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Skydiving Accident Leaves Security Guru Cedric 'Sid' Blancher Dead At 37
An anonymous reader points out The Register's report that Wi-Fi security expert Cédric 'Sid' Blancher has died as the result of a skydiving accident. "Among other things, the 37-year-old Blancher was a sought-after speaker on WiFi security, and in 2005 published a Python-based WiFi traffic injection tool called Wifitap. In 2006, while working for the EADS Corporate Research centre, he also put together a paper on how to exploit Skype to act as a botnet." Some of Blancher's skydiving videos are posted to Vimeo; clearly, it's something he was passionate about.
A friend of mine was into sky diving years ago. Everyone warned him he was taking crazy risks and he'd die some time.
But in the end, he died flat on his back under a car that slipped from the jacks. Life can be so ironic...
Steve Irving (aka the crocodile hunter) always said "if I ever die during recording something then people will just laugh and say "the crocs finally got him"". In the end he died during recording due to a freak accident involving a stingray. Supposedly they just bumped into each other by accident and the tail went strait though his chest. Life is neither fair or predictable.
I've had lots of opportunity.
The question is, did you act on the opportunity? Did you really climb, jump, shoot the rapids, or whatever the opportunity was for? Many people have opportunities, not all take them. Besides ...
Nothing says a nerd and a geek
can't also be an adrenaline freak.
There are pleasures to be had from both intellectual achievement and testing one's physical courage.
“There is nothing more exhilarating than to be shot at with no result.” -- Winston Churchill
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
That's really a distortion of how dangerous skydiving is. The vast majority of skydiving deaths aren't really accidents but rather someone doing something stupid under a perfectly good canopy.
I don't see the distortion -- deaths caused by stupidity are just a real as any other kind of death. In that case, the risk is that you'll make a bad decision, rather than a risk of equipment failure, but it's still a risk.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
no... the impact is what killed him. We are all subject to the effects of gravity 24/7. Difference is how far off the ground you are when you start your freefall.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel