Looking through CNN’s coverage of Katrina’s aftermath, I came upon a map of the city with an ad from Western Union below. It read, “In emergency situations, trust Western Union to get money to loved ones quickly.” (Click to enlarge the image.)

Was Western Union being incredibly, pathetically tacky? Or were its ads just in the CNN rotation and simply appeared at the wrong time?

The answer came quickly when these two appeared (click to enlarge):

Now, if Western Union was offering free transfers for any money going into the disaster zone, that would be a Very Cool Thing and it would deserve high praise.

Taking advantage of human tragedy, on the other hand, deserves something else.

“NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) — Louisiana evacuees should stay away for at least a week to avoid “a wilderness” without power or drinking water that will be infested with poisonous snakes and fire ants, state officials warned Monday.”

(A “lede” is journalist-speak for the first graf — paragraph, that is — of a story.)

Best sites for late-breaking on-site info:

The best I’ve seen: The “Survival of New Orleans blog,” a blogger holed up with friends and supplies in a building somewhere.

The Times-Picayune Breaking News Weblog
and Jon Donley’s blog on the site.

UPDATE: Thanks to Eric for these: The Web sites Katrina Check-In and the New Orleans Craig’s List site are serving as clearinghouses for victims.

(Katrina Check-In was swamped, so it may take a while to get through.)

If that doesn’t work, the best place to try to find relatives is through the Red Cross — it’s at www.redcross.org or you can call (800) HELP NOW. Unfortunately, those folks can’t get through to N.O. either.

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Levee breach near the Industrial Canal and Tennessee Street. Three to eight feet of water expected.

Why mention this? Because I typed “tennessee street, new orleans” into Google Earth and it zoomed in right to the location. Neat stuff.

(Click for larger.)

The following, from the National Weather Service, is to me the defintion of “We’re not fucking around here”:

WWUS74 KLIX 281550
NPWLIX

ONCE TROPICAL STORM AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ONSET…DO NOT VENTURE
OUTSIDE!

“[T]he area from New Orleans to the Mississippi-Louisiana border is going to get a catastrophic blow.”

-and-

“I put the odds of New Orleans getting its levees breached and the city submerged at about 70%.”

That from Dr. Jeff Masters’s blog at the Weather Underground.

With all the digital cameras, Webcams, and phone cams out there, combined with sites like Flickr and smugmug, I wonder if the destruction of New Orleans this week will be the first major disaster to be covered more by the rank and file than by professional jounnalists.

Not that all the networks won’t be there to watch The End, but they can only have a couple of camera crews at most. Citizens, on the other hand, will be everywhere.

It’s going to be interesting to see how much amateur video appears on the networks, and how many Flickr collections appear showcasing the destruction. The fact that we have several days’ warning makes it easier, so I have high hopes for all those lenses out there.

With technology, it’s easy to break the law — or at least get close to the edge

Legally, it’s been a gray week for me.

I took apart and repaired a 15-year-old, Freon-filled air conditioner without an EPA permit. I destroyed a wasps’ nest with a makeshift flamethrower — using an aerosol can of cleaner “in a manner inconsistent with its labeling.”

And then I went hardcore. Well, sort of.

I got myself a new laptop at work; I bring it home on weekends for safekeeping. It has built-in Wi-Fi networking, and I had a Wi-Fi hotspot in my house.

As soon as I turned it on, the laptop found and connected to a Wi-Fi network. This was cool; I appreciate how easy it works. But it was also odd, because my Wi-Fi network is encrypted. You need a password to access it, and I hadn’t entered one.

I pulled up the list of networks, and there was mine, locked down, along with a few others, also locked. There was also one unencrypted one and I was connecting through it. The computer is set to search for the strongest network it can access and use it.

As I wasn’t planning on bringing my machine home more than occasionally, it was easier to piggyback on this mysterious signal than to set up my own network.

There have been plenty of stories about how you should secure your wireless network, and doing so isn’t difficult: a handful of clicks, really. Some neighbors had done so, but one had not, and now I was using his Internet connection.

