peaceandconflictstudies.org

To see what’s going across the Black Hat network, there are seats where you can plug in your own laptop and use whatever sniffer you have to see what they see. If they can see your network, they can see the clear text contents of your e-mail.

At the conference, in one of the most anticipated talks, researcher Dan Kaminsky explained the urgency in having everyone patch their systems: virtually everything done on the Internet involves a Domain Name System request and therefore is vulnerable.

Yahoo–one big happy family?
Now the fireworks and fractiousness can officially move inside Yahoo: activist investor Carl Icahn is now part of the Internet company’s board.

The customized results present content including video on the search results, blurring the lines between an Internet portal and a search engine. The results also include a link that can take users to various related Yahoo Sports Olympics coverage pages, which at least at present feature a lot of advertisements by Visa.

Security researchers always thought it was hard to poison DNS records, but Kaminsky said to think of the process as a race, with a good guy and bad guy each trying to get a secret number transaction ID. “You can get there first,” he said, “but you can’t cross the finish line unless you have the secret number.”

Hacks at Black Hat
Three journalists for a French security magazine were kicked out of the Black Hat security conference after they allegedly sniffed the press room computer network. Organizers required the men to leave the conference, confiscated their badges, and barred them from Defcon, a sister security conference that runs over the weekend, and from all future events.

The men were seen huddled over a table in the two press rooms for much of the day and took their computer to the Wall of Sheep (a project that monitors wireless network activity), asking them to display the alleged usernames and passwords of journalists. The Wall of Sheep organizers refused to do that, saying that they do not monitor the traffic of the press room.

Also, Google’s DoubleClick technology will be used to deliver video advertising shown with Microsoft’s Silverlight technology, and it will be used for that purpose with the Olympics video that NBC Universal plans to show online using a player based on Silverlight 2.

The Olympic Games officially begin on Friday in Beijing–and on the Web.

Quantitatively, the change means nothing: “These errors did not affect the outcome of the election of directors,” Yahoo said. But qualitatively, it’s a different story, because withhold votes do send a message even if the board were still re-elected.

The Wall of Sheep board has long been a fixture at Defcon, Black Hat’s sister conference. The board displays the names (with some identifying information obscured) of those connecting to the Internet in insecure ways. The idea is both meant to shame and educate users on best practices.

Click here for more stories on tech and the Beijing Olympics.

To be sure, Internet marketing executives were hopeful about the performance of Google rivals, even while they downplayed their importance. Marketers said that Yahoo, Ask.com, and others are performing well for search ad campaigns.

Search engine marketers also aren’t so crazy about how the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft power struggle has played out. It’s not that they disapprove of Yahoo remaining independent of Microsoft. It’s just that Google’s search market share, at nearly 70 percent in June, has only grown stronger during its rivals’ kerfuffle.

Also of note
A laptop with information on prescreened travelers that was reported stolen at the San Francisco airport was found in the office from which it was reported missing, and the incident may be relabeled the case of the misplaced laptop…Google has launched a free music search service in China that will give people access to free downloads of licensed songs…Delta Air Lines passengers will get Wi-Fi access on all domestic flights by the middle of next year…Facebook is reportedly ready to let current employees unload a fifth of their stock options, at the company’s internal valuation of $4 billion…A privately funded rocket suffered a launch failure, the third in as many attempts for an Internet entrepreneur who is hoping to develop private space delivery and transportation.

Citizens of Ethiopia and Thailand are among the international Web users who will be able to view online content from the Beijing Olympics via YouTube. While NBC holds the Olympics digital video-on-demand rights in the U.S., rights have not been sold on an exclusive basis in more than 70 countries. In those countries, people can access the specialized YouTube Olympics channel.

Meanwhile, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft say they are close to an agreement on a code of conduct for doing business in China and other countries that censor the Internet. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) released separate letters from the companies, stating they have “reached agreement on the core components of the principles” of the code, as Google put it.

One of the men later tried to lay the entire blame for the incident with another of the accused, but said, “For us, it was like a joke.”

Icahn, who owns about 5 percent of Yahoo’s shares, had tried to take over the entire board in July, but settled for seats for himself and two allies. One of Icahn’s first roles on the board will be to help pick the two allies who will join him. The new appointments are set to be announced by August 15, increasing Yahoo’s board from 9 to 11 members.

