Streaking. It was a fad for a while in the 1970’s, funny, harmless and certain to piss off the grown ups.  At the Harvard-Yale game in 2006, a nostalgic MIT hacker reminded them which school had the best sense of humor.

This isn’t to be flippant about what follows in this post, but rather to provide context to the seriousness of the offense with which 15-year-old Sparkman High School student Christian Adamek was charged. Continue reading →

The video went viral as it should, given how awful the images were.  A swarm of motorcyclists driving crazy, having a grand time and then, inexplicably, one motorcyclist stopping a Range Rover on the highway. It didn’t end well for the motorcyclist, or the driver.

The motorcyclist who insanely decided to take on the SUV ended up with two broken legs, perhaps paralyzed for life, when the Range Rover tried to get away.  From the motorcyclists’ perspective, the driver of the SUV only needed to do as he was being forced to do and he would have been fine.  While that safe outcome was by no means assured, Continue reading →

Some guy created a website that allows other people to click some button that says he’s a pretty cool guy and does great at his job. People the guy doesn’t know click on the button to say how great he is at his job. He’s got nothing to do with it, but he knows that the people clicking on his button don’t know him and wouldn’t have a clue whether he was any good or not.

The guy doesn’t care a whole lot about whether people click on his button or not, but doesn’t have a problem with it either. Who gets upset about people they don’t know saying unwarranted nice things about them?  But other people, the ones who regulate what he does for a living, have a rule that says two things: first, that you can’t bullshit people, Continue reading →

Among certain public officials, penises are all the rage. And so they impose conditions, whether to stick things in there or just to require people to offer them up as a condition of freedom.  The Second Circuit, thankfully, does not harbor such an attraction, as reflected in its decision in United State v. McLaurin.

When David McLaurin failed to register as required as a sex offender, he was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment plus, upon release, the standard conditions of supervised release, which the judge pronounced to include:

“participate in an approved program of sex offender evaluation and treatment, which may include . . . plethysmograph examinations, as directed by the probation officer.” Continue reading →

You could have seen “Grace’s Law” coming a mile away, following the sad story of 15-year-old Grace McComas committing suicide after being bullied on twitter.  So Maryland’s attempt to never let another child be bullied went into effect this week in the hope that no child ever feels hurt again.

But what comes as surprise is Facebook’s “response” to the Maryland’s efforts.  Via Walter Olson’s post at Cato:

Maryland attorney general Douglas Gansler unveiled a joint initiative with Facebook and the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG) in which Facebook will create a new program for school officials, the Educator Escalation Channel Continue reading →

Lavabit’s Ladar Levison asked the right question, but he did it in the wrong place and way too late.

“How as a small business do you hire the lawyers to appeal this and change public opinion to get the laws changed when Congress doesn’t even know what is going on?” Mr. Levison said.

Now, he’s no longer a bit player in the secure e-mail industry, but a privacy hero, a government target and a guy without a job.  Before Edward Snowden became a public enemy, he used Lavabit, a fledgling company that took years to generate enough revenue to let Levison quit his day job. Continue reading →

The arrest of Ross William Ulbricht sent shockwaves through the underground internet, even though most of us wouldn’t have the slightest clue that the crimes with which he’s charged ever happened.  He’s alleged to be the mastermind of Silk Road, an online drug marketplace that existed in the deep web.

The what?  Accessible only via the onion network of Tor, payable only with Bitcoin, covered with multiple layers of encryption, false transactions and bouncing from computer to computer around the world so that no IP address can be traced, Silk Road enabled people to buy and sell things without regulation or accountability, except within its own community. It was as wild as the web gets, and what was sold there was drugs.  That wasn’t exactly a secret. Continue reading →

The government has submitted a lengthy brief to the Third Circuit in response to the appeal of Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer following his conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for embrassing AT&T by revealing a huge hole in its handling of iToys.  And it’s making computer guys, like my pal Rob Graham, nuts.

The start of the brief goes to great lengths to describe how Andrew’s company, Goatse Security…

is not, to put it mildly, a traditional security research company. Continue reading →

“I was horrified. I’m frightened for my cops,” Chief Thomas Nestel said reacts to surveillance video.

As well Chief Nestel should be, given what was reported by MyFoxPhilly.  A SEPTA Transit cop tried to stop a fare-beater, who didn’t go quietly.

Police said the suspect, Ernest Hays, was avoiding arrest and threw SEPTA police officer Samuel Washington on the ground and then pinned him under a bench.

No, it wasn’t that Hays fought Washington that horrified Nestel, but what happened next.  Or, to be more precise, what didn’t happen next. Continue reading →

Had it been a mural of happy unicorns, it would have still been there when the students returned from their summer of excellent experiments. But then, it was painted at a time when the Institute was more concerned with giving students the freedom to express themselves rather than never hurting anyone’s feelings.

When the residents of third floor of MIT’s Burton-Conner dorm left at the end of the spring semester, there was an old mural of a bar scene on the wall, and a real bar in front of it.  This was the personality of the floor, an aspect of dorm life that characterizes MIT.  Unlike other schools, each dorm has developed a persona, and attracts like-minded students who prefer the lifestyle it reflects. But that’s history, and this is a school of science. Continue reading →