Technically, this is theft. Sort of. (One reason it’s not is that I figured out which neighbor it was, and I told him. He didn’t mind.)

But it’s a good example of how traditional definitions don’t always fit in the brave new world. Was I stealing? It’s a solid argument that I was depriving him of bandwidth — that I was slowing his access. But what if he wasn’t online? (In fact, he wasn’t home at the time.) I wasn’t not depriving him of anything.

More importantly, he was leaving his network unsecured, so any PC with a Wi-Fi card in the area would pick it up automatically.

Try to make an analogy. It’s tough. He doesn’t pay for time on the network, so I’m not costing him anything. He wasn’t using the network then, so I wasn’t depriving him of anything — I wasn’t slowing his connection. Free WiFi connections are all over, so I wasn’t depriving an ISP of revenue.

Still, that hasn’t stopped other people from being arrested for “stealing” a signal.

(Amusingly, back in my office, I also get an unencrypted signal. This one’s from the Associated Press office across the street.)

Terrible twos

My two year old does not quite understand the concept of “don’t scratch your DVDs.” He’s already ruined a few CDs, but videos are more expensive and we’ve been good about keeping them out of his (literally) grubby hands.

The smart thing to do, of course, is make a backup and use that, keeping the original safely put away. That’s the beauty of digital, as I’ve said before: Lots of copies keeps stuff safe. This way Sam only risks a 50-cent disk, not a $20 one.

There are a bunch of programs out there for making backups of your DVDs with names like “1Click DVD Copy,” “DVD Wizard Pro,” and “DVD Cloner.”

I use one called DVD Decrypter, which I like for two reasons: 1) It’s free, and 2) it can remove UOPs from the DVD before making a copy.

If you have a DVD player, you’ve bumped into UOPs — “user operation prohibitions.” They’re the things that give the message “Operation currently prohibited by disk” (or something similar) when you try to do something you’re not supposed to.

For example, some of Sam’s disks come from a company — no names, please — that fills the first 10 minutes with commercials for its other products. The UOPs prohibit you from skipping them.

Can you imagine if you tried to read your child a book but couldn’t start until you flipped through 20 pages of ads? Of course not.

That’s why, when I made a backup of these disks, I also removed the UOPs. Now Sam can be as rough as he likes and we can skip the commercials, too. I know the original is safe, and I know he doesn’t have to be exposed to yet more advertising.

Is what I did against the law? Not yet, but the entertainment industry wants it to be. Right now it’s a gray area. I didn’t break the law, but the company that made the software might be on shakier ground… if it’s in the US. Of course if it’s in the free world (copyright wise) it might be perfectly legal.

Gray area

My father sent me birthday greetings with a card that has a photo of a New York scene — specifically, Fort Washington Park with the George Washington Bridge in the background. I’m always happy to see scenes of New York, but this one made me stop.

From the angle the shot was taken, you could just see, under the bridge, the Little Red Lighthouse. (If you don’t know about the lighthouse, you should.)

“Holy moly!” I said. Entirely by accident, he had sent me a card that brought back memories of one of my favorite childhood books. I scanned the card and sent it to a friend with a note, “Holy moly!”

Now that card was copyrighted art, yet here I was, scanning it and sending it to someone. Breaking the law or fair use? Obviously, fair use… I think. I wasn’t profiting from it, wasn’t depriving anyone of anything (it isn’t as if my friend was going to buy the card and now wouldn’t). It was pretty much in the context of a review.

Had it been a digital image I had paid for, however, and not an analog one (in this case, a printed one), that would have been exactly the kind of thing content creators would have wanted to prevent.

For now, though, I still have my copyrights — at least to some extent. (And let’s not forget that the idea of copyright was to protect the rights of content consumers as much as those of creators. It’s something the entertainment industry has paid Congress to ignore.)

I still can change my car’s oil without a license, permit, or certification. I can still build a potato cannon and fix my air conditioner. I can still copy my CDs to my MP3 player and use my TiVo to watch Friday’s Battlestar Galactica again.

