Good morning, internet. Here is your top headline of the week: Designer nano luggage to carry drugs to diseased cells.
And now, your infographic of the week:
(by Chon Hon Lam)
This past weekend, in one of our many links, we mentioned this story here at the Big Bad Blog. It has since developed, and we have been watching it, absolutely fascinated.
I’m talking about the school in Pennsylvania that was accused of using laptops that it distributed to students as a tool to spy on them. This first came to light when a lawsuit was filed on behalf of one of the students, who was disciplined on the basis of what was seen on the video.
Yes, the school has the ability to do this. The school sent a letter to parents which admits that they have a “security feature” that allows them to remotely activate the webcams.
Students could not opt out. Laptops provided by the school were mandatory for classes at the school, and disabling the webcam or “jailbreaking” the computer in order to monitor potential intrusions were both considered to be offences worthy of expulsion. (via Stryde Hax)
The student did nothing wrong. The laptop’s security feature, according to school policy, should not have been turned on — the laptop was never lost or stolen (or reported as lost or stolen). The behaviour worthy of discipline? Eating candy. Not only did somebody at the school take a photo using the webcam, but they mistook candy for drugs. (via NBC)
The FBI is now investigating. For reasons that should be obvious at this point. (via the Washington Post)
Here at the Big Bad Blog, we are nothing if not flabbergasted.
The entire policy seems nothing short of foolish — laptops will certainly end up in teenagers’ bedrooms, and they have been enabled for remote activation and picture-taking. Beyond the issues being raised in the court case about privacy and illegal wiretapping — which are themselves valid concerns — the school appears to have created a child pornography network with the webcams. The policy is so foolish and poorly thought out as to be completely baffling.
If the school has been abusing the ability to operate the webcams remotely — and there is little doubt that they have, as this incident shows — it seems beyond doubt that there will have been photos taken of partially and/or completely naked children stored on school computers. Even if these were taken with the knowledge and consent of the children in question, they would be illegal.
This is a much more serious problem than the invasion of privacy. The penalties for such offenses are harsh, and the United States has a reputation for being ridiculously harsh — prosecuting teenagers for self-publishing photos of themselves in bikinis, for instance.
A school abusing its position of trust to secretly photograph kids? The prediction here is more revelations accompanying the FBI investigation, and some long prison sentences.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. A year ago today, the original Morning Coffee made its debut here on the Big Bad Blog. We have proudly been giving you a morning glance through the Internet ever since.
To celebrate, we present to you some of our favourite moments in the Big Bad Blog, in our usual format …
Our most popular Morning Coffee of the past year has been The Morning Coffee will have to stop shooting the cops, in which we pointed out that the British can now be imprisoned for photographing police officers.
(from This morning coffee is nude and covered in silver paint)
Our third most popular coffee is the one on drugs, sexting and bees. Mostly due to the sexting part — the third most popular search term to find the Big Bad Blog (after “weird tattoos” and “origami unicorn”. We’re a strange place).
Fourth on the coffee list is The morning coffee and the world’s strongest vagina, notable for the mighty vagina therein.
Rounding out the top five morning coffees is The morning coffee and the slutty grave. While we’re pretty sure it got lots of hits due to the use of the word “slutty”, we’ll borrow the webcomic instead — we seem to be short one today.
Decisions are being made right now that will decide whether or not you are insane in the year 2013. In May of that year, a new version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will be published. That publication determines what is — and what is not — a mental illness. The decisions made by the group defining mental illnesses will determine whether or not people get locked up in mental institutions or put on drugs for the things they think and feel.
Which is good when those people think that everybody is covered in spiders. There is concern that these people seem to be involved. And think that preferring people who are tall (or short, or fat, or thin) is a mental illness.
So there’s a “vaccine” for cocaine, now. The vaccine stops the drug from entering the brain, making it impossible to get high from cocaine. There is a problem, however: It does not stop cravings, if you happen to be addicted to the drug. As a result, people on the vaccine take ten times as much cocaine, bankrupting themselves in an attempt to overpower the vaccine and get high.
The person who way mayor of New York on September 11, 2001, has claimed that there was never a terrorist attack on the domestic United States while George Bush was president.