The Olympics are a media feeding frenzy, as everyone tries to capitalize on the huge audience for the global sporting event, and now Yahoo and Google are trying to get in on the action. The Internet pioneers have launched a number of shortcuts to present Olympics-related information through Yahoo’s search engine. The shortcuts package up information such as the overall medal count, a country’s specific medal count, and information for individual athletes.

The International Olympic Committee said the Olympic Broadcasting Services will produce the YouTube channel content and will include highlights, news clips, and daily videos of the international games. YouTube and parent company Google will also help remove videos that violate the IOC copyrights on Olympics content. YouTube said it would not disclose exact terms of the deal, but that the IOC “is using our industry-leading VideoID technology to manage and protect its content on the site.”

Shareholders unhappy with board members withheld their votes in the August 1 election. In Yahoo’s official voting tally, 14.6 percent of votes for Yang and 20.5 percent for Bostock were withheld. But in the corrected results, Yang’s withhold percentage rose to 33.7 percent and Bostock’s to 39.6 percent, Yahoo said.

At least within the Wall of Sheep room you can get help on how not be posted on the display wall. For example, use encryption on your wireless connection such as WPA2. That will encrypt the signal from your mobile device to the access point. From there, the network itself should run Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).

But the dysfunctional family love doesn’t end there. The shareholder approval ratings plunged for Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang and Roy Bostock after Yahoo released new results that corrected a vote transmission error.

Google’s Silverlight ad capability, called DoubleClick In-Stream, can be used to deliver video ads using Flash, RealMedia, and Windows Media technology. In-Stream also can show static ads within video, which Microsoft and NBC concluded was the best approach for live video.

Those components, the letters say, include principles for promoting freedom of expression and privacy, implementation guidelines, and an accountability framework. The specifics of the code are now being reviewed by the individual organizations involved. Google said the companies are working toward a “set of clear and rigorous principles, such that restrictive governments would be unable to ignore or reject these best practices on freedom of expression and the protection of individual privacy.”

Expectations were running high as Kaminsky, director of penetration testing for IOActive, had revealed little about his DNS vulnerability up till then. That didn’t stop others from trying to figure it out. But that actually helped Kaminsky in the end; it meant during his speech, he was able to skip the what and go directly to the why.

Adding video annotations to YouTube videos isn't hard, but it could be a whole lot easier. Most users will know what to do right away.

Bugged by the overlay ads popping up on some YouTube videos? The purity of those home videos is about to get a little more cluttered with the inclusion of video annotations.

Wednesday morning the video-hosting company rolled out its own tool for adding text bubbles, links, and call-outs to uploaded videos. The feature is available as part of its TestTube service, which showcases some of the technologies the company is testing, but is not ready to unleash on the general YouTube populace.

One thing to note is that annotations don’t yet make their way with the source video when embedded, something I’m sure will be changed later down the line. For now you can check out this example video I made shortly after unboxing the new Flip Video Mino.

There are also slots to input the exact start and stop time down to the second. It’s not an exact science. Ideally I’d like to see YouTube add some better timeline control to let you simply drag a start and stop point as if you were editing the video itself. To push it live you just hit the publish button and any changes are reflected immediately.

Unlike some other Web video annotation services, you can only add them to a video if you’re the creator–something I’m betting will change in later iterations with a possible toggle to view community annotations. In the meantime, if you come across a video with annotations that you’d care not to see, you can simply click the new arrow button on the right side of the player.

As far as actually adding annotations there’s a simple two-pane editor with your video on one side and a list of each annotation on the left. You physically have to play the video and pause it to track down the right times to start and stop an annotation.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Unless anything else surfaces, this is probably the end of Apple’s stock-option troubles, which forced the company to take an $84 million charge in 2006 to properly account for stock option awards that were given to executives with cherry-picked grant dates. No one from Apple’s current management team has been charged, and Securities and Exchange Commission cases against former executives Fred Anderson and Nancy Heinen have been settled.

The executives themselves, including CEO Steve Jobs, won’t actually have to cough up the cash: that’s why they have insurance, according to the Associated Press. And the money actually goes to the corporation, not the shareholders themselves, because this was a “derivative” lawsuit that sought compensation on behalf of the company. Attempts by shareholders to sue on their own behalf have been stymied by the fact that Apple’s stock has actually risen since the backdating was revealed in late 2006.

Apple executives have settled a shareholder lawsuit filed over its stock-option backdating practices for $14 million.

Rumors began circulating on the Internet in March that Amazon was gearing up to sell wine through its grocery section when a job opening for a senior wine buyer at the online retailer appeared on a jobs site.

Since the Supreme Court ruled in May 2005 that states must grant the same shipping rights to out-of-state and in-state wineries, winery-to-consumer shipping has become legal in 35 states, according to wine advocacy group Free the Grapes. There are now more than 5,000 wineries in the United States, at least one in each state.

Amazon has dabbled in the wine business before, investing $30 million for a 45 percent share in Wineshopper.com in 1999, a start-up that was acquired by Wine.com in 2000 before going through a series of layoffs. Wine.com has a storefront on Amazon, through which it sells gourmet food baskets but not wine.

“We have set up a few get-to-know-you meetings with wineries, and the wineries will make their own decisions on what fits best with their business plans,” Hall said, who added that his St. Helena, Calif.-based group has been collaborating with Amazon on the enterprise since early this year.

An Amazon representative declined to comment for this report, so it is unknown if each winery would have a separate online storefront, or whether they would be administered through a single store.

Amazon.com customers will be able to buy wine through the e-tailer’s Web site as early as this month, a spokesman for the Napa Valley Vintners Association said Wednesday.

“It should be live in the next few weeks,” Hall said, adding that Amazon was “really looking to be the go-to Web site for wine sales.”

Amazon has been working with the nonprofit group, which represents 315 vintners in the Napa Valley, to arrange workshops with wine producers that might be interested in selling wine through the retail giant, said Terry Hall, the group’s communications director.

“With sponsored events in the calendar, you can do very, very narrow targeting,” Dietzen said. “We’re trying to strive for ways that help Yahoo monetize, but that enhance the user experience as opposed to detract.”

(Credit:
Yahoo)

For example, people can subscribe to others’ calendars, such as schedules for sports teams or college courses, and to share calendars publicly or with others who’ve been invited, said Scott Dietzen, who took over Yahoo’s mail and communications business in June.

The new site brings a more polished Web 2.0 interface, with drag-and-drop abilities, color-coded entries, Flickr image backdrops, and a slick “zoom” feature that expands a single day’s schedule to a usefully large size when browsing in the monthly view. And picking up an ability from No. 2 rival Google Calendar, the new design finally moves beyond the narrow single-user calendar idea of the earlier design.

Different colors represent entries from different calendars. (Click to enlarge.)

The new Yahoo Calendar is based on the calendar technology of Zimbra, the open-source e-mail, contacts, and calendar start-up Yahoo acquired in 2007. “This is the first wide-scale deployment of Zimbra technology for Yahoo consumer technology. It won’t be the last,” Dietzen said.

The new Yahoo Calendar can show Flickr images as a background, though not yet a user’s own shots. That’s planned for a future version. (Click to enlarge.)

Of course, Yahoo doesn’t just want to be useful to people: it’s under financial pressure, and calendars provide at least in theory a better way to make money. Today’s calendar shows ordinary banner advertisements, but the new design offers space on the lower left for advertising promotions. Clicking the link can add an event to the user’s calendar, and the advertiser will be able to gauge more precisely how successful the ad campaign is.

Yahoo Mail is used by about 278 million people each month, but Yahoo Calendar is relatively unknown with 8 million users, according to ComScore’s August statistics. If the company is successful with its calendar push, the calendar will narrow that usage gap, making scheduling a more active and useful part of people’s online lives.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

One benefit of the Zimbra technology is the ability to synchronize with calendars stored with Microsoft’s Outlook software, though that won’t come until a future version, he added. Also coming is
iPhone synchronization, he said.

The new Yahoo calendar site lets users zoom into a day's events from the monthly view. (Click to enlarge.)

Yahoo plans to begin a beta test of a major overhaul of its online calendar Wednesday, a redesign that brings new advertising and social-networking possibilities.

Usage has been “relatively flat,” he said, but “We think we’re going to see some very nice growth…I think it’s poised to go mainstream. It’s the combination of mobile devices and collaborative authoring in terms of publish and subscribe.”