But as technology marches on, our laws don’t always march with it. They’re written by men with agendas that are different than ours — men who don’t understand what they’re trying to legislate, or who are on the payrolls of companies that very much do understand it.

So chances are there will come a day there won’t be room for naughty men to slip about at all. The sad thing is that we’ll think them naughty in the first place.

Circa 1966 (a very good year, if you ask me), comes this gem: The Exciting Game of Career Girls.

Young women get to choose from a long reasonable disturbingly short list of careers — from teacher to nurse! Yet among all the options, librarian is mysteriously absent.

(Thanks, Eric!)

(This is the unedited version of the column that appeared in USA Today.)

When there are two sides to a story, sometimes everybody’s wrong.

You may have read about this: A group of high school students in Kutztown, Pa., have been charged with third-degree felonies for misusing their school-issued computers.

They’ve been given the nickname “the Kutztown 13,” as if they’ve been wrongfully charged by a government gone amok for a crime they didn’t commit. As a tech columnist, I suspect I’m supposed to rally to their defense because they’re just kids playing around with computers.

But that isn’t quite the story, although it is the story that one side wants you to hear: those poor, poor dears.

Students are Kutztown High School were given free Apple iBooks — Macintosh notebooks. They got free Internet access through the school’s network.

The price: $50 insurance if they wanted to take it home. And they and their parents had to sign an acceptable use policy document. Essentially, they promised to follow the rules of computer use, which included things like ‘you have to live with the Internet filter we put on the computers, as annoying as it is’ and ‘you cannot use instant messaging software,’ and ‘we have monitoring software that can peek at what you’re doing.’

The kids didn’t follow the rules. They’re kids, and they quickly took advantage of the school administration’s stupidity.

Stupidity, as in the school taped the administrator password to at least some of the machines. With that, they could shut off the Internet filter. (Taping the admin password to the machine? How dumb is that?)

Naturally, with the filters removed and the big, bad Internet at their disposal, kids did what kids will: They downloaded things they shouldn’t have, grabbed themselves copies of iChat messaging software, and — this is the best part — hacked the monitoring program the school had installed so that they could spy on the administrators’ computers. (Ha!)

And, as you may have read, they’ve been charged with third-degree felonies.

Sounds like overkill for some teenaged mucking about, especially when it’s pretty obvious that the school administrations was a small step away from clueless.

Their parents, naturally, are outraged at this. A felony conviction can stick with those kids the rest of their lives. Essentially, it could destroy them. Try getting a job when you have to check Yes to “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?”

Hence, “The Kutztown 13.”

But there’s a lot more to the story.

What the parents don’t mention — but the school did in a press release — is that it wasn’t as if the school came down with the Hammer of God out of nowhere.

Not at all. These kids were caught and punished for doing this stuff, and their parents informed.

Over and over.

Quoth the release:

Unfortunately, after repeated warnings and disciplinary actions, a few students continued to misuse the school-issued laptops to varying degrees. The disciplinary actions included detentions, in-school suspensions, loss of Internet access, and loss of computer privileges. After each disciplinary action, parents received either written notification or telephone calls.

What was the parents’ reaction those disciplinary actions? Some of them complained that — despite signing a document agreeing to the acceptable use policy — the kids should be able to do whatever they wanted to with the free machines.

‘We signed it, but we didn’t mean it’? Interesting lesson, there.

Of course, they point out how disturbingly stupid the school to tape the admin password to the machines. (How dumb is that? This dumb.) And kids will be kids; if I was 15 or 16 and got the admin password, yeah, I’d do what they did.

And turning the administration’s monitoring program around so they (the kids) could see what school officials were doing? Brilliant. Positively brilliant.

But brilliant doesn’t mean right.

Did you read about the four guys who stole more than $70 million from Brazil’s Central Bank by digging for three months and creating a 260-foot tunnel to the vault?

Also brilliant. And also wrong.

Then the kids and their parents argue that they didn’t do anything all that bad — downloading instant messaging programs they weren’t supposed to, for example. And if that’s all they did, they’d be right to be angry.

