title: Jaleel White

text: The character was originally intended to be a one-time guest appearance on the show; however, he was an instant hit with audiences and White became a regular cast member. The series aired for a total of nine seasons, from 1989 to 1997 on ABC, mostly on its Friday night TGIF lineup, and from 1997 to 1998 on CBS, again on Friday nights, via their short-lived "CBS Block Party" attempt. White then reprised his role as Urkel for the first time in 21 years in the 2019 series "Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?".


title: Jaleel White

text: White is also the first actor to voice the popular Sega video game character Sonic the Hedgehog in animated media, doing so in "Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog", "Sonic the Hedgehog" (also known as "Sonic SatAM") and "Sonic Underground", all of which were produced by the now-defunct DIC Entertainment studio. He then reprised his role as Sonic in the 2013 "Sonic" fan film.


title: Jaleel White

text: After "Family Matters" ended, White went on to star in the short-lived UPN comedy series "Grown Ups" (1999–2000). White then took brief hiatus from acting to attend UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he graduated in 2001, earning a degree in film and television. He returned to acting with supporting roles in "Dreamgirls" (2006), and cameo appearances on another ABC series, "Boston Legal", Fox's "House", ABC's "Castle", and USA's "Psych". In 2010, he portrayed Dr. McCormick in the sci-fi film "Mega Shark Versus Crocosaurus". In March 2012, White was a contestant in season 14 of "Dancing with the Stars" before he was voted off in May of that year, leaving him with a 7th place finish overall. In April 2012, White hosted the Syfy game show "Total Blackout". In January 2017, White appeared in "Bones" as Officer Adams. In 2020, White joined the cast of the Netflix series "The Big Show Show" in the recurring role of Terry.


title: Jaleel White

text: White was born in Culver City, California, the only child of Michael White, a dentist, and Gail White, who was a homemaker. His mother later became his manager. White attended John Marshall Fundamental High School in Pasadena, California, and South Pasadena High School before graduating from UCLA in 2001. On the advice of his preschool teacher, White began acting as a child. He got his start on TV commercials at age three. One of White's notable commercial appearances was for Jell-O pudding pops alongside Bill Cosby.


title: Jaleel White

text: After starting his career at the age of three, White's first television role was a guest stint on "The Jeffersons", in 1984. He later auditioned for the role of Rudy Huxtable on "The Cosby Show". According to White, he was cast in the role (the character was originally intended to be male) but was replaced by Keshia Knight Pulliam when Bill Cosby decided to mirror his television family after his real life family. The following year, he was cast as the son of Flip Wilson and Gladys Knight on the CBS sitcom "Charlie and Company". The series was intended to be CBS' answer to the highly rated "Cosby Show" which debuted on NBC in 1984. Unlike "The Cosby Show", "Charlie and Company" did not catch on with audiences and was canceled in May 1986. In 1987, he appeared in the pilot episode for "Good Morning, Miss Bliss", and had a guest role on "Mr. Belvedere". In 1988, White had a supporting role in "Cadets", a sitcom starring Soleil Moon Frye. The pilot episode aired during a preview special on September 25, 1988, on ABC. The series, however, was not picked up by the network. Also during the 1980s, he appeared in a few segments of NBC's "One to Grow On".


title: Jaleel White

text: White had a role in the NBC television movie "Camp Cucamonga". The film features an ensemble cast including Sherman Hemsley, Jennifer Aniston, and Brian Robbins. Several other child actors of the era including Chad Allen, Candace Cameron, Danica McKellar, Josh Saviano, and Breckin Meyer also appear.


title: Jaleel White

text: At the age of 12, White originated his most famous role, Steve Urkel, on "Family Matters". The role was initially conceived as a one-time guest appearance, but the character proved to be popular and White was given a full-time starring role. He also played several other members of the Urkel family, including his alter ego Stefan Urquelle and Myrtle Urkel. During the height of "Family Matters" popularity, the character of Urkel was marketed with breakfast cereal (Urkel-Os) and an Urkel doll. In addition to starring in the series, White also wrote several episodes, including one, at age 19, that was the series' highest rated for that year. The series was a staple of ABC's TGIF lineup and became one of the longest-running sitcoms with a predominately black cast in television history.


title: Jaleel White

text: In 1992, he was featured in The Jaleel White Special, where he played a fictionalized version of himself making a movie, while also playing Steve Urkel.


title: Jaleel White

text: By the time the series ended in 1998, White, who was then 21 years old, was disillusioned with the role, and had been shaken by the death of his close friend and co-star Michelle Thomas from an aggressive form of stomach cancer. Shortly after the series' cancellation, he stated in a 1999 interview, "If you ever see me do that character again, take me out and put a bullet in my head and put me out of my misery." Due to the character's popularity, White was so tightly defined by his Urkel character that he encountered difficulty finding other roles.


title: Jaleel White

text: In later years, White came to terms with the character. In a 2011 interview with "Vanity Fair", he addressed the 1999 "bullet" quote stating, "It's one of those things that it's very unfortunate how quotes are taken out of context. I remember that interview very vividly. I loved playing those characters ... But the fact is that I was maturing. ... To be honest, I was retarding my own growth as a man to maintain the authenticity to what I thought that character should be." When asked if he would ever reprise the Steve Urkel role, White said, "I'll always say never say never; I'm a pretty creative person. I can't envision how I could do it in a way that would be irreverent and fun for both me and the viewing audience".


title: Jaleel White

text: White was the original English voice of the popular video game character Sonic the Hedgehog, having been cast in 1993 (pre-dating Martin Burke and Ryan Drummond). He voiced the character in all of the DiC-produced animated series: "Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog", "Sonic SatAM", and "Sonic Underground," as well as the Christmas special, "Sonic Christmas Blast". In "Underground", White also voiced Sonic's brother and sister, Manic and Sonia. White did not return to voice Sonic when "Sonic X" was released in 2003.


title: Jaleel White

text: In 1999, White returned to television in the UPN sitcom "Grown Ups". The series was based around White as a young man striking out into adulthood. He also co-produced and wrote some episodes for the show, in which he starred as "J", a college graduate struggling to establish his role in life as an adult. The pilot episode featured another former child actor, Soleil Moon Frye, known for her role as Punky Brewster, as the girl whom he chose as a roommate. The show received poor reviews from critics but debuted in second place in the ratings upon its premiere. However, ratings soon dropped and UPN canceled the series after one season.


title: Jaleel White

text: White's acting roles have not been restricted to sitcoms. He has provided his voice to several animated projects including Warner Bros.' 1998 film "Quest for Camelot". In 1999, he provided the voice for a teenaged Martin Luther King Jr., in "Our Friend, Martin".


title: Jaleel White

text: In 2001, White graduated from UCLA with a degree in film and television. He has continued acting and has had small parts in the films "Big Fat Liar" (in a cameo role) and "Dreamgirls", and was featured as the lead role in the direct-to-DVD comedy "Who Made the Potatoe Salad?" in 2006. In 2007, he guest-starred on the CW series "The Game", followed by a role as a law school graduate interviewing for a job at Crane, Poole and Schmidt in the ABC legal drama "Boston Legal".


title: Jaleel White

text: In June 2009, White began appearing in the web series "Road to the Altar". In the series, White stars as Simon, a 30-something black man marrying a young Jewish girl named Rochelle. In September 2009, White guest starred on the USA Network series "Psych", as an estranged college singing buddy of the character Gus.


title: Jaleel White

text: In June 2010, White starred in the web series "Fake It Till You Make It". He also serves as writer and producer of the series. The series, which premiered on Hulu, follows the exploits of former child star Reggie Cullen (White) turned image consultant and his three protégés as they hustle to navigate Hollywood. In March 2011, White guest starred on the TBS sitcom "Are We There Yet?", which reunited him with fellow "Family Matters" cast member Telma Hopkins. Later that same year, White appeared as the star in Cee-Lo Green's music video for his song "Cry Baby".


title: Jaleel White

text: In October 2011, White appeared in the season 8 premiere of "House", titled "Twenty Vicodin", where he appears as a well-connected inmate, occasionally helping Hugh Laurie's character Gregory House to sneak contraband into the prison. In April 2012, White began hosting the Syfy game show "Total Blackout".


title: Jaleel White

text: In March 2012, White began competing on the 14th season of "Dancing with the Stars". He was partnered with two-time dance champion Kym Johnson. In the opening night's performance, White and Johnson danced the Foxtrot to "The Way You Look Tonight". They earned a total of 26 points out of 30. White was voted off the series in May 2012.


title: Jaleel White

text: In 2017, it was announced that CBS picked up his single camera comedy series "Me, Myself & I" with Bobby Moynihan, that premiered in September 2017. After six episodes, it was pulled from the fall schedule, leaving seven episodes unaired, with the network airing the remaining episodes in the summer.


title: Jaleel White

text: In 2021, White announced the launch of his ItsPurpl line of cannabis products featuring the Purple Urkle strain, set for debut on April 20 at California dispensaries.


title: Jaleel White

text: White has a memorial set up in his home for his "Family Matters" co-star Michelle Thomas, who died in 1998 of stomach cancer, shortly after the series had wrapped. He has described Thomas as a 'big sister' who was, for a period of time in the early seasons of the show, his closest friend on set, and has stated that his childhood seemed to officially end with her death.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Franklin Patrick "Frank" Herbert Jr. (October 8, 1920February 11, 1986) was an American science fiction author best known for the 1965 novel "Dune" and its five sequels. Though he became famous for his novels, he also wrote short stories and worked as a newspaper journalist, photographer, book reviewer, ecological consultant, and lecturer.


title: Frank Herbert

text: The "Dune" saga, set in the distant future, and taking place over millennia, explores complex themes, such as the long-term survival of the human species, human evolution, planetary science and ecology, and the intersection of religion, politics, economics and power in a future where humanity has long since developed interstellar travel and settled many thousands of worlds. "Dune" is the best-selling science fiction novel of all time, and the entire series is considered to be among the classics of the genre.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Frank Patrick Herbert Jr. was born on October 8, 1920, in Tacoma, Washington, to Frank Patrick Herbert Sr. and Eileen (née McCarthy) Herbert. His rural upbringing involved spending a lot of his youth on the Olympic and Kitsap Peninsulas. He was fascinated by books and could read much of the newspaper before the age of five, had an excellent memory, and learned things quickly. He had an early interest in photography, and bought a Kodak box camera at age ten, a new folding camera in his early teens, and a color film camera in the mid-1930s. Because of an impoverished home environment, largely due to the Great Depression, he left home in 1938 to live with an aunt and uncle in Salem, Oregon. He enrolled in high school at Salem High School (now North Salem High School), where he graduated the next year. In 1939 he lied about his age to get his first newspaper job at the "Glendale Star". Herbert then returned to Salem in 1940 where he worked for the "Oregon Statesman" newspaper (now "Statesman Journal") in a variety of positions, including photographer.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Herbert married Flora Lillian Parkinson in San Pedro, California, in 1941. They had one daughter, Penelope (b. February 16, 1942), and divorced in 1943. During 1942, after the U.S. entry into World War II, he served in the Navy's Seabees for six months as a photographer, but suffered an accidental head injury and was given a medical discharge. Herbert subsequently moved to Portland, Oregon where he reported for "The Oregon Journal".


title: Frank Herbert

text: After the war, Herbert attended the University of Washington, where he met Beverly Ann Stuart at a creative writing class in 1946. They were the only students who had sold any work for publication; Herbert had sold two pulp adventure stories to magazines, the first to "Esquire" in 1945, and Stuart had sold a story to "Modern Romance" magazine. They married in Seattle, Washington on June 20, 1946, and had two sons, Brian Patrick Herbert (b. June 29, 1947, Seattle, Washington) and Bruce Calvin Herbert (b. June 26, 1951, Santa Rosa, California d. June 15, 1993, San Rafael, California, a professional photographer and gay rights activist).


title: Frank Herbert

text: In 1949 Herbert and his wife moved to California to work on the Santa Rosa "Press-Democrat". Here they befriended the psychologists Ralph and Irene Slattery. The Slatterys introduced Herbert to the work of several thinkers who would influence his writing, including Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger; they also familiarized Herbert with Zen Buddhism.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Herbert never graduated from university. According to his son Brian, he wanted to study only what interested him and so did not complete the required curriculum. He returned to journalism and worked at the "Seattle Star" and the "Oregon Statesman". He was a writer and editor for the "San Francisco Examiner" "California Living" magazine for a decade.


title: Frank Herbert

text: In a 1973 interview, Herbert stated that he had been reading science fiction "about ten years" before he began writing in the genre, and he listed his favorite authors as H. G. Wells, Robert A. Heinlein, Poul Anderson and Jack Vance.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Herbert's first science fiction story, "Looking for Something", was published in the April 1952 issue of "Startling Stories", then a monthly edited by Samuel Mines. Three more of his stories appeared in 1954 issues of "Astounding Science Fiction" and "Amazing Stories". His career as a novelist began in 1955 with the serial publication of "Under Pressure" in "Astounding" from November 1955; afterward it was issued as a book by Doubleday titled "The Dragon in the Sea". The story explored sanity and madness in the environment of a 21st-century submarine and predicted worldwide conflicts over oil consumption and production. It was a critical success but not a major commercial one. During this time Herbert also worked as a speechwriter for Republican senator Guy Cordon.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Herbert began researching "Dune" in 1959. He was able to devote himself wholeheartedly to his writing career because his wife returned to work full-time as an advertising writer for department stores, becoming the breadwinner during the 1960s. The novel "Dune" was published in 1965, which spearheaded the "Dune" franchise. He later told Willis E. McNelly that the novel originated when he was assigned to write a magazine article about sand dunes in the Oregon Dunes near Florence, Oregon. He got overinvolved and ended up with far more raw material than needed for an article. The article was never written, but it planted the seed that led to "Dune". Another significant source of inspiration for "Dune" was Herbert's experiences with psilocybin and his hobby of cultivating mushrooms, according to mycologist Paul Stamets's account.


title: Frank Herbert

text: "Dune" took six years of research and writing to complete and was much longer than other commercial science fiction of the time. "Analog" (the renamed "Astounding", still edited by John W. Campbell) published it in two parts comprising eight installments, "Dune World" from December 1963 and "Prophet of Dune" in 1965. It was then rejected by nearly twenty book publishers. One editor prophetically wrote, "I might be making the mistake of the decade, but..."


title: Frank Herbert

text: Sterling E. Lanier, an editor of Chilton Book Company (known mainly for its auto-repair manuals) had read the Dune serials and offered a $7,500 advance plus future royalties for the rights to publish them as a hardcover book. Herbert rewrote much of his text. "Dune" was soon a critical success. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1965 and shared the Hugo Award in 1966 with "...And Call Me Conrad" by Roger Zelazny.


title: Frank Herbert

text: "Dune" was not an immediate bestseller. By 1968 Herbert had made $20,000 from it, far more than most science fiction novels of the time were generating, but not enough to let him take up full-time writing. However, the publication of "Dune" did open doors for him. He was the "Seattle Post-Intelligencer" education writer from 1969 to 1972 and lecturer in general studies and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington (1970–1972). He worked in Vietnam and Pakistan as a social and ecological consultant in 1972. In 1973 he was director-photographer of the television show "The Tillers".


title: Frank Herbert

text: By the end of 1972, Herbert had retired from newspaper writing and became a full-time fiction writer. During the 1970s and 1980s, he enjoyed considerable commercial success as an author. He divided his time between homes in Hawaii and Washington's Olympic Peninsula; his home in Port Townsend on the peninsula was intended to be an "ecological demonstration project".


title: Frank Herbert

text: Other works by Herbert include "The Godmakers" (1972), "The Dosadi Experiment" (1977), "The White Plague" (1982) and the books he wrote in partnership with Bill Ransom: "The Jesus Incident" (1979), "The Lazarus Effect" (1983) and "The Ascension Factor" (1988), which were sequels to Herbert's 1966 novel "". He also helped launch the career of Terry Brooks with a very positive review of Brooks' first novel, "The Sword of Shannara", in 1977.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Herbert's change in fortune was shadowed by tragedy. In 1974, his wife Beverly underwent an operation for cancer. She lived ten more years, but her health was adversely affected by the surgery. During this period, Herbert was the featured speaker at the Octocon II science fiction convention held at the El Rancho Tropicana in Santa Rosa, California, in October 1978. In 1979, he met anthropologist James Funaro with whom he conceived the Contact Conference. Beverly Herbert died on February 7, 1984. Herbert completed and published "Heretics of Dune" that year. In his afterword to 1985's "", Herbert included a dedication to Beverly.


title: Frank Herbert

text: In 1983, British heavy metal band Iron Maiden requested permission from Herbert's publisher to name a song on their album "Piece of Mind" after "Dune", but were told that the author had a strong distaste for their style of music. They instead titled the song "To Tame a Land".


title: Frank Herbert

text: 1984 was a tumultuous year in Herbert's life. During this same year of his wife's death, his career took off with the release of David Lynch's film version of "Dune". Despite high expectations, a big-budget production design and an A-list cast, the movie drew mostly poor reviews in the United States. However, despite a disappointing response in the US, the film was a critical and commercial success in Europe and Japan.


title: Frank Herbert

text: In 1985, after Beverly's death, Herbert married his former Putnam representative Theresa Shackleford. The same year he published "Chapterhouse: Dune", which tied up many of the saga's story threads. This would be Herbert's final single work (the collection "Eye" was published that year, and "Man of Two Worlds" was published in 1986). He died of a massive pulmonary embolism while recovering from surgery for pancreatic cancer on February 11, 1986, in Madison, Wisconsin, age 65.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Herbert was a strong critic of the Soviet Union. He was a distant relative of the Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he referred to as "Cousin Joe". However, he was appalled to learn of McCarthy's blacklisting of suspected communists from working in certain careers and believed that he was endangering essential freedoms of citizens of the United States. Herbert believed that governments lie to protect themselves and that, following the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon had unwittingly taught an important lesson in not trusting government. Herbert also opposed American involvement in the war in Vietnam.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Frank Herbert used his science fiction novels to explore complex ideas involving philosophy, religion, psychology, politics and ecology. The underlying thrust of his work was a fascination with the question of human survival and evolution. Herbert has attracted a sometimes fanatical fan base, many of whom have tried to read everything he wrote, fiction or non-fiction, and see Herbert as something of an authority on the subject matters of his books. Indeed, such was the devotion of some of his readers that Herbert was at times asked if he was founding a cult, something he was very much against.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Frank Herbert refrained from offering his readers formulaic answers to many of the questions he explored.


title: Frank Herbert

text: "Dune" and the "Dune" saga constitute one of the world's best-selling science fiction series and novels; "Dune" in particular has received widespread critical acclaim, winning the Nebula Award in 1965 and sharing the Hugo Award in 1966, and is frequently considered one of the best science fiction novels ever, if not the best. "Locus" subscribers voted it the all-time best SF novel in 1975, again in 1987, and the best "before 1990" in 1998.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Herbert never again equalled the critical acclaim he received for "Dune". Neither his sequels to "Dune" nor any of his other books won a Hugo or Nebula Award, although almost all of them were "New York Times" Best Sellers.


