Be sure to "middle click" on the post links to open them in a new tab. Kids get your mom or dad to approve all the news feeds, some may be PG-13 or higher.
According to the Mercury News, cops in San Jose will soon be wearing head-mounted video cameras to record their interaction with civilians. The devices will sit above their ears and they will be activated whenever they speak with a citizen or suspect. The videos will then be uploaded to a central server. Presumably these things turn off when the officers are in the toilet.
Why is this happening? Because people don’t trust cops right now. The system, called AXON, can also attach to other parts of the body.
A leading critic of the department welcomed the cameras as a tool to provide useful evidence, but dismissed their significance as a solution to rocky police-community relations.
“The AXON project is unfortunately a positive thing right now because the level of distrust is so high,” said Raj Jayadev, director of the community organization Silicon Valley De-Bug. “But it doesn’t address the more fundamental problem: What stereotypes police may carry when they see people of color on the street and make assumptions about
The kit also includes a computer that hangs from the officer’s belt.
Gotta love cops. A woman in Boston got mad at her 14-year-old son for being up at 2:30am playing Grand Theft Auto. (At least the kid wasn’t smoking dust in the street at that hour.) In fact, she got so mad that she called 911 for help. You know, “You have to help me. My son is up in the middle of the night playing video games! I don’t know what to do!” The cops responded, no doubt aggravated that they had to deal with this garbage, by saying, “Calm down, ma’am. Just put your dumb kid to bed.” That’s not an exact quote, but you know that’s what they were thinking.
The woman, Angela Mejia, feared that her son was addicted to video games. Rather than throwing the kid’s PlayStation into the Charles like a normal parent would do, she waffles, baffled that her son is acting out by having the audacity to stay up late and play games.
And who knows: maybe this kid is absolutely miserable, and the time he spends playing video games represents his only outlet. That certainly sounds familiar.
It’s like, I could see the mother being upset if her son ran with gang-bangers, but staying up past his bedtime to get in a little GTA? Doesn’t sound like too big a problem to me, and certainly not worthy of harassing the 911 operators. As if they don’t have actual emergencies to respond to!
The bomb squad in Carlisle, PA “neutralized” something that fell out of the sky triggered a total panic in the town. What was the bomb? It was a wireless router wrapped in duct tape that a man was using to grab free Wi-Fi from a nearby library.
Here’s a note to cops: the vast majority of items in the world are not bombs. Especially things that look like the kind of bombs you’d see on TV. If it appears to be something Bruce Willis would throw out of an ascending helicopter at the end of Die Hardest there is a 99.99% chance that it is not a bomb.
Oh well. At least they got to use the bomb squad’s “mechanical” neutralization solution. I suspect it was a hammer.
A new law in Ontario, Canada has banned the use of handheld devices while driving. This includes cellphones, GPS devices, MP3 players, etc. Slight problem: the law is broad enough that you can construe it to include doing things like changing the radio station or reaching for a cup of coffee.
Someone caught breaking the law faces up to a C$500 fine. And this isn’t 15 years ago: C$500 is about $460 right now. Pretty serious money to lose because you need to text your friend WTF.
As for that cup of coffee gimmick that Slashdot originally brought up, I sincerely doubt a police officer is going to waste his time and pull you over for sipping a cup of coffee at the traffic light. Unless, of course, Canadian cops are like their American counterparts and have unofficial quotas to meet at the end of the month.
That’s it, really. Don’t text and drive, friends. It’s not safe, no sir.
Please turn your attention to Rolling Stone, where an article about a blind, lonely phreaker is currently tearing up the charts. That is to say, it’s an article worth your time, and it’s certainly better than refreshing drudgereport.com for the thousandth time today.
The quick version, in case you can’t block off 15 minutes of your time to read the whole article, is that a blind kid named Matt was a greatphreaker. He was handy with a telephone, able to recognize phone numbers by the tone alone, call up the phone company, impersonate a supervisor, and wreak havoc. He moonlighted as a swatter, someone who can call in a SWAT team to a person’s house in an act of revenge. (“You called me names? Have fun when the cops show up to your house, guns drawn, and drag your ass off to jail.) Lots of fun, in other words.
His progression was pretty predictable: the kid spent all day in his bedroom participating in telephone party lines; made friends, made enemies, swatted every now and then; helped take down someone for the FBI; got caught himself when he was over 18, and is now in prison in Dallas.
The lesson? Do all your phreaking before you turn 18.
According to the Mercury News, cops in San Jose will soon be wearing head-mounted video cameras to record their interaction with civilians. The devices will sit above their ears and they will be activated whenever they speak with a citizen or suspect. The videos will then be uploaded to a central server. Presumably these things turn off when the officers are in the toilet.