But that wasn’t it. When the school changed the admin password, the kids got hold of a password-cracking program to get the new one.

They were caught, over and over.

“Stop doing that.”

“Stop doing that.”

“Stop doing that.”

My two-year-old knows to stop when we tell him twice not to do something. What’s a 15-year-old’s excuse?

Warning after warning, punishment after punishment, letter after letter, the kids kept breaking the rules, kept breaking their promises, and kept getting caught.

Of course, they play up the fact that the school administration was outwitted by a bunch of teenagers and thus deserved what it got. And if you ask me, it is pretty pathetic that the school didn’t have people who could set up its systems properly.

But the school wasn’t exactly outwitted; it caught the kids over and over. And even if it was outwitted, is that an excuse? If I’m smart enough to pick the lock on your house, and I get in and watch your TV for a while — would you say I had the right to do it? After all, I have these skills and you don’t know what kind of lock to buy.

What if I was caught and punished, and warned not to do it again, but I did? And again, and again, and again?

How many times is it OK to take advantage of someone who knows less than you, but also has power over you?

Answer, as they discovered: not too many.

Some of the parents have set up a Web site to give their side of the story. On it, on the page titled “What we want,” is this:

“The administration needs to admit their responsibility in the breakdown of security and discipline during the rollout of this experimental laptop program.”

Huh?

The breakdown of security and discipline? By the school? These kids and their parents were warned over and over to stop, and they persisted. These parents are in effect saying, “We can’t control our kids.” If there’s a breakdown, it’s on the parents’ parts.

And then there’s this oft-quoted bit from John Shrawder, one of the kids:

“There are a lot of adults who go 10 miles over the speed limit or don’t come to a complete stop at a stop sign. They know it’s not right, but they expect a fine,” [not a felony conviction].

Um, hate to break it to ya, John, but if you get caught doing 10 MPH over the limit again and again, Bad Things happen to you.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, you get two points on your license for driving 10 MPH over the limit. After three, if you’re under 18, you lose your license for 90 days. Do it again, and you lose it for 120 days.

Not a felony, mind you, but the lesson is clear: If you do something once when you’ve been told to stop, you might get away with it. But over and over? Not so much.

But we learn from the parents’ site that these kids apparently have, shall we say, poor impulse control. (And their parents are powerless to stop them.)

“Make it policy,” sayeth the site, “that there is a back up plan other than felony charges for the kids who can not handle the temptations that laptops bring into their lives.”

First, there was a “backup plan.” It was the repeated disciplinary actions. Second, they appear to be saying that these kids can’t control themselves and the parents can’t control them. It’s not their fault they did these things even after being punished repeatedly. It’s the school’s, and it’s the laptops’.”

Sheesh.

Finally, after all these warnings and letters and phone calls, the school had enough. Yep, the kids were smarter than it was; that’s been proven. They can crack the security, ignore the rules, and the parents aren’t helping.

When nothing else worked, the school turned to the only thing it had left: the law.

Pennsylvania law classifies computer crimes like these as felonies. That’s not the school’s choice; it simply reported the crimes to the district attorney, who filed the appropriate charges.

Good.

Maybe a few pairs of soiled underwear will finally hammer home the messages into their heads: You don’t break in just because you can. When you sign an agreement, it means something. Learn to read the writing on the wall when it’s spelled out clearly and repeatedly.

But.

Soiled underwear and sleepless nights are one thing. A felony conviction is quite another.

The charges are not appropriate. The kids were incredibly stupid to do what they did, and the parents are just as bad for ignoring the messages they got. They’re also pretty pathetic if they think that the “kids will be kids” argument could possibly hold water after the first infraction. Or to even try to argue that the kids did nothing wrong after all those warnings — it’s like saying, “They had the ability to break in, so why shouldn’t they?”

But felony charges are not appropriate. Yeah, the kids and their parents clearly need to learn a lesson in a big way, by authorities more powerful than the schools. Fail them for the year. Forbid them from having computer access, period. Give them community service every day till they graduate. Slap ’em with hefty fines.

