DefCon 33 arrives, my talk from DefCon III survives

The T-shirt I bought at my first DefCon, which was DefCon III in 1995

DefCon, the very popular annual hacking conference held annually in Las Vegas opens today, August 7th and runs through the 10th. This is DefCon 33 and I'm a bit sad I can't be there. This would have been an anniversary event of sorts, the 30th anniversary of my first Defcon talk. And I will miss seeing all the folks I know that will be there this year.

The good news is that Jeff Moss—the founder of DefCon—had the wisdom and the foresight to insist, even back in 1995, that all talks delivered at Defcon be archived. That means anyone with an internet connection learn from past events, which is great because in my experience DefCon never fails to deliver cutting edge information about digital technologies, how they work, how they don't, and what that might mean. 

DefCon III shirt with human inside

More than a few times I have used the DeCon archives to find out when a particular vulnerability was discovered or explotied for the first time. 

As a big believer in learning from history rather than repeating it, I like to debunk statements like "we had no idea criminals would exploit our technology like that."

Really? You mean nobody from your security team went to the session at DefCon X where exact same exploit was demonstrated?

And on a personal level, those DefCon sound archives mean I can still listen to what I said, 25 years ago, preserved as an audio (.m4b) file. 

If you want to listen, just go to the DEFCON III Archive and search for Cobb. My talk was titled: The Party's Over: Why Hacking Sucks. Alternatively, you may be able to listen in your broswer (not all browsers are supported). The talk is about 49 minutes long and while the sound starts out rough, it quickly gets better.

My goal with this talk was to generate dialogue about the ethics of hacking, and I think I succeeded. In fact, the audio captures that quite well. As someone who had been working on the computer security problem since the 1980s, I have to say that I learned a lot from that 1995 session and appreciated everyone's input. The feedback from the audience must have been okay because I was invited back the next year

Even before DefCon 26, kilts were a thing

My talk at DefCon 4 in 1996 was about how to go from being a hacker to being an infosec professional. The title was 101 Things to Do With an Ex-hacker. Like many early DefCon talks this one took some unexpected turns. For example, I talked for a bit about trainspotting, not so much the movie as the hobby in which you try to see as many railway locomotives as possible. 

Trainspotting was one of my hobbies when I was a boy, back when steam engines were still is service. My point was that in our enthusiasm to explore this fascinating pre-digital technology we would sometimes break the law and trespass into locomotive sheds.

The parallel with hacking was that despite this illegality, some of us matured into respected professionals with rewarding careers. Indeed, one of my fellow trainspotters has had a long and fulfilling career writing and editing books about trains. 

Anyway, the talk lasts less than 30 minutes and might be worth a listen, eve if it's just as a historical curiosity. However, before you click this link to that talk be warned that there is some swearing, albeit in a very polite voice.

Over time, the Defcon archives have evolved to become a quite amazing cornucopia of knowledge and history, a feast for eager minds, and a legacy for future generations. 

Thanks Jeff and DefCon! Thanks your foresight! 

And please accept my apologies for not being their this year. I will be keeping an eye on things from 5,000 miles away in Coventry, England, where I'm looking after my mum (96) and my partner Chey, herself a Blackhat speaker (Why Government SystemsFail at Security, 2001).

What's Amusia Got to Do With It

A few years ago I learned that I have something called congenital amusia, an inherited condition that can make it impossible to carry a tune or learn to play a musical instrument. In other words, amusia is tone deafness, or to use a derogatory expression, tin ears.

Amusia is defined as: "a musical disorder that appears mainly as a defect in processing pitch but also encompasses musical memory and recognition" (Wikipedia). Some studies suggest that as many as 4% of people are born with an innate inability to recognize musical tones or to reproduce them. This is referred to as congenital amusia.

In 2018, advances in genetics led me to discover that my lifelong failure to sing or learn guitar —despite great effort—was due to congenital amusia, not some weird character defect (although you can still find music coaches who insist that amusiacs are just being lazy).

When time permits, I plan to blog about my own journey with amusia, but in the meantime I put up a separate website —4Amusia.com— to curate links to information about amusia. Those links should not be taken as endorsements of the content to which I link, and the look and feel of the site may change over time; however, I am also color blind (deutan), so please excuse any jarring color choices you may encounter there.

You might be surprised at how many things can be affected by amusia, like some forms of speech and comprehension. The leading researcher in all things amusic is Dr. Isabelle Peretz and if you're interested in this topic her website is the place to look. It features a link to an online hearing test that you can take to diagnose amusia.

For myself, the stigma of being a tone deaf child was unpleasant, and the decades spent failing to learn a musical instrument were frustrating. At times I experienced deep sadness at not being able to express my feelings in song in the presence of other humans. Nevertheless, learning that there is a physical basis for these limitations, rather than some character defect, was quite liberating!

Happy 2025!

Welcome to a new and potentially extraordinary year. I am looking forward to making some long overdue changes here on the blog for 2025. 

As you can see Lola is looking forward too.

In many ways 2024 was a tough year for me and my family. I hope to find time in the coming months to share some of the lessons I've learned from dealing with those challenges, even as some of them continue to take a toll.

In 2024, I discovered several things about myself. For example, it turns out I am a cat person, even though I have never sought to get a cat as a pet. This might not sound like a life-changing revelation, but the fact that you can still learn stuff about yourself, even when you're in your seventies, well I find that encouraging.

Here's hoping we all have a great year in 2025.

Beastie Boy the hummingbird

One of the things that has helped me get through 2024 is the ability to look back, with very little effort at the many pictures I have taken in years gone by.

Sometimes it is the subject of the photo that gives me a lift. Other times it's the fact that I was able to get the shot. 

This photo of a hummingbird that we named Beastie Boy is one of those other times. 

Beastie is the hummingbird that hung out all year-round on our 14th floor balcony in San Diego, circa 2012-2016.

I tried to capture a good portrait of him for nearly two years. While this one is not perfect, I think it was my best effort, and a pretty good result considering the inexpensive gear I used: a five-year-old Olympus Pen E-P1 digital camera and some "classic glass," a 20 year-old Olympus 200mm Zuiko OM lens.

If the bird in that photo looks too fat to be a hummingbird, you've just learned something I didn't realize about hummingbirds until our balcony gave me a chance to study them: their appearance can change a lot. In the photo above, Beastie has fluffed up his feathers to create insulating pockets of air because the weather is cold (yes it can get cool in San Diego during the winter months, and Beastie chose not to migrate south).

The changes in hummingbird appearance can also be subtle and quick. The two images below were snapped with just seconds between the shots. 

For fellow photo geeks these images were captured with a handheld Olympus E-P1 (circa 2009), sporting an adapted manual F4 OM 200mm lens (20 years old at the time, $50 on eBay), shutterspeed 1/500 at f5.6, 1600 ISO. For more on old lens or classic glass click here.

Hummingbirds are one of the things about San Diego that I miss, so I'm very glad I spent some time to learn about and photograph them.

The Welcome Page

This post used to be pinned to the top of the blog but I decided to let it move down the stack. It's purpose was, and still is, to explain that I am Stephen Cobb and this is my personal blog. 

The blog was set up in 2005 but I didn't start regular blogging on it until 2006. That's because I had another blog, also started in 2005, where I covered my main interest back then: information security.

Over time, this blog became a place to talk about things other than cybersecurity. Things like dealing with several medical conditions: my primary aldosteronism, basal cell carcinoma, and very low grade prostate cancer; also my partner's hemochromatosis and Giant Cell Arteritis (UK readers can just add an 'a' after the 'e' in the hemo words).

Brief notes on 70+ years of life

I was born in a house in the medieval city of Coventry, in the middle of England, in the middle of the last century, to parents who survived heavy aerial bombardment in the global conflict known as World War Two, which ended seven years before my life began. 

After going to university—first in Leeds and then in Canada — I travelled the world for several decades before moving back to the city of my birth with my partner and our adopted cat, Lola (seen above).

My partner of 39 years, the phenomenal Chey Cobb, is a US citizen, legally resident in the UK. I am a citizen of both the UK and the US. We have both spent, and continue to spend, a lot of time researching how humans create and confront technology risks and health challenges. I write about my research for a variety of websites and publications, like:

• Cobbs on Security: cybersecurity articles, some written with Chey
• Medium: articles on technology, policy, cannabis, and more 
• LinkedIn: check my "Featured" articles
• ResearchGate: curated publications
• YouTube: narrated articles, personal views
• IEEE Technology & Society: perspective on technology

This blog is where I write about more personal stuff such as: the fact that I'm retired, although I'm still open to interesting projects; my plans to publish another book, but I'm not sure when; my attempts to raise awareness of the medical problems which disabled my partner; the role of registered carers and how it can be supported; my hopes for radical reform of the patriarchal medical establishment that continues to fail women so badly. 

On a lighter note, Chey thinks I should have a hobby to take my mind off things, so I'm been trying "classic glass" photography: using lenses from old 35mm film cameras to take pictures with modern digital cameras (for example, the Minolta lens on my Olympus camera shown here).

On a more serious note, I feel the need to use some of my "free" time to contribute to society. So in addition to sharing my knowledge about thwarting digital criminals, I serve on the board of a charity, Carers Trust Heart of England. 

I also do driving jobs for our local hospital as one of the hundreds of UHCW Volunteers. As I travel around Warwickshire collecting and delivering patients I engage in another hobby: sampling independent coffee shops and their menus.

