant patch of sky, and then offsets successive images to superimpose—and brighten—any pixels corresponding to the planet. A pipeline of software written with Peter Nugent, their faculty advisor, performs the overlapping and subtracts known objects such as stars.

The computational task is enormous because the planet’s orbit is still so uncertain. To do a 98 percent complete search, Medford estimates, they will need to perform 10 billion image comparisons. Fortunately, Nugent has time allocated on the Cori supercomputer, a new Cray XC40 system that recently ranked as the fifth most powerful in the world.

False positives are unavoidable. “Even if we get only one false hit for every million searches, we’ll still get 10,000 fake planets,” Goldstein says. “So we will be passing all detections through a machine-learning system trained to catch and reject artifacts: satellite trails, hot pixels, cosmic rays, and other spurious sources.”

With the data already in hand, the two expect the system, running in parallel on hundreds of Cori’s CPU nodes and 278 hyperthreads per node, to finish the work in just a few days when they flip the switch in August. “We’ll be sitting on the edge of our seats,” Goldstein says. “And whether we find P9 or not, this method can be used to detect other TNOs.”

It’s 2017 and Hayes AT modem commands can hack luxury cars
The affected BMWs went on sale between 2009 and 2010, the affected Infiniti models were built between 2013 and 2015 and there's a chance Nissan Leafs manufactured between 2011 to 2015. The problem device is a 2G baseband chipset, the S-Gold 2 (part number PMB 8876) used by Continental.

The first vulnerability is a stack-based buffer overflow exposed by the Hayes-AT commands AT+STKPROF, AT+XAPP, AT+XLOG and AT+FNS. The second vulnerability is remotely exploitable if by a 2G connection which lets an attacker “access and control memory” for “remote code execution on the baseband radio processor of the TCU.”
Details from DEFCON.

We found a hidden backdoor in Chinese Internet of Things devices
VoIP company "dbltek" found a vulnerability in their GSM-to-VoIP devices which uses components from a Chinese vendor that refuse to fix it.

Basically, when you try to telnet into the device as dbladm, the gadget tries to connect to UDP port 11000 on 192.168.2.1 on its local network. If it receives a valid response, it grants access.

Battle of the racial alternate reality fiction concepts:

Amazon's Making Its Own Post-Civil War Series Called 'Black America'

A couple weeks ago, HBO announced that the guys behind Game of Thrones—no, not George R. R. Martin, but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—are working on a new series about an alternate history where the Confederate South won the Civil War and seceded from the union. The show, titled Confederate, caused a big stir online from people who thought that, well, maybe a pair of white dudes best known for making a fantasy show about dragons and zombies and incest aren't the best people to tactfully address modern-day slavery.

In the wake of the controversy, Amazon took the opportunity to announce that it had also been working on a similar alternate history show over the past year—but with a few key differences, Deadline reports.

First, Amazon's show, called Black America, will be the brainchild of Boondocks genius Aaron McGruder and producer Will Packer, who did Straight Outta Compton and, more recently, Girls Trip. Also, instead of Confederate's faux-history about a split United States where slavery still lives on, Black America is set in a world where freed African Americans were given a trio of Southern states after the Civil War as reparations. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are fused to form a new nation, called New Colonia, and the series tackles its tenuous relationship with the original US of A.

Confederate reminds me of the fun but low-budget mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. Black America reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' article The Case for Reparations. He is also involved in entertainment; he wrote the new Black Panther comics for Marvel last year, which have been cited as an influence for the upcoming movie.

Amid HBO’s “Confederate” fallout, Amazon introduces alt-history show “Black America”

The African-American community has long made the case for reparations from the United States government. Ta-Nehisi Coates convincingly argued in 2014 that the freedom given to slaves after the Civil War was not enough — that black people in America had suffered through institutionalized racism long after slavery had been abolished.

Packer told Deadline that the controversy surrounding “Confederate” pressured him to divulge the upcoming project. The show itself is not a reaction to “Confederate,” as reports say it has been in development for over a year.

Prime Minister Theresa May's spokesman said on Monday that the free movement between United Kingdom and EU will end in March 2019.

Get those consulting gigs complete by then.. :p

The ride failure at the Ohio State Fair, USA on 2017-07-26 that killed one 18-year old:
WKYC Channel 3: Verify: How safe are the rides here in Ohio?

This investigation by the news outlet notes at 2:20 something interesting. Namely that the swing arm shows signs of metal fatigue. Maybe someone will take a metal grain microscopy of the surfaces. It ought to tell a lot.