Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader@ (30 page)

THE LOST EXPLORERS:
PERCY FAWCETT

The second in a series on explorers who strode bravely into the face of the unknown—and never came back
.

M
AD DOGS AND ENGLISHMEN
Percival Harrison Fawcett (1867–1925) was a man who believed in manifest destiny—specifically, his own—and that he was born to make history. Tall and athletic, he possessed a steely will that allowed him to endure hardships that would kill most people. Among his friends were adventure writer H. Rider Haggard (
King Solomon’s Mines
) and Arthur Conan Doyle, who used Fawcett’s journals as inspiration for
The Lost World
. Between 1906 and 1924, Fawcett made seven expeditions to the Texas-sized unexplored region of the Amazon Basin known as the Mato Grosso. Most European expeditions into the Amazon were massive affairs—explorers venturing in at the head of small armies of bearers, guards, and heavy equipment. They stuck to navigable rivers, and rarely trekked into the jungle itself. If they encountered natives, it was considered prudent to shoot first and ask questions later. Fawcett rejected this approach. He traveled light, with only a handful of trusted men, on the assumption that natives would be less threatened by a few solitary travelers. Rather than drive the tribespeople off, Fawcett risked his life again and again by approaching them and trying to communicate (a brilliant linguist, Fawcett learned over 60 tribal languages).

THE HUNT FOR “Z”

By the early 1920s, Fawcett had become convinced that an ancient city, which he called “Z,” lay buried in the Brazilian jungle. Locals had told him legends of a vanished civilization, and these reports, combined with information he gleaned from colonial archives in Peru, Bolivia, and Spain, convinced him that the ruins of “Z” were out there somewhere. This notion went completely against accepted scientific belief of the day, which held that the Amazon was too hostile an environment to support any social organization larger than the scattered villages that had already been found. Fawcett’s theory was ridiculed, and soon he was considered more of a crackpot than a scientist. But Fawcett was nothing if not stubborn, and in 1925 he was able to scrape together enough money for another expedition. True to form, he decided to take only two people with him: his son Jack and Jack’s best friend, Raleigh Rimell. Both were in their early 20s, athletic, adventurous, and, most important to Fawcett, trustworthy. They landed in Brazil and made their way by riverboat and mule train to the headwaters of the Upper Xingu River, in present-day Bolivia, which marked the border of the unexplored region of the Amazon. On May 29, 1925, Fawcett telegraphed his wife that they were setting off into the uncharted area and it might be some time before she heard from them again.

Sean Connery turned down the role of Morpheus in
The Matrix
.

SWALLOWED BY THE JUNGLE

Months, then years, passed, with no word of the expedition. Finally it was assumed that either natives or disease had killed them. Whatever the cause of the trio’s disappearance, it triggered a bizarre obsession to find Fawcett that lasted for decades, often with disastrous consequences. More than 100 explorers died trying to find him. Pieces of Fawcett’s personal effects cropped up from time to time—a nameplate from a carrying case in 1927, an engraved compass in 1934—and every so often someone would claim to have found his bones, only to have the evidence debunked after closer examination. His fate remains a mystery.

VINDICATED

Ironically, Percy Fawcett may not have been as mad as his rivals thought. Recent excavations in the Amazon Basin, led by Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida, have uncovered tantalizing evidence of massive earthworks believed to be the remnants of a vast irrigation system capable of sustaining a population of 50,000 or more people. Causeways, spanning hundreds of square miles, connect raised mounds containing shards of finely wrought pottery. The site, named Kuhikugu, appears to have been inhabited for 1,000 years and abandoned about 400 years ago. Heckenberger is convinced this is evidence of an advanced Amazonian civilization that rivaled “anything happening in Europe at the time.” Wherever he is, Percy Fawcett must be smiling.

President Lyndon B. Johnson’s favorite soft drink: Fresca.

CYBER COWBOYS

On virtual steeds they ride into the abyss of the information superhighway—some want to lay down the law, and some want to break break it
.