title: Frank Herbert

text: California State University, Fullerton's Pollack Library has several of Herbert's draft manuscripts of "Dune" and other works, with the author's notes, in their Frank Herbert Archives.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Metro Parks Tacoma built Dune Peninsula and the Frank Herbert Trail at Point Defiance Park in July 2019 to honor the hometown writer.


title: Frank Herbert

text: Beginning in 2012, Herbert's estate and WordFire Press have released four previously unpublished novels in e-book and paperback formats: "High-Opp" (2012), "Angels' Fall" (2013), "A Game of Authors" (2013), and "A Thorn in the Bush" (2014).


title: Frank Herbert

text: In recent years, Frank Herbert's son Brian Herbert and author Kevin J. Anderson have added to the "Dune" franchise, using notes left behind by Frank Herbert and discovered over a decade after his death. Brian Herbert and Anderson have written three prequel trilogies ("Prelude to Dune", "Legends of Dune" and "Great Schools of Dune") exploring the history of the "Dune" universe before the events of the original novel, two novels that take place between novels of the original "Dune" sequels (with plans for more), as well as two post-"Chapterhouse Dune" novels that complete the original series ("Hunters of Dune" and "Sandworms of Dune") based on Frank Herbert's own "Dune 7" outline.


title: Linda Blair

text: Linda Denise Blair (born January 22, 1959) is an American actress and activist. She played Regan MacNeil in the horror film "The Exorcist" (1973), for which she won a Golden Globe Award and received a nomination for an Academy Award. The film established her as a horror icon and scream queen; she reprised the role in the sequel "" (1977), for which she earned a nomination for a Saturn Award.


title: Linda Blair

text: Blair went on to star in numerous television films, such as "Born Innocent" (1974), "Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic" (1975), and "Stranger in Our House" (1978), before establishing herself as a sex symbol in the musical film "Roller Boogie" (1979). The 1980s had her starring in numerous horror and exploitation films, including the slasher "Hell Night" (1981), the prison drama "Chained Heat" (1983), and the grindhouse cult thriller "Savage Streets" (1984). Throughout the 1990s, Blair appeared in various independent films and B movies, as well as several television credits. She was the host of the Fox Family reality series "Scariest Places on Earth" (2000–2006) and had regular appearances on the Animal Planet series "Pit Boss" (2010–2012).


title: Linda Blair

text: Blair is a prominent activist for the animal rights movement. In 2004, she founded the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation, a nonprofit organization that serves to rehabilitate and adopt rescue animals. A vegan, she co-authored the book "Going Vegan!" in 2001.


title: Linda Blair

text: Blair was born January 22, 1959, in St. Louis, Missouri, to James Frederick and Elinore ( Leitch) Blair. She has an older sister, Debbie, and an older brother, Jim. When Blair was two years old, her father, a Navy test pilot-turned-executive recruiter, took a job in New York City, and the family relocated to Westport, Connecticut. Her mother worked as a real-estate agent in Westport. Linda worked as a child model at age five, appearing in Sears, J.C. Penney, and Macy's catalogues, and in over 70 commercials for Welch's grape jams and various other companies. Blair secured a contract at age six for a series of print ads in "The New York Times". At the same age she began riding horses, later becoming a trained equestrian.


title: Linda Blair

text: Blair started acting with a regular role on the short-lived "Hidden Faces" (1968–69) daytime soap opera. Her first theatrical film appearance was in "The Way We Live Now" (1970), followed by a bit part in the comedy "The Sporting Club" (1971). In 1972, Blair was selected from a field of 600 applicants for her most notable role as Regan, the possessed daughter of a famous actress, in William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" (1973). The role earned her a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress, and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Film critic and historian Mark Clark notes that in her performance, "Blair matches [adult co-star] Ellen Burstyn note-for-note." Despite the film's critical successes, Blair received media scrutiny for her role in the film, which was deemed by some as "blasphemous", and Blair has said the film had significant impact on her life and career. After the film's premiere in December 1973, some reporters speculated about Blair's mental state, suggesting the filming process had resulted in her having a mental breakdown, which Blair denied, and she later received anonymous death threats. To combat the rumors and media speculation surrounding her, Warner Bros. sent the then-14-year-old Blair on an international press tour in hopes of demonstrating that she was "just a normal teenager".


title: Linda Blair

text: Blair starred opposite Kim Hunter in the wildly controversial television film "Born Innocent" (1974), in which she plays a runaway teenager who is sexually abused. The film was criticized by the National Organization for Women, the New York Rape Coalition, and numerous gay and lesbian rights organizations for its depiction of female-on-female sexual abuse; the Lesbian Feminist Liberation dismissed the film, stating: "Men rape, women don't," and regarded the film as "propaganda against lesbians." After filming "Born Innocent", Blair also had a supporting part as a teenaged kidney-transplant patient in the disaster film "Airport 1975" (1974), which was critically panned, but a success at the box office. A steady series of job offers led Blair to relocate to Los Angeles in 1975, where she lived with her older sister, Debbie. Between 1975 and 1978, she had lead roles in numerous television films: "Sarah T. – Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic" (1975), as a teenager who becomes addicted to alcohol; "Sweet Hostage" (1975) opposite Martin Sheen, in which she plays a kidnapping victim; and "Victory at Entebbe" (1976), a dramatization of a real-life hostage situation starring Anthony Hopkins and Elizabeth Taylor.


title: Linda Blair

text: In 1977, Blair reprised her role as Regan in the "Exorcist" sequel, "Exorcist II: The Heretic" (1977), garnering a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress of 1978. The film was a critical and commercial failure, however, and at the time was the most expensive film ever made by Warner Bros. Studios. After filming "Exorcist II: The Heretic", Blair took a year off from acting and competed in national equestrian circuits under the pseudonym Martha McDonald. In 1978, she made a return to acting in the Wes Craven-directed television horror film "Stranger in Our House" (retitled "Summer of Fear"), based on the novel by Lois Duncan, and also with the lead role in the Canadian production "Wild Horse Hank", in which she used her equestrian skills to play a college student saving wild horses from ranchers.


title: Linda Blair

text: Blair's career took a new turn in 1979 with her starring role in the musical drama "Roller Boogie", which established her as a sex symbol. The following year, she co-starred with Dirk Benedict in "Ruckus", playing a young woman who helps a maligned Vietnam veteran evade antagonistic locals in a small town. She also starred in a number of financially successful low-budget horror and exploitation films throughout much of the 1980s. She starred opposite Peter Barton and Vincent Van Patten in the slasher film "Hell Night" (1981), followed by roles in the women-in-prison film "Chained Heat" (1983), playing a teenager in a women's prison, and the exploitation thriller "Savage Streets" (1984), in which she plays the lead of a female vigilante street gang who targets male rapists. In a review of "Savage Streets" published by "TV Guide", her performance was deemed "her best since "The Exorcist" (1973)... and that's not saying much." Also in 1983, Blair posed nude in an issue of "Playboy". In 1985, Blair starred again in another women-in-prison feature titled "Red Heat", playing a prisoner of war in West Germany. This was followed by a lead in the direct-to-video film "Night Force" (1985), in which Blair portrayed a woman who travels to Mexico to save her friend from terrorists.


title: Linda Blair

text: The era of Blair's career between 1980 and 1985 was marked by some critical backlash, with Blair earning a total of five Razzie Award nominations and being awarded two Razzies for Worst Actress. In the late 1980s, she worked in numerous low-budget horror films, including "Grotesque" (1988), opposite Tab Hunter, and the Italian production "Witchery" (1988), opposite David Hasselhoff. The following year, she starred in the romantic comedy "Up Your Alley" opposite Murray Langston, and the "Exorcist" spoof "Repossessed" in 1990, co-starring Leslie Nielsen. She also appeared in several Australian B-movies in the early 1990s, including "Fatal Bond" (1991) and "Dead Sleep" (1992).


title: Linda Blair

text: In 1997, Blair reunited with director Wes Craven for a cameo role as a reporter in "Scream" (1996), and also starred in a Broadway revival of "Grease", playing Rizzo. Also in 1997, she appeared in a documentary for Channel 4 in the United Kingdom entitled "Didn't You Used to be Satan?", which served as a biography of her life to that point and how the film "The Exorcist" had dominated her career and life. Blair appeared in critic Mark Kermode's 1998 BBC documentary "The Fear of God" (which Kermode directed and hosted), included as a special feature on the DVD of "The Exorcist". In 1999, Blair appeared in an online parody of "The Blair Witch Project" titled "The Blair Bitch Project".


title: Linda Blair

text: In 2000, she was cast as a regular in the BBC television show, "L.A. 7", and between 2001 and 2003, hosted Fox Family's "Scariest Places on Earth", a reality series profiling reportedly haunted locations throughout the world. Blair devotes time to a nonprofit organization she established in 2004, the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation, which works to rescue and rehabilitate abused, neglected, and mistreated animals and provide them with needed pet care. As an adult, she became an animal rights activist and humanitarian, working with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Feed the Children, Variety, the Children's Charity, and other organizations, as well as advocating for teen HIV/AIDS awareness. Blair is on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society operation’s board of advisors. In August 2005, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Blair travelled to Mississippi and saved 51 abandoned dogs.


