(Image is used under the Pixabay license)

Someone actually thought this was a good idea? How stupid do you have to be?

Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables. ... "The children were in that room in the dark, begging for their lives, because they thought there was someone with a gun after them," said Brandy Cole, whose son went on the trip.

Update: Here's a link to the school's press release on the topic. Their account of what happened is completely opposite of what was reported on CNN.

Most of the students stood up and said, "That was a good one." "Yeah, you got me." High fives were exchanged.

Either the school is totally downplaying this or CNN has got some serious problems with their accuracy. But something about this press release bothers me and apparently I'm not the only one:

"The children went to sleep and did not discuss it the following morning." The absurdity of that statement is staggering. They are trying to convince people that in a class of over 60 students, after teachers pulled a 'prank', that not one of these ~60 students said anything about it the next day? Not one of them teased another one about falling for the 'joke'? Really? Not one?

The person who posted this comment on the Slashdot forums is right on.

Darn those hackers... so clever.

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This is so, so stupid. It's not weak security, its that you data-abused us for all our customer data that we didn't want you to keep anyway. If you hadn't stored all the data on us, you couldn't have lost it.

In addition to pilfering over 45 million—and possibly as many as 200 million—credit card and debit card numbers, the hackers were also able to obtain other personal data from over 450,000 customers. This included driver's license numbers and Social Security numbers.

I already know they don't need to store our credit cards, but licenses and SSNs?

Goodbye DRM

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Here's a neat article about how DRM is dying, but more importantly, how companies are realizing that searching for violators and charging them is far better than trying to implement DRM which doesn't work and ticks off customers at the same time. Duh.

Free Speech Flag

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This article is worth reading just from this tagline alone:

Last night, the AACS LA's attempts to keep an HD DVD crack under wraps backfired in a spectacular fashion. Pandora's Box is now wide open, and there's no going back now.

The problem with DRM is that they companies are doing this for entirely their benefit at the detriment of normal users. It's no wonder that the entire Internet community is against them. Now if we could only get that kind of response for RFID.

Brilliant Plan

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Congress is now considering a bill similar to the CAN-SPAM act for spyware. Like the CAN-SPAM act, it doesn't actually stop anything, but rather legalizes it instead.

Let's sum up. If the Spy Act become law, hardware, software, and network vendors will be granted carte blanche to use spyware themselves to police their customers' use of their products and services. Incredibly broad exceptions will probably allow even the worst of the adware outfits to operate with legal cover. State attempts to deal with the spyware problem will be pre-empted and enforcement left up almost entirely to the FTC. Gee, what's not to like in that deal?

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I had no idea Diebold sold to the French. But seriously:

Philippe de Villiers, a nationalist Catholic candidate in the election, called it a "cheating machine" as he voted in his home town of Herbiers in western France.

Note that it doesn't actually say who makes the voting machines. Maybe it really was Diebold.

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It looks like there's a legitimate working hack for Vista that kills their bogus activation scheme. Microsoft is saying that they're not going to do anything about it yet because they don't know if it will become a wide exploit. But I think this commentor (from the source article) has it more correct:

They didn't think it through as a "hacker" (pirate more like it) would, and now they have a problem. Millions of legitimate users are out there with legitimate hardware sold with Vista. MS can't simply pull the carpet out from under these users. They will need to devise a way that all users can continue using their systems without having to do something drastic like reinstall or update the BIOS because many users simply don't know how to. Even locating the product key on the sticker would be difficult for some.

MS can't simply pull the OEM keys and try again.

But on MS's side, the number of users using this method is very low. And MS have said they'd prefer we pirate Windows than use MacOS or Linux.

(Image is in the Public Domain)

Here's a fairly good checklist for what to do if you're a victim of identity theft.

The only problem is that he didn't mention the most effective tool for preventing ID theft that there is: Credit Security Freezes. If you live in a state that has a freeze law, don't wait until you're a victim, do it now!

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This story is hilarious! In short:

1. John McCain, Senator and Presidential hopeful, set up a Myspace page to "connect with younger audiences"
2. He used a default theme created by the author of this prank
3. He not only didn't credit the author of the theme, but one of the images in the theme was being pulled from the author's webservers costing him money every time someone loaded McCain's page.
4. The Author, to teach him a lesson, changed the picture to a joke political message

Anyway, read the details for a much better description by the author himself.

ID that broadcasts data about you. What could go wrong?

In an act of supreme stupidity and ignorance, Washington state has passed a law allowing residents to purchase an "alternative" drivers license that could be used in lieu of a passport at the Canadian border.

Citing the 9/11 Commission's support for more secure documentation for U.S. entry, Chertoff pointed out that U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents currently must look at more than 8,000 different forms of identification, whether birth certificates, driver's licenses or other documents.

So their answer to the problem?

The alternative license will contain a Radio Frequency Identification chip, commonly known as RFID, which the guard booths will use to scan the license as a traveler or trucker pulls up to the booth. U.S. passports issued since late 2006 already contain RFID chips.

They're going to offer a license that has no shielded covers like passports do that border guards will now just non-chalantly swipe across a reader rather than take the time to inspect. Brilliant. Maybe next, they can just put the readers out for the people in the vehicle to use making it even more convenient. That way, the criminals wouldn't have to bother changing the photo on the ID since no one would be looking anyway.