SEPTEMBER 2008 CLASS NOTES
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Herbert DeStaebler |
Dr Bernard Herbert Conrad DeStaebler died on June 13, 2006 in Portola Valley, CA. His last known address is 31 Santa Maria Ave, Portola Valley, CA 94028-7215.
Dr. DeStaebler, known as "Hobey", was a leading physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). "For half a century, Hobey was an important figure at SLAC," said Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard E. Taylor. "His quiet manner and dedication to 'getting it right' served the laboratory well."
After graduating with our class, Hobey received a doctorate in physics at MIT in 1954. He joined SLAC in 1958, and was part of the team that designed and operated a new accelerator that would study the basic structure of matter by shooting electrons through a two-mile tube 25 feet underground.
Dr. DeStaebler met his future wife at a Christmas party in Palo Alto. They married in 1967, and moved to a log house in Woodside Highlands in Portola Valley in 1968. The former summer house, where the DeStaeblers raised sons, features log walls, hand-hewn redwood shakes, and a huge rock fireplace. It also came with numerous maintenance problems, which Dr. DeStaebler took on with gusto.
Dr. DeStaebler loved hiking, climbing, and backpacking, often with family. He was an athlete and captain of his high school football team. In Portola Valley, he was a member of the town's Conservation Committee.
In addition to his wife, Marge, Dr. DeStaebler is survived by sons Peter and Jim and a brother, Stephen.
John Kern writes:
Hi Joe, this is from my laptop, not Blackberry for a change, out at our place at 9,300 ft. in the Colorado Mountains at Keystone. We are back from almost a month in Europe celebrating Anne’s and my 50 years’ of marriage. Not so incidentally while reminiscing, Bob Mann as well as a number of other Osiris buddies were in or at our wedding in West Hartford in 1958. We hosted our kids and grandkids in southern Austria (Carinthia to be specific) at a local family resort with pre and post drives all over the place. Anne and I were accompanied by daughter Louise and husband Thomas Grischany. (Tom has a visiting professorship at University of Arkansas for this coming academic year after receiving his Ph.D. in History from the U. of Chicago last December). We drove down through Slovenia to Trieste and back up to Vienna before returning. The other kids and their families also headed up to England to visit with friends they each made while in school there at Eton and Cambridge University. Needless to say, we planned this before our dollar tanked so resoundingly! I’ve been editing my approximately 1,100 camera raw digital photos with my upgraded Photoshop CS3 software. A big job, but easier by far than CS2.
Yardley Chittick, who passed away recently, was a member of Beta Theta Pi at MIT where as an undergrad member I saw him regularly at alumni functions as well as over the years at Technology Days. Last years’ Alumni Day I heard him sing “Take Me Back To Tech” as well as saw him last Fall following MIT’s Annual Meeting of their Council for the Arts, where we both attended a Beta Award ceremony in Boston. He really was quite a guy! How many of us will live so long, especially singing in such a robust voice?
JOHN
The Kern Foundation
189 East Lake Shore Drive #8
Chicago IL 60611
TEL 312.274.1356
FAX 312.274.1360
jck@kernfdn.org
Lars-Eric Wiberg writes:
The junk mail has got the best of the old address, and I'm leaving that ISP completely. The new address is lewiberg@alum.mit.edu . I'll make the switch in a few days so that the bcc recipients have had a chance to make the change. Sayonara.
Sent by John Kocher:
In case you haven't seen this. John
Hack your local subway
by Grant Martin Aug 13th 2008 @ 1:00PM
Frequent travelers on any metropolitan subway system know that the two major means for fare tracking and billing are via magnetic strip and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). And every nerd and his RPG character know that those systems can be both readable and exploitable.
To see how secure the Boston subway system was, several MIT students decided to run an analysis on the security of the infrastructure; what they found was a little disturbing. By simply wandering into unlocked doors, opening unlocked cabinets and peering around they were able to find keys to the system, get access to network hardware and find and copy employee identification.
On looking into the security of the magnetic and RFID systems, they were able to reverse engineer the code on the magnetic stripes and reconfigure the data to post $653 to a subway card. Similarly, the group analyzed the RFID contents and was able to disassemble the code.
The students point out that numerous transportation systems around the globe use these systems and technology.
Naturally, all of this quite illegal -- the students were just illustrating a point to the MBTA that there are security vulnerabilities in the system that can fairly easily be exploited. Hopefully, they and the company that makes subway infrastructures perks up and makes some serious security changes as a result of this research.
Check out the full 87 page presentation on the execution hosted at MIT.
| Joseph D. D’Annunzio, PE, Class Secretary |
|
Thomas R. Keane, Assistant Secretary |
| 16 Treeview Circle |
|
332 Spalding Road |
| Scotch Plains, NJ 07076-2436 |
|
Wilmington, DE 19803-2422 |
| joeviola@alum.mit.edu |
|
tomkeane@alum.mit.edu |
| Phone 908-322-1785 |
|
Phone 302-658-2095 |
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