title: Linda Blair

text: In 2006, she guest-starred on The CW television series "Supernatural" playing the part of Detective Diana Ballard, as she aids Sam and Dean Winchester in the episode "The Usual Suspects", which aired November 9, 2006. In 2008, she appeared at the 18th annual Malaga Fantasy and Horror Film Festival to accept a lifetime achievement award for her work in the horror genre. Blair appeared the following year in the documentary "Confessions of a Teenage Vigilante," discussing her role as Brenda in "Savage Streets" (1984). The documentary was included as a bonus feature on the 2009 DVD release of the film.


title: Linda Blair

text: In 2010, she appeared as herself on the cable series "Pit Boss" and "Jury Duty." She appeared in the 2011 Rick Springfield documentary "Affair of the Heart", and was a panelist in a 2011 episode of "The Joy Behar Show". In late 2011, Blair appeared at the taped Governors Awards for the 84th Academy Awards ceremony, honoring makeup artist Dick Smith, who had created the iconic makeup for Blair in "The Exorcist." In 2013, Blair accepted a role in the comedy web series "Whoa!", and has since appeared in the 2016 feature "The Green Fairy", and the films "Surge of Power: Revenge of the Sequel" (2016) and the upcoming "Landfill" (post-production).


title: Linda Blair

text: In 2022, Blair competed in season eight of "The Masked Singer" as "Scarecrow". Before the first elimination on "Fright Night" can be announced, she interrupted Nick Cannon by declaring forfeit while claiming that her fellow contestants "Sir Bug a Boo" (who would be unmasked in the same episode to be Ray Parker Jr.) and "Snowstorm" (later unmasked as Nikki Glaser) should face off. When unmasked, Blair did her praise for this show and stated that she wanted to talk about her animal charity called the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation Rescue and Wellness Center in light of the nation's animal crisis and to also annoy Ken Jeong.


title: Linda Blair

text: At age 15, Blair dated Australian singer Rick Springfield, 25 years old at the time, whom she met during a concert at the Whisky a Go Go. She also dated Deep Purple bassist Glenn Hughes, and Neil Giraldo, guitarist and future husband of Pat Benatar. Between late 1979 and mid-1981, Blair dated Styx guitarist Tommy Shaw. Blair also dated Jim Dandy Mangrum of Black Oak Arkansas. In the early 1990s, Blair was in a relationship with actor Wings Hauser.In a 1982 interview accompanying a topless pictorial in "Oui", Blair revealed that she found Rick James "very sexy". James, who was shown the piece by a member of his retinue, returned the compliment through an intermediary. They dated for two years and James wrote his hit song "Cold Blooded" about her. Speaking on their relationship in his book "Glow: The Autobiography of Rick James," he says "Linda was incredible. A free spirit. A beautiful mind. A mind-blowing body. She liked getting high and getting down as much as I did. We posed topless for a photograph that showed up everywhere. We didn't care. We were doing our own thing our own way. It was a love affair that I hoped would last. It didn't." James revealed that he found out Blair had been pregnant by him and had an abortion without his knowledge.


title: Linda Blair

text: On December 20, 1977, at 18 years old, she was arrested for drug possession and conspiracy to sell drugs. She pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of conspiracy to possess cocaine, in exchange for three years' probation. She was also required to make at least 12 major public appearances to tell young people about the dangers of drug abuse.


title: Linda Blair

text: Blair believes in the paranormal and supports animal welfare. In 2004, she founded the Linda Blair WorldHeart Foundation, a nonprofit organization that serves to rehabilitate and adopt rescue animals. She was a vegetarian for 13 years before becoming a vegan in 2001. Blair co-authored the book "Going Vegan!" in 2001.


title: Linda Blair

text: In 2014, Blair revealed that she was treated for an umbilical hernia. , Blair resides in Coto de Caza, California.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Eleanor Nancy Macpherson (; née Gow; born ) is an Australian model, businesswoman, television host, and actress.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: She is known for her record five cover appearances for the "Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue" beginning in the 1980s, leading to her nickname "The Body", coined by "Time" in 1989. She is the founder, primary model, and creative director for a series of business ventures, including Elle Macpherson Intimates, a lingerie line, and The Body, a line of skin care products. She has been the host and executive producer of "Britain & Ireland's Next Top Model" from 2010 to 2013. She is an executive producer of NBC's "Fashion Star" and was the host for the first season.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: As an actress, Macpherson appeared in supporting roles in "Sirens" (1994), "The Mirror Has Two Faces" (1996) and as Julie Madison in "Batman and Robin" (1997) as well as lead roles in "The Edge" (1997) and "South Kensington" (2001). She had a recurring role on "Friends" and hosted an episode of "Saturday Night Live".


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson was born Eleanor Nancy Gow in Killara, New South Wales, on March 29, 1964, the daughter of entrepreneur and sound engineer Peter Gow, a former president of the Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks, a Sydney rugby league team, and Frances Gow, a nurse. She is of Scottish descent. Macpherson's parents divorced when she was 10 years old, and she moved with her mother and two siblings. Her mother later remarried, and a clerical mistake in registering at her new school meant that her surname was changed from Gow to Macpherson (her stepfather's surname).


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson grew up in East Lindfield, a suburb in Sydney's North Shore, and attended Killara High School, completing her Higher School Certificate in 1981. She briefly studied law for one year at the University of Sydney. Her sister is businesswoman and environmentalist Mimi Macpherson, born Miriam Frances Gow.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson enrolled to study law at Sydney University. Before beginning her university studies, she visited the United States to spend one year doing modelling work to earn money to pay for her law books. She travelled to New York City, where she initially signed up with Click Model Management. Her modelling career began in 1982 with a television commercial for Tab which established her as a "girl next door" figure in Australia.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: During the 1980s, Macpherson's profile quickly rose and she appeared on the cover and in the pages of major magazines including "Elle", "Harper's Bazaar", "Marie Claire", "Vogue", "Cosmopolitan", "Tatler", "GQ", "Allure, Mademoiselle", "Glamour", "Time", "L'Officiel", "Flare", "Maxim" and "New York". She cemented her high-profile image through frequent appearances in "Elle"; she was featured on numerous covers and appeared in every issue for six straight years. During that time, at the age of 21, she married Gilles Bensimon, the creative director of "Elle". In 1985, Macpherson became the longtime face of luxury French skin care company Biotherm.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Eventually she garnered more exposure through "Sports Illustrated" magazine's annual Swimsuit Issue. She appeared on the cover a record five times: 1986, 1987, 1988, 1994, and 2006.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: She has walked the runways for Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren, Azzedine Alaïa, Donna Karan, Christian Dior, Thierry Mugler, Nicole Miller, Michael Kors, Perry Ellis, Kenzo, Todd Oldham, Calvin Klein, John Galliano, and Valentino.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: She has appeared in advertising campaigns for Christian Dior, Escada, Enrico Coveri, Azzedine Alaïa, Guy Laroche, Ralph Lauren, Victorio & Lucchino, Omega, Pinko, H&M, Victoria's Secret, ModelCo and Revlon. She also appeared in non-fashion advertising campaigns for Diet Coke, Chrysler, Miller Lite, Impulse, Budweiser, Tab, KFC, Garuda Airlines, and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: After appearing nude in the 1994 film "Sirens", Macpherson learned that the media had begun searching for nude photos of her, including contacting her ex-boyfriends. To address this, Macpherson appeared in a nude pictorial in the May 1994 issue of "Playboy" magazine, shot by Herb Ritts, to produce nude photos "on her own terms". In 1999, the twin island nation of Antigua and Barbuda honoured Macpherson by using her face on a series of postage stamps, the first model to appear on legal tender. Macpherson appeared among other Australian icons during the 2000 Summer Olympics closing ceremony, her elaborate float resembling a camera lens and featuring a runway. Along with Naomi Campbell, she co-hosted the Miss Universe 2001 pageant. Her popularity had reached such a level that Australian government offered her a position on its tourist commission as an unofficial ambassador.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: During her career, Macpherson has worked with fashion photographers including Francesco Scavullo, Mario Testino, Mert and Marcus, Ellen von Unwerth and Steven Meisel. Portraits of Macpherson, shot by Bob Carlos Clarke, were among those donated to the National Portrait Gallery, London by his family following his death. Macpherson received the Style Icon award at the 2006 Elle Style Awards presented by fashion magazine "Elle". In March 2008, she signed a three-year deal with Revlon Cosmetics, which named her a Global Brand Ambassador. She has since been featured in print and advertising campaigns for the company. She returned to the runway in 2010 to close the fall Louis Vuitton show for Marc Jacobs in Paris.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: In the 1980s, together with Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz, Naomi Campbell, Pavlína Pořízková, and Cindy Crawford, Macpherson became part of the new generation of supermodels. In 1989, she was given the nickname Elle "The Body" Macpherson by "Time" magazine after she appeared on their cover. She went on to use the name in a number of business ventures. In 1996, Frank DeCaro of "The New York Times" cited Macpherson, along with Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Helena Christensen and Claudia Schiffer as "The Magnificent Seven". DeCaro reflected, "Known by their first names to legions of fans, they are the legends of the modern catwalk, the girl next door pretty underneath all the paint".