B
ACKGROUND
The term “hacker” dates back to 1960, when students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spent long hours “hacking” away at their keyboards in their Artificial Intelligence class, trying to make the computer do something it hadn’t been programmed to do. Over the years, as hackers discovered they could break into all sorts of “secure” systems, they had a choice to make: Should they hack for the good of others…or for themselves? Like cowboys in Western movies, they had to choose whether they’d wear the black hat or the white hat.

BLACK HATS
are the “bad guys” who break into corporate computer systems, stealing credit card numbers, bank accounts, identities, and e-mail addresses. They either use them for their own benefit or to sell or trade to other Black Hat hackers. Because of the criminal nature of their activities, the ethical hackers often call them
crackers
. Whatever you call them, they’re up to no good.

WHITE HATS
are the “good guys” (also known as
ethical hackers
or
penetration testers
)—security experts hired to protect companies from the Black Hats. In the era before computers, military intelligence called these experts
sneakers
and utilized them to test security systems, working in groups called Tiger Teams. The sneakers would break into a defense installation and, in prankster style, leave a cardboard sign with the word “BOMB” printed on it in an office and another with “Your codebooks have been stolen” inside the safe, then sneak away undetected. White Hat Tiger Teams do the same thing in cyberspace, only now their calling cards are virtual. They find a hole in a company’s security system and show the company how to fix it. In the White Hat community there’s an ethical code, inspired by the “net cowboys” of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels (
Neuromancer
and
Mona Lisa Overdrive
) and Japan’s Samurai warriors: They are loyal to their employers and sneer at the greed, theft, and vandalism of Black Hats.

Longest-running jingle in advertising history: “It’s Slinky, it’s Slinky…”

BLUE HATS
are an offshoot of the White Hats. They’re ethical hackers, but they operate outside of computer security firms and are often contracted to bug-test a system before it launches. The concept was created by Microsoft to find vulnerabilities in Windows.

GRAY HATS
follow their own code of ethics. Originally coined in 1998 by a hacker group called LoPht, Gray Hats are a little bit white and a little bit black. They don’t actually
steal
assets—they find a hole or a bug in a company’s security system (through illegal means), but often report their findings to the company. A recent example of Gray Hat behavior occurred in 2010 when a group known as Goatse Security found a flaw in AT&T’s security system that allowed e-mail addresses of iPad users to be exposed to the public. Goatse informed AT&T of the problem first, and then let the media know about their discovery. Sometimes Gray Hats aren’t so altruistic. They’ll alert a company to the bug in their system and offer to fix it…for a hefty fee. Or a Gray Hat might release the bug he or she’s found to the public, just to embarrass a company. And then there are those Gray Hats who lean toward the Dark Side, offering to sell their knowledge of the bug to Black Hats or White Hats on the “Bug Market,” an online network where computer bugs, vulnerabilities, and personal information are sold and traded.

HAT TRICKS

At the 2010 Black Hat Security Conference, security researcher Barnaby Jack wowed his audience by hacking into two different ATMs right from the stage. He used a remote connection for one and a USB port on the ATM for the other and made them both spit out money like a Las Vegas slot machine. How’d he do it? He wouldn’t go into detail (otherwise we’d all become Black Hats looking for a jackpot), but he made it clear that it wasn’t just ATMs that were vulnerable. Every piece of equipment that uses a standard computer, like the kind inside an ATM, can be easily hacked: cars, medical devices, televisions, you name it. Jack also pointed out that once he hacked a bank ATM, the machine’s data gave him access to anyone who’d ever used it. He found that the stand-alone ATMs at convenience stores were the easiest to hack (something to think about the next time
you
go to an ATM).

It costs $100 to make a Pulitzer Prize (a gold medal), and $500 to make an Oscar statuette.