The new beta will be available to a gradually larger subset of subscribers in the United States, United Kingdom, India, Taiwan, and Brazil, though users can sign up at the Yahoo Calendar switch site. The company plans to have the beta version in use globally by the end of the year, but Dietzen wouldn’t share when it expects to release the final version.

And through a later upgrade, Yahoo will build in access to the company’s Upcoming service to share and find events, he added. This sidebar will show popular local events and–through the “vitality” information Yahoo users can share as part of the Yahoo Open Strategy–the events on the calendars of a person’s top social contacts, Dietzen said.

(Credit:
Yahoo)

RepairPal will tell you if your mechanic's quoted price is out of line.

There’s a very cool service launching this morning: RepairPal, a utility for when you need work done on your
car.

The site will keep repair logs for your cars, recommend scheduled service items. And should you want to sell your old heap, it will generate widgets of those logs to embed in eBay or Craigslist sale listings.

RepairPal has a host of supporting features for its repair cost estimator, such as expert advice that you get when you look up a repair. For example, if your mechanic tells you that you should replace your spark plug wires when replacing a failing ignition coil, and you can see that RepairPal recommends that for your car, you can feel less suspicious of your mechanic.

To drive home his point, Sturtz told me about a study the company did when it was forming: 50 calls were made to shops asking for a price quote on a given repair. Then, a short time later, the calls were made again to the same shops, but this time with women making the queries instead of men. The average price difference was 17 percent higher when women called. Sturtz thought he could level the playing field, and not just for women.

As CEO David Sturtz explains, car repair is one of the classic cases where the consumer “is at an extreme informational disadvantage.” Mechanics know more than you do, and this disparity can be used in the worst way: to completely rip you off. Even in the best cases, many people suspect their shop is cheating them out of money whenever their ride needs unexpected work.

Sturtz worked hard in my interview with him to hammer home his point that the price estimates RepairPal generates are comprehensive and accurate and that they take in a ton of information while throwing out specious data like prices on inferior-quality parts. Nonetheless, I found a huge range on some repairs — from $1,100 to $2,400 for a clutch replacement on my 1996 Saab in San Francisco, for example. Sturtz told me that the data did reflect the reality of different parts costs, labor costs, and competencies that shops have in estimating repair prices. He also said that the range for higher-volume vehicles, like mid-’90s American cars, is tighter. (I found the Saab figures reassuring, by the way: My local shop charged me $1,200 for a new clutch a month ago.)

Revenue will come from context-sensitive advertising at first, but the longer-term opportunities for this business are much more interesting than that. Sturtz is convinced that mechanics will love this service, since it has the potential to reduce the natural suspicion customers feel when they’re told about the price of a repair. And since Sturtz thinks he’ll end up as friend to the auto shop, he’s looking at an OpenTable model to help shops run online scheduling for repairs, and he’ll collect booking fees from that. He’s also thinking that at some point he may put an open bid model on the scheduler, so users could put a call out for a standard repair (like a 30,000 mile scheduled service), and then collect bids from nearby shops on that service.

You can keep a repair log on the site.

Also to come is a mobile app or a call center for the service, so consumers will be able to use the site at time they need it the most: when their car has stranded them in an unfamiliar town.

RepairPal can’t tell you what is wrong with your car. But if you tell it which repair the shop says you need, plus what car you have and where you live, it will tell you the real price range for the repair. The data that goes into the generation of the this range is gathered from a number of sources, including one of the super-secret labor cost estimator tables that’s been available exclusively to mechanics up until now. (RepairPal has a five-year exclusive on this data.)

There’s also a way to rate your auto shop, and if you tell the site about a repair you just had or are about to, it will give you a short quiz at the appropriate time on the transaction (estimated vs. actual price, for example) as well as asking you about your subjective satisfaction with the repair. All this goes back into the giant pool of data RepairPal will use to generate recommendations and repair price estimates.

RepairPal could be a major disruptor to the auto repair business. I hope the company is able to deliver on its vision.

RepairPal is a great idea and nicely executed, too. The hard job for the company is going to be to get users, since it’s not like this site is going to be front-of-mind with them all the time. Interest from blogs, consumer advocates, and an upcoming hit on Car Talk will generate spikes in traffic, but not the persistent awareness this service will need to survive. Ongoing traffic will come primarily from search engine optimization and search advertising, Sturtz said.