title: Elle Macpherson

text: In 1994, she left her agency, Ford Models, to form her own company, Elle Macpherson Inc., which would serve as the financial organizational base for her later endeavours. She soon went on to produce her own series of calendars, each of which was accompanied by a "making of" television program in 1992, 1993, and 1994. She used this as a springboard to create the "Your Personal Best – The Body" series of workout videos.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: She later diversified her portfolio of businesses, and in 1990 launched her lingerie collection 'Elle Macpherson Intimates' in partnership with Bendon Limited Apparel. Intimates became the single best-selling lingerie line in both Great Britain and Australia.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: The partnership was among the first instances of a crossover between a model and a fashion label. In 1989, when she was first approached by Bendon to promote their lingerie in Australia, Macpherson saw an opportunity to reverse their strategy and suggested a licensing arrangement, with products bearing her name and designs created in partnership with Bendon's team. Though commonplace now, the idea was unorthodox at the time.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson took a significant role in the development and management of the company, serving as chief marketing officer and later Creative Director. In January 2010, Macpherson expanded the line, launching Obsidian as a sub-brand. While nursing her second child, she spearheaded the development of a signature maternity bra line. Intimates has retained a high brand recognition into the 2000s, appearing as a featured brand on "America's Next Top Model"; last year, the brand celebrated 10 years of being stocked at Selfridges.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson has also created her own line of beauty products: "Elle Macpherson – The Body". The line was carried at Boots, and Australian suncare brand Invisible Zinc. She spent a year on the board of directors at Hot Tuna Clothing, advising on product development, brand positioning and sales strategy.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: In 2007, the BBC TV series "The Money Programme" aired a documentary which followed Macpherson through her day-to-day business as she continued to develop her international lingerie business. In 2009 Macpherson delivered the Keynote Address at the annual meeting of the International Trademark Association.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: In 2014, Macpherson co-founded WelleCo, and released its flagship product, an alkalising wellness supplement, "The Super Elixir". The product, sold at retailers including Selfridges in London and the premium online retailer, Net-A-Porter has celebrity fans including Kate Moss.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson has received a number of awards recognising her business acumen and the success of Elle Macpherson Intimates. In 2005, she was named Glamour Magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year; in 2007, she received an Everywoman Ambassador Award recognising her success as a businesswoman; in 2008, the Underfashion Club's Femmy Awards crowned her Lingerie Designer of the Year; in 2009, she received a World Career Award from the Women's World Awards.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson made her film debut playing an artist's model in the 1994 film "Sirens", which starred Hugh Grant, Sam Neill, and Tara FitzGerald. She followed with a two-year sequence of film roles, appearing in films such as Woody Allen's "Alice", "Batman & Robin" alongside George Clooney, "The Edge" with Anthony Hopkins, and "The Mirror Has Two Faces" with Barbra Streisand. In 1996 Macpherson hosted an episode of "Saturday Night Live".


title: Elle Macpherson

text: In 1999, Macpherson appeared in five episodes of the American TV series "Friends" as Joey Tribbiani's roommate and eventual girlfriend, Janine Lecroix. Macpherson went on to act in the movie "Jane Eyre" with William Hurt, and she has also appeared alongside Ben Stiller and Sarah Jessica Parker in "If Lucy Fell". Her most controversial acting role was in the Showtime cable network miniseries, "A Girl Thing", as a woman experimenting with bisexuality. In 2001, she appeared in the Italian movie "South Kensington". She played agent Claudia Foster in "The Beautiful Life", appearing with Mischa Barton, Sara Paxton and Corbin Bleu. The show centred on aspiring models working for a modelling agency, trying to make it big in New York City and in the fashion world. In April 2011, she starred with Gary Lineker in an advertisement for Walkers Crinkles.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: In July 2010, Macpherson became the new host of "Britain and Ireland's Next Top Model", taking over from Lisa Snowdon. She also serves as executive producer on the show. The revamped show's panellists now include OBE-winning fashion designer Julien Macdonald, designer Whitney Port and male model Tyson Beckford.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson hosts and executive produces NBC's reality competition series "Fashion Star". The series gives 14 unknown designers, mentored by celebrities such as Jessica Simpson, Nicole Richie, and John Varvatos, the chance to launch their collections in three of America's largest clothing retailers, including Macy's, H&M, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Its first season was sold to 75 countries.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: According to a police statement reproduced online, between 11 and 22 July 1997 William Ryan Holt and Michael Mischler broke into Macpherson's Los Angeles home while she was away on business in Chicago. They stole an estimated $100,000 worth of jewellery, $6,000 in cash, and several photographs. The two were arrested on 4 August 1997. Mischler, 29, pleaded guilty to one count of attempted extortion and one count of burglary. He received a six-year and eight-month prison sentence. Holt, 26, a former US Air Force enlisted man and a military-justice convict out on parole, pleaded guilty to one count of extortion, and was sentenced to a year in prison.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson is a European Ambassador for RED, an initiative set up by Bono and Bobby Shriver to raise money and awareness for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and to help eradicate AIDS for women and children in Africa. She is also an ambassador for UNICEF.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: In Australia, she is an ambassador for the Smile Foundation, which helps the families of children with rare diseases and organises government research grants. She has also modelled for charitable causes including fundraising for 2007 British flood victims, and child welfare group Absolute Return for Kids.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: In 2012, Macpherson led Sky's campaign for International Women's Day. MacPherson is a patron for the National Association for the Children of Alcoholics (NACOA).


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson dated Billy Joel during the early 1980s. Joel has said that the songs "This Night" and "And So It Goes" were written about his relationship with Macpherson. Macpherson is also believed to be at least part of the inspiration for Joel's track "Uptown Girl".


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson met French fashion photographer Gilles Bensimon in 1984 on a photo session for "Elle" magazine. They wed in May 1986, and divorced three years later.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson began a relationship with financier Arpad Busson in 1996. They have two sons. The family lived together in London until their separation in July 2005.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: Macpherson subsequently began dating Miami, Florida-based hotel heir and billionaire Jeffrey Soffer, son of Donald Soffer, in early 2009. They broke up in March 2012, but reconciled following his injury in a helicopter accident in November 2012. They became engaged in March 2013, and married in July 2013 at the Laucala Resort in Fiji. In 2017, Macpherson and Soffer announced that they were getting a divorce. Macpherson also lives in Florida, where Soffer is based.


title: Elle Macpherson

text: From 2017 to 2019, Macpherson dated the British anti-vaccine activist and discredited academic Andrew Wakefield.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Henry Lee Lucas (August 23, 1936 – March 12, 2001) was an American convicted serial killer. Lucas was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and two others in 1983. He rose to infamy while incarcerated for these crimes when he falsely confessed to approximately 600 other murders to Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials. Many unsolved cases were closed based on the confessions and officially attributed the murders to Lucas, and he was considered the most prolific serial killer in history. Lucas was convicted of murdering 11 people and condemned to death for a single case with a then-unidentified victim, later identified as Debra Jackson. An investigation by the "Dallas Times-Herald" newspaper showed that many of the murders Lucas confessed to were flatly impossible for him to have committed. While the Rangers defended their work, a follow-up investigation by the Attorney General of Texas concluded Lucas was a fabulist who had falsely confessed. Lucas' death sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1998. Lucas himself later recanted everything, with the exception of his confession to murdering his mother, as a hoax. He died of congestive heart failure in 2001.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Lucas' case damaged the reputation of the Texas Rangers, caused a re-evaluation in police techniques, and created greater awareness of the possibility of false confessions. Investigators did not consider that the ostensibly trivial comforts such as steak dinners, milkshakes, and access to television in return for "confession" to crimes of extreme seriousness might encourage prisoners such as Lucas, who had little to lose, to make false confessions. Investigators also let Lucas see the case files so he could "refresh his memory", making it easy to seemingly demonstrate knowledge of facts that only the perpetrator would know. The police also did not record their interviews, making it impossible to know for sure how much information interviewers accidentally gave Lucas unprompted.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Henry Lee Lucas was born in a one-room log cabin in Blacksburg, Virginia. He lost an eye at age 10, after it became infected subsequent to a fight with his brother. A friend later described Lucas as a child who would often get attention by displaying frighteningly strange behavior. His mother, Viola, was a prostitute who would force her son to watch her engaging in sex with clients, and who would make him cross-dress in public, purportedly so she could later pimp him out to men and women alike. Eventually, Lucas' schoolteachers complained about the cross-dressing, and a court order put an end to it.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: In December 1949, Lucas' alcoholic father, Anderson Lucas, died of hypothermia after drinking to intoxication and collapsing outside during a blizzard. Shortly thereafter, while in the sixth grade, Lucas dropped out of school and ran away from home, drifting around Virginia. He claimed to have committed his first murder in 1951, when he said he strangled 17-year-old Laura Burnsley after she refused his sexual advances. As with most of his confessions, Lucas later retracted this claim.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: On June 10, 1954, Lucas was convicted on over a dozen counts of burglary in and around Richmond, Virginia, and was sentenced to four years in prison. He escaped in 1957, was recaptured three days later, and was subsequently released on September 2, 1959.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: In late 1959, Lucas traveled to Tecumseh, Michigan, to live with his half-sister, Opal. Around this time, he was engaged to marry a pen pal with whom he had corresponded while incarcerated. When Lucas' mother visited him for Christmas, she disapproved of her son's fiancée and insisted he move back to Blacksburg to take care of her as she grew older. When he refused, they argued repeatedly. These arguments escalated until January 11, 1960, when, according to Lucas, she struck him over the head with a broom, at which point he stabbed her in the neck. Lucas then fled the scene. He subsequently said:


