January 18, 2009 @ 10:32 pm
· Filed under Crime, General, Web
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
November 25, 2006 @ 3:10 pm
· Filed under Crime, Video, Web
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.
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.
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.
20-year-old Alexander Eric Smith was arrested after a three-month stretch where he periodically parked in front of a coffee shop off-and-on with a laptop and used its WAP.
The kicker? He never bought so much as a small latte.
Brewed Awakenings manager Emily Pranger finally tired of his presence and called 911. Police came and told Smith to surf elsewhere. After returning, he was taken into custody and charged with theft of services.
Note that unlike other cases, he was not charged with unauthorized use of a computer network. Instead, the premise for his arrest is that he used Brewed Awakenings’ free WiFi network without buying anything from them.
Gwinnett County is located in northeast metro Atlanta. They’ve had similar problems in the past.
Thieves have broken into portable classrooms at 20 Gwinnett County public schools over the past month and stolen 50 laptop computers and other electronic equipment, school officials said Friday.
Gwinnett school police officers are investigating the break-ins, district spokeswoman Sloan Roach said. The information has been shared with Gwinnett County police and other police agencies, Roach said.
“This is a greater-than-usual number of break-ins in a short amount of time,” Roach said. “It goes without saying that the loss of any public school property is a great concern. We are actively investigating this matter and hope to apprehend and prosecute the offenders to the greatest extent of the law.”
In addition to the computers, thieves also stole 16 graphing calculators, 15 printers, six projectors, three computer scanners, one digital camera and five other pieces of equipment, Roach said. There also was some property damage, she said.
The Colombine shooting is one of those things that still seems like it just happened last week. In April of 1999 I was still teaching at a high school in the Atlanta area, and it just shook us all to the core. Here is an article about some of the survivors. Colombine Victims Still Healing
March 4, 2006 @ 10:38 pm
· Filed under Crime, Tech
Here is a fascinating account of how a software program called Undercover was used to track a stolen Mac. Well, it realy wasn’t stolen, but the author pretended it was to test the system.
The team at Mac 360 “stole” a Mac in order to test Orbicule’s Undercover, new anti-theft software for a Mac. David Chartier described what Undercover does in an earlier post. The gist of it is that Undercover tries to locate a stolen Mac by taking and transmitting screenshots. If the Mac has an iSight, Undercover will even take photos of the user and send those back to Orbicule. What if the Mac isn’t connected to the Internet? In that case, Undercover simulates a hardware meltdown, in the hope that the thief will take the computer to an authorized reseller for repair.
February 23, 2006 @ 12:56 pm
· Filed under Crime, Misc.
This is one of the most incredible videos I’ve ever seen.
On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.
No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way upreal one-way streets.
Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and thefilm went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.
Police have arrested a man for using someone else’s wireless Internet
network in one of the first criminal cases involving this fairly common
practice.
Benjamin Smith III, 41, faces a pretrial hearing this month
following his April arrest on charges of unauthorized access to a
computer network, a third-degree felony.
Police say Smith admitted using the Wi-Fi signal from the home of
Richard Dinon, who had noticed Smith sitting in an SUV outside Dinon’s
house using a laptop computer.
"More than one-third of Internal Revenue Service employees and managers who were contacted by Treasury Department inspectors posing as computer technicians provided their computer login
and changed their password, a government report said Wednesday."
"A man from Poland had packed his car so full of beer, liquor and
cigarettes that it broke down, uncomfortably close to a border crossing
where customs officials were standing by."
February 23, 2005 @ 12:05 am
· Filed under Crime, Tech
Do you know what Spim is? It is the practice of sending unsolicited instant messages, and it is extremely annoying if you’ve ever experienced it. An 18 year-old was arrested in what is believed to be the first such arrest.