The Dresden, Germany, plant produces biogas from corn waste like husks and stalks, notably not cobs. Like other bioenergy plants, the biogas is then converted into electricity at the plant.

To produce the electricity from the biogas, the plant uses a high-temperature fuel cell with a combined electrical and thermal efficiency of about 85 percent. That, too, is more efficient, according to the scientists who contend that the average combustion engine only has an efficiency of about 38 percent.

This biogas electrical plant runs on straw from corn.

Because this electricity plant does not use any edible crop sources, the system, if scaled up for wider use, would not interfere with world food supplies, according to a statement from the group.

Not only is the plant agro-friendly because it avoids using feedstocks, the scientists have also come up with a quicker method for fermenting the ingredients.

The biomass used at the Dresden plant are decomposed in about 30 days compared to the typical 80 days it takes to ferment feedstock biomass.

German scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems have developed an electricity plant that produces its biogas, a form of biofuel, from non-edible plant waste.

(Credit:
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft )

“Corn stalks contain cellulose which cannot be directly fermented. But in our plant, the cellulose is broken down by enzymes before the silage ferments,” Michael Stelter, head of the research group, said in a statement.

As of now, the plant is only built to produce about 1.5 kilowatts of electricity, barely enough to supply one home. Now that the system works, the group plans to step it up to two kilowatts.

Sue Decker

(Credit:
Dan Farber)

Kara also listed former eBay CEO Meg Whitman (who is busy as co-chair of the McCain presidential campaign), former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig, and even Mark Cuban. Check out Kara’s complete list.

Whatever transpires, it would be very difficult for Yang to give up the CEO seat. He wants to prove that he can turn around the company, but he may not be given a chance given all the tumult. Since Microsoft pounced on February 1, Yang’s purple blood has been in the water, drawing a number of detractors, such as investor Carl Icahn, who would like to see him and the board gone.

Replacing Yang and appointing Decker as CEO or bringing in an outsider to run the company isn’t going to dramatically alter the course of Yahoo history. The company needs to focus on products–getting its Yahoo Open Strategy and AMP advertising platform released. With a number of key people leaving and the ongoing drama around Yahoo’s future, Yang’s to-do list is not getting any less challenging.

Kara Swisher of AllThingsD.com puts Sue Decker at the top of her list to succeed Jerry Yang as Yahoo CEO if he returns to his former position of founder and chief Yahoo. She acknowledges that the Yahoo president has been part of the team that put Yahoo in its current position, but that she “might blossom if she had full control” over the company. It seems that she already has a lot of control over the company, based on her performance at the D6 conference and analyst calls over the last few months.

I often tell people that the state of information security is far worse than they think. Yes, I realize that the security industry loves this type of messaging because fear sells product, but I truly believe that things are really bad.

These numbers point to the fact that the bad guys are winning. Even the most sophisticated security departments at enterprise organizations are no match for this onslaught. We really need to re-think our security model by adding “up the stack” layers of defense (i.e. more application protection), building in end-to-end trust, and working with expert security service providers like Trend Micro and others.

In 2005, Trend examined less than 1 million malicious code patterns. In 2007, there were nearly 5.5 million malicious code patterns. In the first four months of 2008, Trend has already seen more than 2 million.

This morning I met with security company Trend Micro to discuss security trends and upcoming products. The data that Trend presented was even frightening to a security pessimist like me. Case in point:

Note to chief information security officers: The worst thing you can do is go it alone.

Newly created Web threats grew 1,564 percent from Q1 2005 through the end of 2007. That’s nearly 200 percent growth every quarter. This is due to the large number of variants written off of a base of the original threat.

I was curious how someone becomes a Blue Angels pilot, and Weisser explained that there’s an application process, just like for any job. But the requirements are a little more stringent than for most: to qualify, you must have flown at least 1,250 hours as a pilot of an F-18 or F-14.

The team’s commanding officer, Weisser also explained, has even more strict requirements: he (or she, though the Blue Angels has never had a female member of the performance team) must have already commanded a squadron of F-18s.

The show itself was spectacular, especially from up close and with many other planes as backdrops, including “Fat Albert,” the team’s C-130 that ferries its equipment and support crew to various stops around the country.