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Opal returned later and discovered their mother alive, but in a pool of blood. She called an ambulance, but it arrived too late. The official police report stated that Lucas' mother died of a heart attack precipitated by the assault. Lucas was soon arrested in Ohio on the outstanding Michigan warrant. He claimed to have killed his mother in self-defense, but his claim was rejected and he was sentenced to up to 40 years imprisonment in Michigan for second-degree murder. After serving 10 years in prison, he was released in June 1970 due to prison overcrowding.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: In 1971, Lucas was convicted of attempting to kidnap three schoolgirls. While serving a five-year sentence for the crime, he established a relationship with a family friend and single mother who had written to him. They married on his release in 1975, but he left the marriage two years later after his stepdaughter accused him of sexually abusing her. Lucas began moving between various relatives, one of whom got him a job in West Virginia, where he established a relationship that ended when his girlfriend's family confronted him about another abuse allegation.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Lucas befriended Ottis Toole and settled in Jacksonville, Florida. There he lived with Toole's parents and became close to his adolescent niece, Frieda "Becky" Powell, who had a mild intellectual disability and had escaped from a juvenile detention center. A period of stability followed, with Lucas working as a roofer, fixing neighbors' cars and scavenging scrap.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Powell was put in a state shelter by the authorities after her mother and grandmother died in 1982. Lucas convinced her to run away with him and they lived on the road, eventually traveling to California, where an employer's wife asked them to work for her infirm mother, 82-year-old Kate Rich. However, Rich's family turned the couple out, accusing them of failing to do their jobs and writing checks on Rich's account.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: While hitchhiking, Lucas and Powell were picked up by the minister of a Pentecostal religious commune called "The House of Prayer", located in Stoneburg, Texas. Believing Lucas and the 15-year-old Powell were a married couple, the minister found Lucas a job as a roofer while allowing the couple to stay in a small apartment on the commune where they even attended church services. Powell became argumentative and homesick for Florida; when she turned up absent, Lucas claimed that she left at a truck stop in Bowie, Texas.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: In June 1983, Lucas was arrested on charges of unlawful possession of a firearm by Texas Ranger Phil Ryan. Later, he confessed to the murders of Powell and Rich, and led the police to their purported remains, although forensic evidence alone was inconclusive and the coroner stopped short of positively identifying either of them. Lucas' participation in the investigation would serve to boost his credibility in later confessions to other crimes. Lucas later denied involvement, but the consensus is that he did murder Powell and Rich.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: In November 1983, Lucas was transferred to a jail in Williamson County, Texas. He reported that he attempted suicide after receiving rough treatment by the inmates, and claimed that police stripped him naked, denied him cigarettes and bedding, held him in a cold cell, tortured his genitalia, and did not allow him to contact an attorney. In interviews with law enforcement personnel, Lucas confessed to numerous additional unsolved killings. It was thought that there was positive corroboration with Lucas' confessions in 28 unsolved murders, so the Lucas Task Force was established by James B. Adams, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: The Lucas Task Force officially cleared 213 previously unsolved murders as a result of Lucas' confessions. Lucas received preferential treatment that was extremely lax for someone supposedly thought to be a cunning mass murderer. He was frequently taken to restaurants and cafés, rarely handcuffed, allowed to wander police stations and jails, and he even knew codes for security doors.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Later attempts at determining Lucas' involvement in his confessed crimes were complicated when it was discovered he had been given access to information in the files of cases he was confessing to. There were suggestions that the interview tapes showed that Lucas would read the reactions of those interviewing him and alter what he was saying, thereby making his confessions more consistent with facts known to law enforcement. The most serious allegation against the Lucas Task Force is that they had let Lucas read case files on unsolved crimes, enabling him to come up with convincingly detailed confessions and making it virtually impossible to determine if he had been telling the truth about a relatively large number of the murders.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: In 1983, Lucas claimed to have killed an unidentified young woman, later identified as Michelle Busha, along Interstate 90 in Minnesota. When questioned by police, he gave inconsistent details on the way he murdered the victim and was eliminated as a suspect. In 1984, he confessed to the murder of an unidentified girl, referred to at the time as "Caledonia Jane Doe", who was discovered shot to death in a field at Caledonia, New York, on November 10, 1979. Investigators, however, found insufficient evidence to support Lucas' confession. In early 2015, over 35 years later, "Caledonia Jane Doe" was identified through a DNA match as Tammy Alexander. Lucas is also believed to have falsely confessed to the 1980 slaying of Carol Cole in Louisiana. Cole was also unidentified until 2015.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Journalist Hugh Aynesworth and others investigated the veracity of Lucas' claims for articles that appeared in "The Dallas Times Herald". They calculated that Lucas would have had to use his 13-year-old Ford station wagon to cover in one month to have committed the crimes police attributed to him. After the story appeared in April 1985 and revealed the flawed methods of the Lucas Task Force, law enforcement opinion began to turn against their claims that crimes had been solved.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: The bulk of the Lucas Report was devoted to a detailed timeline of Lucas' claimed murders. The report compared his claims to reliable, verifiable sources for his whereabouts; the results often contradicted his confessions, thus casting doubt on his participation in most of the crimes he had confessed to. Texas Attorney General Jim Mattox wrote that "when Lucas was confessing to hundreds of murders, those with custody of Lucas did nothing to bring an end to this hoax ... we have found information that would lead us to believe that some officials 'cleared cases' just to get them off the books."


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Lucas remained convicted of 11 homicides. He had been sentenced to death for one, a then-unidentified woman dubbed as "Orange Socks", whose body was found in Williamson County on Halloween 1979, despite a time sheet recording his presence at work in Jacksonville, Florida, on that day. Lucas was granted a stay on his death sentence after it was discovered that details in his confession came from the case file which he had been given to read. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1998 by then-Governor George W. Bush. In 2019, "Orange Socks" was officially identified as Debra Jackson, who was aged 23 at the time of her death.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: On March 12, 2001, at 11:00 pm, Lucas was found dead in prison from congestive heart failure at age 64. He is buried at Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville, Texas. Since 2012 his grave has been unmarked, due to vandalism and theft.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Lucas' credibility was damaged by his lack of precision: he initially admitted to having killed 60 people, a number he raised to over 100 victims, which police accepted, and then to a figure of 600 that led to him not being taken seriously. Of more than 3,000 murder cases in which he was a suspect, police believed more than 200 cases were committed by him. However, he remained publicized as America's most prolific serial killer, despite denials such as flatly stating, "I am not a serial killer" in a letter to author Shellady.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: Some continue to believe, nonetheless, that Lucas was responsible for a massive number of killings. Criminologist Eric W. Hickey cites an unnamed "investigator" who interviewed Lucas several times and concluded that he had probably killed about 40 people. Such assertions were given little credence, with the lawmen involved refusing to corroborate these claims. An experienced Texas Ranger to whom Ryan's team allowed access to Lucas said that although it was obvious to him that Lucas often lied, there was an instance where he demonstrated guilty knowledge. “I remember him trying to cop to one he didn’t do, but there was another murder case where I’ll kiss your butt if he didn’t lead us right to the deer stand where the murder took place. Ain’t no way he could’ve guessed that, and I damn sure I didn’t tell him. I think he did that one.” Other Rangers had similar experiences with Lucas.


title: Henry Lee Lucas

text: There have been several books on the Lucas case. Four narrative films have been made based on his confessions: "Confessions of a Serial Killer" (1985); "" (1986), in which the title role is played by Michael Rooker; "" (1996); and the 2009 film "Drifter: Henry Lee Lucas". Two documentary films were released in 1995: "The Serial Killers" and "Henry Lee Lucas: The Confession Killer." In 2019, Netflix released a five-part serialized documentary "The Confession Killer" focusing on the far-reaching consequences of the investigation.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, and file transfer rely on TCP, which is part of the Transport Layer of the TCP/IP suite. SSL/TLS often runs on top of TCP.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP is connection-oriented, and a connection between client and server is established before data can be sent. The server must be listening (passive open) for connection requests from clients before a connection is established. Three-way handshake (active open), retransmission, and error detection adds to reliability but lengthens latency. Applications that do not require reliable data stream service may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) instead, which provides a connectionless datagram service that prioritizes time over reliability. TCP employs network congestion avoidance. However, there are vulnerabilities in TCP, including denial of service, connection hijacking, TCP veto, and reset attack.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: In May 1974, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn described an internetworking protocol for sharing resources using packet switching among network nodes. The authors had been working with Gérard Le Lann to incorporate concepts from the French CYCLADES project into the new network. The specification of the resulting protocol, ("Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program"), was written by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, and published in December 1974. It contains the first attested use of the term "internet", as a shorthand for "internetwork".


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: A central control component of this model was the "Transmission Control Program" that incorporated both connection-oriented links and datagram services between hosts. The monolithic Transmission Control Program was later divided into a modular architecture consisting of the "Transmission Control Protocol" and the "Internet Protocol". This resulted in a networking model that became known informally as "TCP/IP", although formally it was variously referred to as the Department of Defense (DOD) model, and ARPANET model, and eventually also as the "Internet Protocol Suite".


