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FBI: Parachute isn’t hijacker Cooper’s

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:21:52 +0000

A tangled, torn parachute found buried last month last month is not the one used by plane hijacker D.B. Cooper when he bailed out of a plane over the Pacific Northwest, the FBI said Tuesday. Investigators reached that conclusion after speaking with parachute experts, including Earl Cossey, who packed the chutes provided to Cooper that rainy November night in 1971.”From the best we could learn from the people we spoke to, it just didn’t look like it was the right kind of parachute in any way,” said FBI spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs.

Further digging at the site in southwestern Washington turned up no indication that it could have been Cooper’s, she added.

A man calling himself Dan Cooper — later mistakenly identified as D.B. Cooper — hijacked a Northwest Orient passenger jet from Portland, Ore., to Seattle on Nov. 24, 1971.

At Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he released the passengers in exchange for $200,000 and four parachutes and asked to be flown to Mexico. He jumped out the back of the plane somewhere near the Oregon line.

Some of the cash has been found, but his fate is unknown, and investigators doubt he survived.

Children playing near a recently graded road found the parachute, and they urged their father to call the FBI because they had seen recent news stories about Cooper’s case. The parachute was the right color, and the location was in the middle of what could have been Cooper’s landing zone.

That got the attention of FBI agent Larry Carr, who drove to the site to see the find for himself.

But Cossey told Carr that Cooper’s parachute was made of nylon. The one the children found was made of silk and did not feature a harness container. Cossey sold parachutes at a skydiving operation in Issaquah in the 1970s.

Cossey has been through the drill before; this is the third time the FBI has asked him to examine parachutes to see whether they might have been Cooper’s.

One chute found long ago — he couldn’t remember when — was just a “pilot chute,” used to pull the main chute out of the pack. The other time, in 1988, it was a parachute found by a Columbia River diver seeking clues to Cooper’s fate.

“They keep bringing me garbage,” Cossey said. “Every time they find squat, they bring it out and open their trunk and say, ‘Is that it?’ and I say, ‘Nope, go away.’ Then a few years later they come back.”

Cossey, though sounding cantakerous, appeared to relish the spotlight Tuesday. He answered his cell phone with “D.B. Cooper” and said he got a kick out of telling some reporters that the parachute was, in fact, the hijacker’s.

One reporter called him back angrily, saying he could be fired for writing a false story, but another said the newsroom enjoyed the April Fool’s joke.

“I’m getting mixed reviews,” Cossey said. “But I’m having fun with it; what the heck.”

Status in the Hacker Culture

admin — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 11:12:40 +0000

Like most cultures without a money economy, hackerdom runs on reputation. You’re trying to solve interesting problems, but how interesting they are, and whether your solutions are really good, is something that only your technical peers or superiors are normally equipped to judge.
Accordingly, when you play the hacker game, you learn to keep score primarily by what other hackers think of your skill (this is why you aren’t really a hacker until other hackers consistently call you one). This fact is obscured by the image of hacking as solitary work; also by a hacker-cultural taboo (now gradually decaying but still potent) against admitting that ego or external validation are involved in one’s motivation at all.
Specifically, hackerdom is what anthropologists call a gift culture. You gain status and reputation in it not by dominating other people, nor by being beautiful, nor by having things other people want, but rather by giving things away. Specifically, by giving away your time, your creativity, and the results of your skill.
There are basically five kinds of things you can do to be respected by hackers:
1. Write open-source software.The first (the most central and most traditional) is to write programs that other hackers think are fun or useful, and give the program sources to the whole hacker culture to use.
(We used to call these works “free software”, but this confused too many people who weren’t sure exactly what “free” was supposed to mean. Many of us now prefer the term “open-source” software).
Hackerdom’s most revered demigods are people who have written large, capable programs that met a widespread need and given them away, so that now everyone uses them.
2. Help test and debug open-source softwareThey also serve who stand and debug open-source software. In this imperfect world, we will inevitably spend most of our software development time in the debugging phase. That’s why any open-source author who’s thinking will tell you that good beta-testers (who know how to describe symptoms clearly, localize problems well, can tolerate bugs in a quickie release, and are willing to apply a few simple diagnostic routines) are worth their weight in rubies. Even one of these can make the difference between a debugging phase that’s a protracted, exhausting nightmare and one that’s merely a salutary nuisance.
If you’re a newbie, try to find a program under development that you’re interested in and be a good beta-tester. There’s a natural progression from helping test programs to helping debug them to helping modify them. You’ll learn a lot this way, and generate good karma with people who will help you later on.
3. Publish useful information.Another good thing is to collect and filter useful and interesting information into Web pages or documents like FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions lists), and make those generally available.
Maintainers of major technical FAQs get almost as much respect as open-source authors.
4. Help keep the infrastructure working.The hacker culture (and the engineering development of the Internet, for that matter) is run by volunteers. There’s a lot of necessary but unglamorous work that needs done to keep it going — administering mailing lists, moderating newsgroups, maintaining large software archive sites, developing RFCs and other technical standards.
People who do this sort of thing well get a lot of respect, because everybody knows these jobs are huge time sinks and not as much fun as playing with code. Doing them shows dedication.
5. Serve the hacker culture itself.Finally, you can serve and propagate the culture itself (by, for example, writing an accurate primer on how to become a hacker ). This is not something you’ll be positioned to do until you’ve been around for while and become well-known for one of the first four things.
The hacker culture doesn’t have leaders, exactly, but it does have culture heroes and tribal elders and historians and spokespeople. When you’ve been in the trenches long enough, you may grow into one of these. Beware: hackers distrust blatant ego in their tribal elders, so visibly reaching for this kind of fame is dangerous. Rather than striving for it, you have to sort of position yourself so it drops in your lap, and then be modest and gracious about your status.

School Proxy

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 18:16:24 +0000

I promised some people i would post a good proxy site so here we go. just go to This Site and click on the “free web translator” enter the url of the site that you want to visit and language as “german to english” and start viewing. other than searching google for translation websites you can use proxys. some are hidemyass.comproxify.com…..