Brian Kenneth Swain

If it seems like every time you drive on the highways of San Antonio lately there are more and more cars around you, that’s not just your imagination. Recent statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau confirm that seven of the fastest growing cities in the U.S. are in Texas. And San Antonio tops the growth list for the state, with more than 24,200 new residents having come here in the past year alone. So, how best to make sense of the growing popularity of the Alamo City, where the city has come from, and where it’s headed in the coming years? Well, turns out one of our neighbors right here in the Dominion is Deborah Perez, a professional statistician and Ph.D. in Applied Demography, just the person to fill us in on what the future holds ...

A few months ago we did a piece in these pages about the life and achievements of former Spurs head coach Doug Moe and his wife Jane. Well, apparently the members of the National Basketball Coaches Association are readers of The Dominion magazine, because only a few weeks ago they voted to recognize Doug with the Chuck Daly Lifetime Achievement Award, which was presented to him in Oakland during Game 2 of the NBA Final Series between the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers. It’s a terrific and much deserved honor in recognition of Doug’s contributions to the game in general and, in particular, to his impact on the pace and style with which the game is played today. So, I asked, how were you notified of this auspicious ...

At one point in our conversation I asked Manny Pelaez to talk about the personal characteristics he believes account for the success in his legal and political career. “Most guys have hobbies—fishing, football, ranch work. I enjoy reading budgets and meeting minutes.” As unusual as that response sounds, it nicely encapsulates the complex individual who has represented the Eighth District (in which The Dominion is located) on San Antonio’s City Council since June of last year. However, understanding why this response makes sense requires a bit of context, which he was more than happy to provide during the rest of our discussion. Manuel (Manny) Pelaez came to San Antonio in 1992, following an itinerant childhood that included being ...

One of the great things about the two-plus years I’ve spent writing these interview articles for The Dominion magazine is getting to meet the many interesting folks who call the Dominion home. Some of you will know Lynette Aleman as an occasional arts writer for this very magazine, as well as the author of Girl About Town, whose musings on local culture and events adorn these pages from time to time. One thing you learn very quickly from talking with Lynette is that she is the artsy type, though by no means are her creative efforts limited to writing, as we will see shortly. She recalls growing up on the southeast side of the city during its period of rapid growth. It was there that she and her future husband Anthony met in high school ...

The Threat Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) mobile attacks can be accomplished in a wide range of technical ways, but the high level effect is the same in every scenario. An individual manages to insert himself between a call originator and recipient, and manages, as well, to fool each party into believing they are communicating directly with the other desired party, when, in fact, they are each communicating with the attacker. Having thus convinced each party that they are taking part in a legitimate and secure conversation, the attacker then has access to both parties’ IMSI numbers, physical locations, and all of the contents of their conversation, which can, in turn, be eavesdropped on or recorded for other nefarious purposes. How Does It ...

The Threat There exist many types of malware targeting mobile devices. And with the proliferation of mobile phones over the past decade, malware developers have dramatically ramped up their efforts to create and distribute malicious software to the cell phone community. Unsurprisingly perhaps, financial attacks are the single largest category of malware. According to a recent article by Ori Bach at SecurityIntelligence.com, about 30% of all extant malware is built for the purpose of stealing financial information. Other popular categories include stealing personal information, keystroke logging, deploying cryptographic ransomware, or opening the phone up to remote control of cameras, microphones, or call eavesdropping.   How’s It ...

The Threat The CCS7 network was developed in the mid seventies to control the routing of phone calls using out-of-band signaling. The data packets transmitted on the network control not only the initiation and completion of calls, but also numerous billing functions and the activation of advanced features that are today taken for granted (call forwarding, call waiting, etc.). Because the data packets transmitted via CCS7 are unencrypted, it has become relatively easy to gain access to this network and to use it to perform numerous nefarious activities, most notable of which are locating a cell phone with an accuracy of a few meters and intercepting and eavesdropping on calls. The weaknesses of the CCS7 network came to the fore in mid 2014 ...

The Threat The baseband processor in a mobile phone is the system that communicates via radio waves with the cell tower in order to complete cellular calls. Because your mobile phone communicates via cell towers, in order to intercept the radio signal from a cell phone, the hacker must first set up a fake cell tower and convince a nearby phone (the target) to connect to it. The hacker can then download malicious code that will attack vulnerabilities in the GSM/3GPP stacks of the phone’s baseband processor, typically Qualcomm or Infineon chip sets. While this attack type is limited to those individuals or entities with the resources and technical know-how to set up their own bogus cell towers, the cost of setting one up has fallen ...

(a somewhat less than epic poem)   Captain Ordinary arrives, as if from out of nowhere, in those moments when something unusual seems about to happen.   He is not summoned by the glow of a signal in the sky, for that would be extraordinary, not his thing at all. Just a simple phone call or text message.   Nor does he swoop down from on high or fly in, defying the laws of physics. He arrives in a beige Prius with a small dent on the front right bumper and fast food wrappers crumpled in the backseat.   He does not crash through windows or knock down front doors. Captain Ordinary courteously rings the doorbell and waits there, humming the last tune from the radio, shifting his weight from one foot to the ...

Rick was supposed to be writing, damn it. He had a contract and a deadline and he’d already long-since spent the meager advance. He had done the math and it was driving him mad. The publisher expected a four hundred pager, due in seven months time, which was, of course, insane, seeing as how the first book had taken nearly five years to research and write. Four hundred pages, about a hundred and fifty thousand words, of which he currently had maybe ten thousand. To make the deadline meant cranking out about ten thousand more words every week for the remainder of the time until the deadline. Who the hell could do that? Nobody, that’s who. Maybe Stephen King, but that was about it. The book would presumably be based on the topic already ...