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The Transmission Control Protocol provides a communication service at an intermediate level between an application program and the Internet Protocol. It provides host-to-host connectivity at the transport layer of the Internet model. An application does not need to know the particular mechanisms for sending data via a link to another host, such as the required IP fragmentation to accommodate the maximum transmission unit of the transmission medium. At the transport layer, TCP handles all handshaking and transmission details and presents an abstraction of the network connection to the application typically through a network socket interface.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: At the lower levels of the protocol stack, due to network congestion, traffic load balancing, or unpredictable network behaviour, IP packets may be lost, duplicated, or delivered out of order. TCP detects these problems, requests re-transmission of lost data, rearranges out-of-order data and even helps minimize network congestion to reduce the occurrence of the other problems. If the data still remains undelivered, the source is notified of this failure. Once the TCP receiver has reassembled the sequence of octets originally transmitted, it passes them to the receiving application. Thus, TCP abstracts the application's communication from the underlying networking details.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP is used extensively by many internet applications, including the World Wide Web (WWW), email, File Transfer Protocol, Secure Shell, peer-to-peer file sharing, and streaming media.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP is optimized for accurate delivery rather than timely delivery and can incur relatively long delays (on the order of seconds) while waiting for out-of-order messages or re-transmissions of lost messages. Therefore, it is not particularly suitable for real-time applications such as voice over IP. For such applications, protocols like the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) operating over the User Datagram Protocol (UDP) are usually recommended instead.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP is a reliable byte stream delivery service which guarantees that all bytes received will be identical and in the same order as those sent. Since packet transfer by many networks is not reliable, TCP achieves this using a technique known as "positive acknowledgement with re-transmission". This requires the receiver to respond with an acknowledgement message as it receives the data. The sender keeps a record of each packet it sends and maintains a timer from when the packet was sent. The sender re-transmits a packet if the timer expires before receiving the acknowledgement. The timer is needed in case a packet gets lost or corrupted.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: While IP handles actual delivery of the data, TCP keeps track of "segments" - the individual units of data transmission that a message is divided into for efficient routing through the network. For example, when an HTML file is sent from a web server, the TCP software layer of that server divides the file into segments and forwards them individually to the internet layer in the network stack. The internet layer software encapsulates each TCP segment into an IP packet by adding a header that includes (among other data) the destination IP address. When the client program on the destination computer receives them, the TCP software in the transport layer re-assembles the segments and ensures they are correctly ordered and error-free as it streams the file contents to the receiving application.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Transmission Control Protocol accepts data from a data stream, divides it into chunks, and adds a TCP header creating a TCP segment. The TCP segment is then encapsulated into an Internet Protocol (IP) datagram, and exchanged with peers.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The term "TCP packet" appears in both informal and formal usage, whereas in more precise terminology "segment" refers to the TCP protocol data unit (PDU), "datagram" to the IP PDU, and "frame" to the data link layer PDU:


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Processes transmit data by calling on the TCP and passing buffers of data as arguments. The TCP packages the data from these buffers into segments and calls on the internet module [e.g. IP] to transmit each segment to the destination TCP.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: A TCP segment consists of a segment "header" and a "data" section. The segment header contains 10 mandatory fields, and an optional extension field ("Options", pink background in table). The data section follows the header and is the payload data carried for the application. The length of the data section is not specified in the segment header; It can be calculated by subtracting the combined length of the segment header and IP header from the total IP datagram length specified in the IP header.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP protocol operations may be divided into three phases. "Connection establishment" is a multi-step handshake process that establishes a connection before entering the "data transfer" phase. After data transfer is completed, the "connection termination" closes the connection and releases all allocated resources.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: A TCP connection is managed by an operating system through a resource that represents the local end-point for communications, the "Internet socket". During the lifetime of a TCP connection, the local end-point undergoes a series of state changes:


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Before a client attempts to connect with a server, the server must first bind to and listen at a port to open it up for connections: this is called a passive open. Once the passive open is established, a client may establish a connection by initiating an active open using the three-way (or 3-step) handshake:


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Steps 1 and 2 establish and acknowledge the sequence number for one direction. Steps 2 and 3 establish and acknowledge the sequence number for the other direction. Following the completion of these steps, both the client and server have received acknowledgments and a full-duplex communication is established.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The connection termination phase uses a four-way handshake, with each side of the connection terminating independently. When an endpoint wishes to stop its half of the connection, it transmits a FIN packet, which the other end acknowledges with an ACK. Therefore, a typical tear-down requires a pair of FIN and ACK segments from each TCP endpoint. After the side that sent the first FIN has responded with the final ACK, it waits for a timeout before finally closing the connection, during which time the local port is unavailable for new connections; this state lets the TCP client resend the final acknowledgement to the server in case the ACK is lost in transit. The time duration is implementation-dependent, but some common values are 30 seconds, 1 minute, and 2 minutes. After the timeout, the client enters the CLOSED state and the local port becomes available for new connections.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: It is also possible to terminate the connection by a 3-way handshake, when host A sends a FIN and host B replies with a FIN & ACK (combining two steps into one) and host A replies with an ACK.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Some operating systems, such as Linux and HP-UX, implement a half-duplex close sequence. If the host actively closes a connection, while still having unread incoming data available, the host sends the signal RST (losing any received data) instead of FIN. This assures that a TCP application is aware there was a data loss.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: A connection can be in a half-open state, in which case one side has terminated the connection, but the other has not. The side that has terminated can no longer send any data into the connection, but the other side can. The terminating side should continue reading the data until the other side terminates as well.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Most implementations allocate an entry in a table that maps a session to a running operating system process. Because TCP packets do not include a session identifier, both endpoints identify the session using the client's address and port. Whenever a packet is received, the TCP implementation must perform a lookup on this table to find the destination process. Each entry in the table is known as a Transmission Control Block or TCB. It contains information about the endpoints (IP and port), status of the connection, running data about the packets that are being exchanged and buffers for sending and receiving data.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The number of sessions in the server side is limited only by memory and can grow as new connections arrive, but the client must allocate an ephemeral port before sending the first SYN to the server. This port remains allocated during the whole conversation and effectively limits the number of outgoing connections from each of the client's IP addresses. If an application fails to properly close unrequired connections, a client can run out of resources and become unable to establish new TCP connections, even from other applications.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The Transmission Control Protocol differs in several key features compared to the User Datagram Protocol:


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP uses a "sequence number" to identify each byte of data. The sequence number identifies the order of the bytes sent from each computer so that the data can be reconstructed in order, regardless of any out-of-order delivery that may occur. The sequence number of the first byte is chosen by the transmitter for the first packet, which is flagged SYN. This number can be arbitrary, and should, in fact, be unpredictable to defend against TCP sequence prediction attacks.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Acknowledgements (ACKs) are sent with a sequence number by the receiver of data to tell the sender that data has been received to the specified byte. ACKs do not imply that the data has been delivered to the application, they merely signify that it is now the receiver's responsibility to deliver the data.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Reliability is achieved by the sender detecting lost data and retransmitting it. TCP uses two primary techniques to identify loss. Retransmission timeout (RTO) and duplicate cumulative acknowledgements (DupAcks).


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: If a single segment (say segment number 100) in a stream is lost, then the receiver cannot acknowledge packets above that segment number (100) because it uses cumulative ACKs. Hence the receiver acknowledges packet 99 again on the receipt of another data packet. This duplicate acknowledgement is used as a signal for packet loss. That is, if the sender receives three duplicate acknowledgements, it retransmits the last unacknowledged packet. A threshold of three is used because the network may reorder segments causing duplicate acknowledgements. This threshold has been demonstrated to avoid spurious retransmissions due to reordering. Some TCP implementation use selective acknowledgements (SACKs) to provide explicit feedback about the segments that have been received. This greatly improves TCP's ability to retransmit the right segments.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: When a sender transmits a segment, it initializes a timer with a conservative estimate of the arrival time of the acknowledgement. The segment is retransmitted if the timer expires, with a new timeout threshold of twice the previous value, resulting in exponential backoff behavior. Typically, the initial timer value is formula_1, where formula_2 is the clock granularity. This guards against excessive transmission traffic due to faulty or malicious actors, such as man-in-the-middle denial of service attackers.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Sequence numbers allow receivers to discard duplicate packets and properly sequence out-of-order packets. Acknowledgments allow senders to determine when to retransmit lost packets.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: To assure correctness a checksum field is included; see for details. The TCP checksum is a weak check by modern standards and is normally paired with a CRC integrity check at layer 2, below both TCP and IP, such as is used in PPP or the Ethernet frame. However, introduction of errors in packets between CRC-protected hops is common and the 16-bit TCP checksum catches most of these.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP uses an end-to-end flow control protocol to avoid having the sender send data too fast for the TCP receiver to receive and process it reliably. Having a mechanism for flow control is essential in an environment where machines of diverse network speeds communicate. For example, if a PC sends data to a smartphone that is slowly processing received data, the smartphone must be able to regulate the data flow so as not to be overwhelmed.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP uses a sliding window flow control protocol. In each TCP segment, the receiver specifies in the "receive window" field the amount of additionally received data (in bytes) that it is willing to buffer for the connection. The sending host can send only up to that amount of data before it must wait for an acknowledgement and receive window update from the receiving host.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: When a receiver advertises a window size of 0, the sender stops sending data and starts its "persist timer". The persist timer is used to protect TCP from a deadlock situation that could arise if a subsequent window size update from the receiver is lost, and the sender cannot send more data until receiving a new window size update from the receiver. When the persist timer expires, the TCP sender attempts recovery by sending a small packet so that the receiver responds by sending another acknowledgement containing the new window size.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: If a receiver is processing incoming data in small increments, it may repeatedly advertise a small receive window. This is referred to as the silly window syndrome, since it is inefficient to send only a few bytes of data in a TCP segment, given the relatively large overhead of the TCP header.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The final main aspect of TCP is congestion control. TCP uses a number of mechanisms to achieve high performance and avoid congestive collapse, a gridlock situation where network performance is severely degraded. These mechanisms control the rate of data entering the network, keeping the data flow below a rate that would trigger collapse. They also yield an approximately max-min fair allocation between flows.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Acknowledgments for data sent, or the lack of acknowledgments, are used by senders to infer network conditions between the TCP sender and receiver. Coupled with timers, TCP senders and receivers can alter the behavior of the flow of data. This is more generally referred to as congestion control or congestion avoidance.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Modern implementations of TCP contain four intertwined algorithms: slow start, congestion avoidance, fast retransmit, and fast recovery.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: In addition, senders employ a "retransmission timeout" (RTO) that is based on the estimated round-trip time (RTT) between the sender and receiver, as well as the variance in this round-trip time. There are subtleties in the estimation of RTT. For example, senders must be careful when calculating RTT samples for retransmitted packets; typically they use Karn's Algorithm or TCP timestamps. These individual RTT samples are then averaged over time to create a smoothed round trip time (SRTT) using Jacobson's algorithm. This SRTT value is what is used as the round-trip time estimate.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Enhancing TCP to reliably handle loss, minimize errors, manage congestion and go fast in very high-speed environments are ongoing areas of research and standards development. As a result, there are a number of TCP congestion avoidance algorithm variations.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The maximum segment size (MSS) is the largest amount of data, specified in bytes, that TCP is willing to receive in a single segment. For best performance, the MSS should be set small enough to avoid IP fragmentation, which can lead to packet loss and excessive retransmissions. To accomplish this, typically the MSS is announced by each side using the MSS option when the TCP connection is established. The option value is derived from the maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of the data link layer of the networks to which the sender and receiver are directly attached. TCP senders can use path MTU discovery to infer the minimum MTU along the network path between the sender and receiver, and use this to dynamically adjust the MSS to avoid IP fragmentation within the network.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: MSS announcement may also be called "MSS negotiation" but, strictly speaking, the MSS is not "negotiated". Two completely independent values of MSS are permitted for the two directions of data flow in a TCP connection, so there is no need to agree on a common MSS configuration for a bidirectional connection.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Relying purely on the cumulative acknowledgment scheme employed by the original TCP can lead to inefficiencies when packets are lost. For example, suppose bytes with sequence number 1,000 to 10,999 are sent in 10 different TCP segments of equal size, and the second segment (sequence numbers 2,000 to 2,999) is lost during transmission. In a pure cumulative acknowledgment protocol, the receiver can only send a cumulative ACK value of 2,000 (the sequence number immediately following the last sequence number of the received data) and cannot say that it received bytes 3,000 to 10,999 successfully. Thus the sender may then have to resend all data starting with sequence number 2,000.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: To alleviate this issue TCP employs the "selective acknowledgment (SACK)" option, defined in 1996 in RFC 2018, which allows the receiver to acknowledge discontinuous blocks of packets that were received correctly, in addition to the sequence number immediately following the last sequence number of the last contiguous byte received successively, as in the basic TCP acknowledgment. The acknowledgment can include a number of "SACK blocks", where each SACK block is conveyed by the "Left Edge of Block" (the first sequence number of the block) and the "Right Edge of Block" (the sequence number immediately following the last sequence number of the block), with a "Block" being a contiguous range that the receiver correctly received. In the example above, the receiver would send an ACK segment with a cumulative ACK value of 2,000 and a SACK option header with sequence numbers 3,000 and 11,000. The sender would accordingly retransmit only the second segment with sequence numbers 2,000 to 2,999.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: A TCP sender may interpret an out-of-order segment delivery as a lost segment. If it does so, the TCP sender will retransmit the segment previous to the out-of-order packet and slow its data delivery rate for that connection. The duplicate-SACK option, an extension to the SACK option that was defined in May 2000 in RFC 2883, solves this problem. The TCP receiver sends a D-ACK to indicate that no segments were lost, and the TCP sender can then reinstate the higher transmission rate.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The SACK option is not mandatory and comes into operation only if both parties support it. This is negotiated when a connection is established. SACK uses a TCP header option (see for details). The use of SACK has become widespread—all popular TCP stacks support it. Selective acknowledgment is also used in Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP).