Ruining their lives with a felony conviction won’t help. They weren’t violent offenders, just idiot kids and idiot parents. This is a major screw-up on their parts, and it’s a lesson they need to be taught good and hard.

But even a minor felony with no any prison time is overkill. Destroying the kids’ lives doesn’t fix anything — it doesn’t make the world a better place. And that should be the goal.

Hurting their chances of going to a good college, or landing a good job does not serve the greater good. The punishment needs to be serious — something they and their parents will finally take to heart. But it should not be a gift that keeps on giving.

The kids in Kutztown are obviously smart (or at least they know how to use a search engine). They stand a good chance of getting past this and growing up and becoming productive members of society. Punish them so they’ll never forget it — but not so society never will.

I screwed up a bit of code in my Movable Type configuration, which caused the comments not to work properly for a day or so — you just got an error.

Dug into the code, saw the mistake, hopefully fixed it.

I doubt anything will go wrong n

ERROR UNDEFINED INVERSE PARTITION SPACE UNABLE TO REFLECT
CONSISTANT MEMORY ADDRESSES. CODE 1734516885 DUMP FOLLOWS:
10010101011010110101010101010101000100010011010101001101
00101010110101101010101010101010001000100110101010011011
10101011010110101010101010101000100010011010101001101100
00101010110101101010101010101010001000100110101010011011
10101011010110101010101010100010001001101010100110110010

Diddy: dumb.

They call it a cult for a reason.

Note: This entry has been moved to the USA Today section.

I think it’s common knowledge that men are better drivers than women. But we didn’t know quite how bad those durned females are.

A new study from some Saudi Arabian universities — their accuracy unquestionable — found that 50 percent of all traffic accidents are caused by women, despite the fact that they’re not allowed to drive.

Quoth the news story:

According to the studies, reasons behind road accidents involving women are usually caused by their lack of knowledge of road traffic rule and regulations. Some actions include opening the car door without paying attention to on-coming traffic is common. Marital quarrels are another main although overlooked reason.

I’m glad to see that, when the study found an accident was caused by a “marital quarrel,” the authors put the blame where it belongs: with the women. Because, as we all know, women are at fault in 100 percent of those.

Our friends the Saudis. [sigh]

Note to the dense: This is sarcasm. Sheesh.
Note to the observant: This entry came and went and came again. I know. I had some odd Movable Type problems. (That’ll teach me to experiment on my personal blog for work.)

It’s my blog, so I can post it.

Says the AP:

NCAA bans Indian mascots during postseason
The NCAA banned the use of American Indian mascots by sports teams during its postseason tournaments…

In other news, tickets are now on sale for the Washington Redskins annual kickoff luncheon.

It wasn’t too long ago that I wrote an entry here about why Doom 3 sucked.

I was not alone, judging by the e-mail I got.

But today I stumbled upon “A Gamers’ Manifesto” that takes game makers to task for all the things I hated about Doom 3, plus a whole honkin’ lot more. Funny… and sad.

Coupla snippets:

Don’t show my character casting magic meteors that smash mountains in one scene and in the next send me all over the dungeon trying to find a single key to a rickety wooden door that looks like it could be knocked in with a strong shoulder. Make it a magic door, a huge door, fine, but don’t make it an arbitrary door that only remains closed because that’s what the plot requires.

And…

Did you remember when you were a kid and you got bored on weekends, how you would go to a large building, a hotel or a hospital, then wander around for several hours looking for a certain room? While zombies attacked you? Neither do we. That’s because, much to the surprise of FPS game makers everywhere, wandering around lost in hallways isn’t fun.

Scott Kleper has posted a wonderfully clear and well-written explanation of the current fight against copyright, and why media companies are users are going at it over the ability to listen to music and watch videos.

It’s a great, not-too-long way to understand why pirated music and movies are more popular than ever.

I have no idea why you don’t see this kind of stuff anymore.

(Thanks to Banned Cartoons!)