Stephen's Untold Stories

Shocking news to many, but not to some of us.

The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all.

A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem.

The findings ran counter to popular perceptions of online dangers as reinforced by depictions in the news media like NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series. One attorney general was quick to criticize the group’s report.

The panel, the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, was charged with examining the extent of the threats children face on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, amid widespread fears that adults were using these popular Web sites to deceive and prey on children.

But the report concluded that the problem of bullying among children, both online and offline, poses a far more serious challenge than the sexual solicitation of minors by adults.

“This shows that social networks are not these horribly bad neighborhoods on the Internet,” said John Cardillo, chief executive of Sentinel Tech Holding, which maintains a sex offender database and was part of the task force. “Social networks are very much like real-world communities that are comprised mostly of good people who are there for the right reasons.”

The 278-page report, released Tuesday, was the result of a year of meetings between dozens of academics, experts in childhood safety and executives of 30 companies, including Yahoo, AOL, MySpace and Facebook.

Read the rest here.

What an interesting story. Students in Marietta City Schools can now text the police if they need to report something suspicious.

Students aren’t usually allowed to use their cellphones at school. But under the “Text a Cop” plan, Marietta High School students won’t face disciplinary action for their efforts to keep their school safe.

The Marietta school board voted 6-0 Tuesday night to allow students to send text messages to two police officers on campus.

“It’s just the way our students communicate these days,” said Marietta High principal Leigh Colburn, who said parents are excited about the progressive program. “Marietta wants to be out front of school safety.”

The idea is that students will be encouraged to report items of concern, whether it be rumored plans of other students, or something more personal, such as abuse.

Marietta Lt. Cliff Kelker said if something serious is happening on campus, text messages will provide quick response.

“We can get help faster than any other way we have out there,” said Kelker, who oversees school resource officers.

Link to article

Disturbing story from south Georgia.

A group of third-graders plotted to attack their teacher, bringing a broken steak knife, handcuffs, duct tape and other items for the job and assigning children tasks including covering the windows and cleaning up afterward, police said Tuesday.

The plot involving as many as nine boys and girls at Center Elementary School in south Georgia was a serious threat, Waycross Police Chief Tony Tanner said.

School officials alerted police Friday after a pupil tipped off a teacher that a girl had brought a weapon to school.

Tanner said the students apparently planned to knock the teacher unconscious with a crystal paperweight, bind her with the handcuffs and tape and then stab her with the knife.

“We did not hear anybody say they intended to kill her, but could they have accidentally killed her? Absolutely,” Tanner said. “We feel like if they weren’t interrupted, there would have been an attempt. Would they have been successful? We don’t know.”

The children, ages 8 to 10, were apparently mad at the teacher because she had scolded one of them for standing on a chair, Tanner said.

Link to article

I remember this case pretty well, but I never knew about this guy.

Atlanta’s death toll was approaching two dozen, and the calls were pouring in.

It was 1981, and thousands of people were flooding the city’s phone lines with tips about what had been dubbed the “missing and murdered children” case.

Most of the calls yielded no useful information, but investigators feared that a crucial clue might be buried among them.

And experts on criminal psychology said the killer might even be among the callers.

“They said that guy will either call in or his name will be there,” Samit Roy recalled recently. “How will you put it all together?”

At age 31, Roy, who had been running the city’s computer systems for three years, was handed one of the most important tasks of his life.

Years before laptops and spreadsheets were commonplace, Roy developed a system to put data in detectives’ hands. His work at the heart of the investigation helped build a case against Wayne Williams, who was convicted in two of the 27 deaths authorities attributed to one serial killer.

In the missing and murdered children case, Roy created a searchable database from the information typed in by call takers, and linked it to numerous other databases, such as police files and vehicle registration records. Investigators who wanted to follow a tip on, say, a brown van, could use the technology to zero in on other calls that mentioned such a van, and pull up vehicle ownership records or anecdotes from police officers’ reports.

The young computer expert gave detectives what was then a novel power: the ability to search instantly across multiple databases for key words. Such boolean searches are instinctive even to children nowadays after a decade of exposure to search engines such as Google. But in 1981 they were a revelation for investigators who learned to assemble files in minutes that might have taken hours or days with paper documents.

Roy said police timed a stakeout of a bridge over the Chattahoochee River where Williams was sighted in part because the data indicated many of the bodies had been dumped from there during full moons. A police recruit heard a splash that night and saw Williams drive away. Police stopped him down the road, and more data from Roy’s network eventually made Williams a prime suspect.

Link to complete article

Does this remind anybody of the movie Minority Report?

Beginning Dec. 1, the Nashville, Tenn., public school system will become what is believed to be the first school system in the country to implement face-recognition security cameras to spot intruders in its schools.

Students, teachers, and school staff will have their pictures taken and uploaded into the system, so the cameras will recognize their images. When an unfamiliar person enters the building, and the camera cannot match that person’s face to a photo stored in its database, an alarm will sound.