Those selected as finalists then join the current team at air shows around the country so everyone can get to know each other.

This week, as part of my Road Trip 2008 project, I stopped in at Naval Air Station Pensacola here for a chance to watch the Blue Angels practice their demonstration show from way up close.

One thing that surprised me is that the Blue Angels spend about two to three months training each year in the desert outside El Centro, Calif., a small town in the southeast corner of the Golden State. This was particularly interesting to me because they fly there from January to March, and for years, I traveled to near El Centro for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. I guess I just missed the team when they were there all those years.

I was invited to watch the show from the flight line, meaning I was able to get much closer than the public gets for the practices. This was nice since, while I’ve seen the Blue Angels fly probably more than a dozen times in San Francisco and once in Seattle, I was never very close to them.

As I mentioned above, the planes can get as close as 12 inches during the shows, flying at speeds of between 300 and 400 knots. For a civilian who’s never flown, this was a rather astounding fact. But to Weisser, it’s just how things are for the team.

Back here in Pensacola, I was curious about whether the practice shows, both here and at various sites around the country, are any different than the formal shows they do.

That seems like a smart thing, even though it is kind of disconcerting to think the pilots aren’t exactly looking where they’re going, since no one wants these high-performance jets touching while in flight.

Though I won’t be in the cockpit of any high-performance fighter jets, Road Trip 2008 will continue for the next week or so. Please stay tuned to this blog, and to my Twitter feed.

“We have to do it that way so we stay safe in the air,” Weisser said. “There’s such a small room for error, that we can’t change the show…(And) one thing we pride ourselves on is our (consistency). Had you seen the show today and been on the team in the ’60s or ’70s, it would look very, very similar to you.” (See below for a video of some of the Blue Angels’ practice.)

After being on the Blue Angels, the idea is that the pilots return to whatever squadron they were part of before. The team is very adamant that pilots don’t use the experience as a springboard to, say, getting a plush job flying for FedEx or some private carrier.

This time, I was allowed onto the tarmac where guests get to stand, meaning I was probably a couple of hundred yards away from the planes when they were at rest (see video below for a view of the tarmac, the Blue Angels planes, and the maintenance hanger).

“You get to fly a ton,” Weisser said, “and everyone who’s a pilot loves to fly and wants to be in the air as much as they can.”

Rather, they’re most likely looking sideways at the fighter just off their side, ensuring that they know exactly where it is as they rocket forward at several hundred miles per hour.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

In fact, when I was planning Road Trip 2008 and found out the Blue Angels are based in Pensacola, I rearranged the entire second half of the journey to attend one of the practices, which happen on a few specific dates in between the air shows all over the country.

“That’s important for us because we’re together for 300 days a year,” Weisser said.

PENSACOLA, Fla.–If you’ve ever watched a Blue Angels show, you may not have known that when the F-18 pilots are screaming across the sky, less than 2 feet apart, they’re probably not looking straight ahead.

Weisser said that the practices, no matter where they are, are identical, in fact, to the formal shows. And over the years, the shows have changed very little.

Two Blue Angels F-18s fly directly at each other during their practice performance at Naval Air Station Pensacola.

The front of a Blue Angels F-18 as seen from the side.

Each year, the team adds three new pilots, but there are probably only about 50 applicants, since the pool of people who have the required hours is pretty small.

Afterward, I got a chance to sit down with Lt. Frank Weisser, the No. 7 Blue Angels pilot.

The six Blue Angels F-18s fly together in perfect formation during a practice performance at their home base in Pensacola, Fla.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

Of course, if you’re a student of the Blue Angels, you know there are only six planes in the performances. Weisser, as the No. 7 pilot, serves a three-year term with the team–while the others stay for two years–because his first year is spent taking care of VIPs, organizational duties and talking to the press. After a year, he will step into one of the regular pilot’s roles.

But regardless of which team pilots are on, being able to fly as a Blue Angel is a boon for their careers, in large part because of how often they get behind the stick. They fly nearly every day, either in a formal show or in practices, and during their training months in the California desert, they fly as many as 15 times a week.

(Credit:
Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

The team, of course, is actually two teams. The first is a group of four of the pilots who fly as part of the “diamond,” always working together during a show. The second are the two solo pilots. Essentially, he explained, the Blue Angels fly two separate shows at a time.