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: For more efficient use of high-bandwidth networks, a larger TCP window size may be used. A 16-bit TCP window size field controls the flow of data and its value is limited to 65,535 bytes. Since the size field cannot be expanded beyond this limit, a scaling factor is used. The TCP window scale option, as defined in RFC 1323, is an option used to increase the maximum window size to 1 gigabyte. Scaling up to these larger window sizes is necessary for TCP tuning.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The window scale option is used only during the TCP 3-way handshake. The window scale value represents the number of bits to left-shift the 16-bit window size field when interpreting it. The window scale value can be set from 0 (no shift) to 14 for each direction independently. Both sides must send the option in their SYN segments to enable window scaling in either direction.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Some routers and packet firewalls rewrite the window scaling factor during a transmission. This causes sending and receiving sides to assume different TCP window sizes. The result is non-stable traffic that may be very slow. The problem is visible on some sites behind a defective router.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP timestamps, defined in RFC 1323 in 1992, can help TCP determine in which order packets were sent. TCP timestamps are not normally aligned to the system clock and start at some random value. Many operating systems will increment the timestamp for every elapsed millisecond; however, the RFC only states that the ticks should be proportional.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP timestamps are used in an algorithm known as "Protection Against Wrapped Sequence" numbers, or "PAWS". PAWS is used when the receive window crosses the sequence number wraparound boundary. In the case where a packet was potentially retransmitted, it answers the question: "Is this sequence number in the first 4 GB or the second?" And the timestamp is used to break the tie.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Also, the Eifel detection algorithm uses TCP timestamps to determine if retransmissions are occurring because packets are lost or simply out of order.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP timestamps are enabled by default in Linux, and disabled by default in Windows Server 2008, 2012 and 2016.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Recent Statistics show that the level of TCP timestamp adoption has stagnated, at ~40%, owing to Windows Server dropping support since Windows Server 2008.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: It is possible to interrupt or abort the queued stream instead of waiting for the stream to finish. This is done by specifying the data as "urgent". This marks the transmission as out-of-band data (OOB) and tells the receiving program to process it immediately. When finished, TCP informs the application and resumes the stream queue. An example is when TCP is used for a remote login session where the user can send a keyboard sequence that interrupts or aborts the remotely-running program without waiting for the program to finish its current transfer.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The "urgent" pointer only alters the processing on the remote host and doesn't expedite any processing on the network itself. The capability is implemented differently or poorly on different systems or may not be supported. Where it is available, it is prudent to assume only single bytes of OOB data will be reliably handled. Since the feature is not frequently used, it is not well tested on some platforms and has been associated with vunerabilities, WinNuke for instance.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Normally, TCP waits for 200 ms for a full packet of data to send (Nagle's Algorithm tries to group small messages into a single packet). This wait creates small, but potentially serious delays if repeated constantly during a file transfer. For example, a typical send block would be 4 KB, a typical MSS is 1460, so 2 packets go out on a 10 Mbit/s ethernet taking ~1.2 ms each followed by a third carrying the remaining 1176 after a 197 ms pause because TCP is waiting for a full buffer.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: In the case of telnet, each user keystroke is echoed back by the server before the user can see it on the screen. This delay would become very annoying.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Setting the socket option codice_1 overrides the default 200 ms send delay. Application programs use this socket option to force output to be sent after writing a character or line of characters.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: The RFC defines the codice_2 push bit as "a message to the receiving TCP stack to send this data immediately up to the receiving application". There is no way to indicate or control it in user space using Berkeley sockets and it is controlled by protocol stack only.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP may be attacked in a variety of ways. The results of a thorough security assessment of TCP, along with possible mitigations for the identified issues, were published in 2009, and is currently being pursued within the IETF.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: By using a spoofed IP address and repeatedly sending purposely assembled SYN packets, followed by many ACK packets, attackers can cause the server to consume large amounts of resources keeping track of the bogus connections. This is known as a SYN flood attack. Proposed solutions to this problem include SYN cookies and cryptographic puzzles, though SYN cookies come with their own set of vulnerabilities. Sockstress is a similar attack, that might be mitigated with system resource management. An advanced DoS attack involving the exploitation of the TCP Persist Timer was analyzed in Phrack #66. PUSH and ACK floods are other variants.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: An attacker who is able to eavesdrop a TCP session and redirect packets can hijack a TCP connection. To do so, the attacker learns the sequence number from the ongoing communication and forges a false segment that looks like the next segment in the stream. Such a simple hijack can result in one packet being erroneously accepted at one end. When the receiving host acknowledges the extra segment to the other side of the connection, synchronization is lost. Hijacking might be combined with Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) or routing attacks that allow taking control of the packet flow, so as to get permanent control of the hijacked TCP connection.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: Impersonating a different IP address was not difficult prior to RFC 1948, when the initial "sequence number" was easily guessable. That allowed an attacker to blindly send a sequence of packets that the receiver would believe to come from a different IP address, without the need to deploy ARP or routing attacks: it is enough to ensure that the legitimate host of the impersonated IP address is down, or bring it to that condition using denial-of-service attacks. This is why the initial sequence number is now chosen at random.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: An attacker who can eavesdrop and predict the size of the next packet to be sent can cause the receiver to accept a malicious payload without disrupting the existing connection. The attacker injects a malicious packet with the sequence number and a payload size of the next expected packet. When the legitimate packet is ultimately received, it is found to have the same sequence number and length as a packet already received and is silently dropped as a normal duplicate packet—the legitimate packet is "vetoed" by the malicious packet. Unlike in connection hijacking, the connection is never desynchronized and communication continues as normal after the malicious payload is accepted. TCP veto gives the attacker less control over the communication, but makes the attack particularly resistant to detection. The large increase in network traffic from the ACK storm is avoided. The only evidence to the receiver that something is amiss is a single duplicate packet, a normal occurrence in an IP network. The sender of the vetoed packet never sees any evidence of an attack.


title: Transmission Control Protocol

text: TCP and UDP use port numbers to identify sending and receiving application end-points on a host, often called Internet sockets. Each side of a TCP connection has an associated 16-bit unsigned port number (0-65535) reserved by the sending or receiving application. Arriving TCP packets are identified as belonging to a specific TCP connection by its sockets, that is, the combination of source host address, source port, destination host address, and destination port. This means that a server computer can provide several clients with several services simultaneously, as long as a client takes care of initiating any simultaneous connections to one destination port from different source ports.