MNPS has had security cameras in its schools for the past eight years, said Steve Keel, the district’s director of school security. But the face-recognition technology came to Keel’s attention after a district employee attended a conference and saw the system from Florida-based Cross Match Technologies.

While the face-recognition system can be installed several ways, Keel said he thinks the district will follow Cross Match’s recommendation to buy the type of camera it suggests. That camera is called an image quality indicator, or IQI, and is an IP-based camera.

Link to article

Thanks to Vicki Davis for pointing this out to me. It came to her from Steve Dembo, and I am more than happy to pass it along.

Those of you who have followed my blog know that I don’t often post things that really tick me off. Today is an exception.

A former Woodburn coach has gotten a state reprimand for biting the thigh of one of half a dozen wrestlers who tried to give him a wedgie. At a December 2005 practice, the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission said, team members tried to give Peter Porath a wedgie jerking his undershorts upward.

“At least six wrestlers, weighing between 180 and 215 pounds each, came up to Mr. Porath from behind in an attempt to give him a ‘wedgie’. In the process of getting the boys off of him, Mr. Porath bit the inside of a wrestler’s leg leaving distinct teeth marks,” the commission said.

The commission called that “gross neglect of duty.” It put him on probation for two years and said Porath must complete a class on appropriate behavior and write a public apology to the student he bit.

So, if you are a teacher and you are attacked by a number of students, you are simply supposed to sit there and take the abuse without any sort of resistance. And I really hope that the appropriate behavior class the teacher is forced to sit through has a section entitled “how to just sit there when receiving a wedgie.”

Wait, there’s more!

Blomberg said the wrestlers were disciplined by the wrestling coach but did not receive academic penalties such as suspension.

These students should have been charged with assault, plain and simple. I hope those extra couple of laps they had to run around the gym as “punishment” from the wrestling coach don’t scar them for life. Little jerks.

Link to full article

I really have to wonder if an actual crime was committed here. Was there an actual law forbidding the use of WiFi after hours at the library?

A police officer seized the laptop computer of a man using the Palmer Library’s wireless Internet connection outside the building after the library had closed.

Brian Tanner, 21, was sitting in his car Feb. 17 outside the Palmer Library playing online games. A police officer asked what he was doing, learned he was using the library’s wireless Internet connection and told him to leave.

A day later, police spotted him there again.

“It was kind of like, ‘Well gee whiz, come on,’” police Lt. Tom Remaley said.

The officer confiscated Tanner’s laptop to inspect what he may have been downloading, Remaley said.

Alaska State Troopers had chased Tanner off a few times at other locations, Remaley said.

Tanner said he used to park in his neighborhood and hop on unsecured wireless networks, but troopers told him to park in a public place. He found the network at the library, which was unprotected by a password.

Jeanne Novosad, the library system manager, said the wireless connection is normally shut off when the library is closed. The library was waiting for a technician to install a timer and the connection was left on for several days, she said.

Tanner said he does not think the case will go to court. Remaley said he’s not sure either. He has to talk to library officials, find out what their rules are, and make a determination.

Link to article

The Anderson County (Tennessee) Sherrif’s office has a live 24-hour webcam where you can see what’s going on at the front desk.

This is a real life transmission of the Anderson County Sheriff’s Department. Instances of violence or sexually inappropriate behavior by detainees during the booking process may occur. Viewer discretion is advised. This is a Jail, not a simulation. The persons in this transmission are either employees of the Anderson County Sheriff’s Department or arrestees.

Tennessee Jail Cam

This is great news for her family. Smart girl!!

A text message sent by a kidnapped 14-year-old to her mother led to her rescue Saturday, when police found her in a hand-dug, booby-trapped bunker.

Elizabeth Shoaf’s message also led investigators to name a suspect in her kidnapping more than a week ago police were searching a wooded area where the girl was found for 36-year-old Vinson Filyaw, said Kershaw County Sheriff Mike McCaskill.

The sheriff said the text message the girl sent to her mother came from Filyaw’s cell phone and deputies began looking for him Friday night.

Investigators used cell towers to determine a general location of the phone used to send the message. “That was the first break,” McCaskill said.

Link to article

I love these kinds of stories. Justice acheived through savvy technology use!

A New York City man retrieved a friend’s cell phone with the help of the New York City police and thousands of Internet supporters.

Evan Guttman set up a Web site, with the heading How Not To Steal a Sidekick after his friend Ivanna left her Sidekick in a taxicab. The pair sent text messages to the phone, but no one answered.

Soon after, Ivanna replaced her mobile device and discovered that someone had used the old one to take pictures and sign onto an AOL account. She discovered the pictures and e-mails because T-Mobile backs up data on remote servers.

Guttman said he used instant messages to contact the person in the photographs and emails but said she told him he was not getting the device back. That’s when he decided to use old-fashioned shame, but a modern twist.

Link to article

Link to the guy’s site