Fortunately, I still find some time to continue my research at the nexus of ethics and technology. I am currently exploring the harm caused by abuse of technology, which I have written about here. and talked about here, on YouTube.

If you want to contact me, you can use the form on this page or find me on Facebook or LinkedIn. 

Note: I am aware of some formatting issues and missing images in the older articles on this site—a side-effect of moving this blog from WordPress to Blogger—I'm fixing them as and when I can.

Giant Cell Arteritis: Watch out for this nasty disease if you're female and over 40

Women in their 40s or older need to be aware of a condition called giant cell arteritis or GCA. This article explains why. I'm not exaggerating when I say that knowing about GCA could save someone's sight, or even their life.

GCA is also known as temporal arteritis because, when you have it, "the arteries, particularly those at the side of the head (the temples), become inflamed." As NHS England states, GCA is "serious and needs urgent treatment."

What does GCA do? It causes multiple problems, including: "persistent, throbbing headaches, tenderness of the temples and scalp, jaw pain, fever, joint pain, and vision problems." That's according to the Vasculitis Foundation, which echoes the NHS when it warns: "Early treatment is vital to prevent serious complications such as blindness or stroke."

But wait, there's more: GCA often causes drenching night sweats, a symptom that can also be caused by menopause. And that's why women over 40 need to know about GCA. Sadly, far too many doctors tend to dismiss any symptoms suffered by women over 40 as "just menopause." And some doctors will say that to women in their 50s, 60s, and even 70s (for menopause neophytes, the menopause as the Brits refer to it, is over by 50 for most women).*

To be clear, most cases of GCA occur in people over 50, and the "peak group" is those between the ages of 60 and 80 years. That's according to PMRGCAuk, the leading GCA support organization in the UK.

It's not always menopause

If you know many women who are nearing or have turned 50, you may already know that this demographic often gets a particularly raw deal when it comes to healthcare. This is a result of two factors. First, there is a massively patriarchal bias throughout the medical world. Second, multiple diseases produce symptoms similar to those of menopause. 

I found this to be true, and truly problematic, when I started researching something called hereditary hemochromatosis about 15 years ago. This genetic condition can cause menopause-like symptoms in women who have gone through menopause; but many doctors have been taught—erroneously—that hemochromatosis is a young man's disease, even though older women can suffer and die from it. The result? Hemochromatosis in older women is often missed until it has caused them serious damage. (See the "hemopause" website for more details). 

When it comes to GCA, consider the main early symptoms, as described by PMRGCAuk: "headache, feeling generally unwell, weight loss, drenching night sweats and loss of appetite." You can well imagine a woman going to her doctor with those symptoms and being told one of the  following:

• It's just menopause
• It's just perimenopause
• You're just post-menopausal
• You're just rundown/overworked/stressed

What the doctor should do is ask the patient if they have any:

• Pain over the temples
• Double vision, loss of vision, or pain behind your eyes
• Difficulty opening your mouth, or pain when eating
• Scalp pain or tenderness

Those are four indicators which, when taken with the initial symptoms, suggest that the patient may have GCA. (Medicine Today) This suggestion needs to be taken very seriously, given that untreated GCA can cause blindness and stroke if not treated swiftly. Heavens knows how many women with those symptoms have been fobbed off with: "it's just the change."

Further GCA Information

How serious is GCA? This article written about 10 years ago for doctors in New Zealand is quite clear on how seriously GCA needs to be treated: "Giant cell arteritis, also referred to as temporal arteritis, is a form of vasculitis which predominantly affects older people. It must be treated urgently, as it is associated with a significant risk of permanent visual loss, stroke, aneurysm and possible death." (Best Practice Advocacy Centre New Zealand) 

Who diagnoses GCA? If you have a good GP (UK) or primary care doctor (US) they may recognize the early signs of GCA and refer you to a rheumatologist. If you are seeing an eye doctor because of pain in one or both eyes, or a sudden and significant reduction in vision, and they can't find a cause for these symptoms within your eyes, they may suspect GCA and refer you to a rheumatologist.

A more scientific description: "Giant cell arteritis (GCA), also called temporal arteritis, is an inflammatory autoimmune disease of large blood vessels. Symptoms may include headache, pain over the temples, flu-like symptoms, double vision, and difficulty opening the mouth. Complications can include blockage of the artery to the eye with resulting blindness, as well as aortic dissection, and aortic aneurysm. GCA is frequently associated with polymyalgia rheumatica. (Wikipedia)

Illustrated medical deep dive: Highly technical article, Giant Cell Arteritis: A Case-Based Narrative Review of the Literature. 

GCA is a form of vasculitis: "Vasculitis is a family of nearly 20 rare diseases characterized by inflammation of the blood vessels, which can restrict blood flow and damage vital organs and tissues." Vasculitis Foundation

Who gets GCA and why? "GCA is the most common form of vasculitis in older adults, affecting people over 50 years of age, with an average onset of 74 years of age. Women are more than twice as likely to get GCA than men. The condition is mostly seen in people of Northern European ancestry and is rare in other ethnic groups such as Asians and African Americans. GCA prevalence is estimated at 278 per 100,000 people in the United States over the age of 50.

Beware of rare: The word rare can be tricky. For example, both GCA and hemochromatosis are said to be "rare in people who are not of Northern European ancestry." But people who self-identify as Asian and African American may still get GCA. Also, GCA is also said to be rare before 50, but there are younger people who have it. Remember this, just because textbooks say X is rare, doesn't mean you don't have it or shouldn't be tested for it.

Facebook support group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/giantcellarteritissupportgroup/

UK support group: https://pmrgca.org.uk/

More about symptoms: "The main early symptoms of GCA are headache, feeling generally unwell, weight loss, drenching night sweats and loss of appetite. Over time, the blood vessels on the side of the head can be visibly swollen with tenderness on touch.  Things like brushing your hair may become painful. In more advanced cases, people may find difficulty in chewing. Typically, it is chewy foods like a piece of chicken or a hard piece of toast that cause problems. The chewing becomes progressively painful rather than being painful from the first bite. If ignored, the condition can affect either part or whole of an individual’s eyesight. Very rarely, individuals may not notice any early symptoms and develop sudden painless loss of vision." https://pmrgca.org.uk/

* I realize that the "timing" of menopause varies greatly, but I sometimes think that statements like "menopause can last into your sixties of seventies" arise from doctors attributing symptoms to protracted menopause rather than digging a bit deeper into the diagnostic toolkit. My partner first presented to her doctor with GCA-like symptoms when she was 45. She was finally diagnosed with GCA at 70.

Disclaimer: This page contains general information about medical conditions and treatments. This information is not medical advice, and should not be treated as such. I, Stephen Cobb, am solely responsible for the content of this website, and I am not a doctor. I'm just this bloke in love with a woman who has, like far too many women, suffered greatly, and in many cases needlessly, from the patriarchal, male-dominated, man-centered nature of medicine.

Please bear in. mind that you must not rely on the information on this page as an alternative to medical advice from your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. If you have any specific questions about any medical matter you should consult your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. If you think you may be suffering from any medical condition you should seek immediate medical attention. You should never delay seeking medical advice, disregard medical advice, or discontinue medical treatment because of information on this page.

Time to revisit high blood pressure and primary aldosteronism

If you or someone you love is taking tablets for high blood pressure, now would be a good time to learn more about primary aldosteronism, a condition that has recently been declared: "the most common specifically treatable and potentially curable form of hypertension" (BMJ, 2021). 

Indeed, if you were to ask your doctor about primary aldosteronism tomorrow, you might be told that it's rare, but that is not true. Recent advances in medical science have confirmed that PA is the most common cause of high blood pressure. If you are academically-inclined, here is one of the landmark studies of PA prevalence: The Unrecognized Prevalence of Primary Aldosteronism: A Cross-sectional Study.

Primary aldosteronism—also known as Conn's syndrome, not Cobb's syndrome—is a condition in which your adrenal glands produce too much aldosterone and this causes your body to retain sodium and lose potassium. Here are some clues that you might have PA:

• your blood pressure is high despite taking BP medication
• your sodium level is on the high side despite cutting back on salt in your diet
• your potassium level is on the low side despite taking prescription potassium supplements and eating lots of bananas

As I learned from my experience as a heart patient, untreated primary aldosteronism leads to elevated blood pressure and can increase your risk of stroke, heart disease, and atrial fibrillation. I spent several decades being treated for high blood pressure by doctors who kept telling me to eat more bananas and less salt, even as excess aldosterone was damaging my heart. (Hint: you will never eat enough bananas to defeat PA.)

These days, there is a whole lot of information on this widely undiagnosed condition at the Primary Aldosteronism Foundation website.You can read about my experience with PA, which eventually led to my high blood pressure being cured through adrenal gland surgery, on my Primary Aldosteronism page, and in my previous blog posts about my adrenalectomy:

• June 4, 2013: The adrenalectomy story begins...Sorry I’ve been out of touch (my adrenal adenoma is to blame)
• June 5, 2013: The Conn is on...Cobb’s got Conn’s? Probably, but I go through Adrenal Vein Sampling (AVS) to be sure
• July 13, 2013: A geek worried about a robot? Robot or not? Robotic surgery and risk, part one
• August 25, 2013: Success is in sight! Adrenalectomy, from pain to promising signs of progress
• January 13, 2019: Primary aldosteronism update: High blood pressure cure? For some, this treatment is not a conn