EJECTED FROM
THE OLYMPICS

If you’re a fan of the Olympics, you probably know that plenty of athletes have been disqualified for “doping”—using banned performance-enhancing drugs. Here are some of the more unusual reasons athletes have been shown the door
.

A
thlete:
Arash Miresmaeili of Iran, a two-time world judo champion competing in the 2004 Summer Games in Athens, Greece

Reason for Expulsion:
Too fat to fight

Details:
At the weigh-in for his first-round bout with Ehud Yaks of Israel, Miresmaeili, who was favored to win the gold, was more than 11 pounds over the weight limit. He was disqualified. (Another Israeli, Gal Fridman, went on to win the gold.)

What Happened:
Miresmaeili may be the only athlete in Olympic history to deliberately eat his way out of a gold medal. He reportedly went on an eating binge before the event in order to force a disqualification on technical grounds. Real reason for the binge: Iran does not recognize the state of Israel and forbids its athletes from competing against Israelis. Iran’s official news agency quoted Miresmaeili as saying that he refused to fight Yaks “to sympathize with the suffering of the people of Palestine.” But Miresmaeili later disavowed the statement, so his disqualification was treated as a case of an athlete simply being over the weight limit, and he was not punished. (Iran later awarded Miresmaeili $125,000, the amount it pays to gold medal winners.)

Athletes:
Ibragim Samadov, a Russian weightlifter competing in the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, Spain

Reason for Expulsion:
Awards-ceremony temper tantrum

Details:
Samadov tied the silver-medal winner by lifting the same amount of weight of his closest competitor: 814 pounds. If you think that qualified him to share the silver medal, think again.
Because Samadov weighed just one-tenth of a pound more than his opponent, he was considered to have had a strength advantage, and that bumped him down to the bronze for third place. How well would
you
have handled missing the silver by one-tenth of a pound? Samadov didn’t take it very well, either. At the awards ceremony, he insisted on being handed his medal instead of having it placed around his neck. Then he set the medal on the ground and stomped off in a huff.

2% of Wikipedia’s contributors are responsible for 73% of all edits.

What Happened:
Did you know that refusing a medal at the Olympics is for keeps? Samadov didn’t: Though he apologized for his actions, he was stripped of his medal and disqualified. And because the disqualification wasn’t related to his performance in the actual events, the bronze medal wasn’t awarded to the fourth-place finisher. Samadov was later banned from his sport for life.

Athlete:
Angel Matos, a Cuban tae kwon do athlete competing in the 2008 summer games in Beijing, China

Reason for Expulsion:
Fighting his opponent
and
the referee

Details:
According to the rules of tae kwon do, if you are injured during a match you can take a 60-second break called a
kyeshi
. Matos took such a break in the second round of his bronze-medal bout with Arman Chilmanov of Kazakhstan…but he went over the 60-second limit and was disqualified. When he realized what had happened, Matos flew into a rage, pushing a judge and then kicking referee Chakir Chelbat in the face. Chelbat needed stitches to close the wound on his lip.

What Happened:
One good kick deserves another. Matos was kicked out of the Olympics, and all records of his participation were erased. The World tae kwon do Federation later banned him and his coach from all sanctioned bouts for life.

Athlete:
Ben Johnson, a Canadian sprinter competing in the 1992 Summer Games in Barcelona, Spain

Reason for Expulsion:
Drugs and violence

Details:
How many athletes have been thrown out of
two
different Games? In the 1988 Seoul Olympics, Johnson won the 100-meter sprint competition in world-record time, but three days later he was stripped of his gold medal and his world record after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. Four years later in Barcelona, Johnson was back, but not for long: He washed out of the 100-meter race after stumbling out of the starting blocks in his semifinal heat and coming in last. That’s what knocked him out of medal contention, but it isn’t what got him thrown out of the Games. That indignity came when a volunteer at an Olympic Village security checkpoint misread Johnson’s credentials and refused him entry to a “restricted area”—the village restaurant. Johnson started shoving the volunteer and may have even kicked him before police broke up the scuffle.