On Friday, at Applebee’s restaurant in Madison Heights, Michigan, Taylor Dill-Reese ordered her 15-month-old Dominick an apple juice, but he ended up gulping down a margarita. From Reuters:
He “kind of laid his head on the table and dozed off a little bit and woke up and got real happy,” his mom said.The little boy reportedly began hailing strangers, too.
“Restaurant to retrain staff after mixed-drink mixup” (Thanks, Rick Pescovitz!)
This is the room where the Internet was born, 3420 Boelter Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Comedy genius and true-born nerd Chris Hardwick (@nerdist) invited me to join him as a guest on his very popular and very funny podcast. Here it is! Chris and his friendly LOL-sidekicks and I talked about what would happen if NPR and E! Television got married; the origin of Boing Boing; and the mainstreaming of geek culture.
And here’s his touring schedule. His live shows are incredible.
Senator Al Franken has proposed a “Pay for War” resolution that would require Congress to raise taxes and/or cut spending before authorizing new acts of war, so that American foreign adventures can’t contribute to the national debt.
“We have to ensure that Iraq and Afghanistan remain anomalies in American history,” Franken said on the Senate floor Wednesday. “And that’s what my resolution seeks to do. It will ensure that future wars don’t make our deficit and debt problem worse. It will ensure that Congress and American citizens must face the financial sacrifice of going to war. And it will force us to decide whether a war is worth that sacrifice.”“In the last ten years our wars have been paid for by borrowing,” Franken said. “The Iraq War was accompanied by a massive tax cut. That failed fiscal experiment created the impression that war requires no financial sacrifice. We know that is just not true. The question is who will bear the financial sacrifice, the generation that has decided to go to war or its children and grandchildren?”
Brian Krebs went browsing in an underground proxy marketplace, where criminals rent time on hijacked computers to other criminals who want to use the compromised machines as launching-grounds for untraceable networked attacks. Krebs traced down some of the people whose computers were up for rent and let them know that they were being bought and sold on the underground.
Michelle Trammell, associate director of Kirby Pines and president of TSG, said she was unaware that her computer systems were being sold to cyber crooks when I first contacted her this week. I later heard from Steve Cunningham from ProTech Talent & Technology, an IT services firm in Memphis that was recently called in to help secure the network.Cunningham said an anti-virus scan of the TSG and retirement community machines showed that one of the machines was hijacked by a spam bot that was removed about two weeks before I contacted him, but he said he had no idea the network was still being exploited by cyber crooks. “Some malware was found that was sending out spam,” Cunningham said, “It looks like they didn’t have a very comprehensive security system in place, but we’re going to be updating [PCs] and installing some anti-virus software on all of the servers over the next week or so.”
Saljake sez, “The Waukesha, WI County Clerk is allowed to design her own vote-counting-software(!) plus it lives off the network on a desktop computer in her office and has zero IT support after 5pm. Today, she found thousands of state Supreme Court votes for Tea Party darling Prosser that she somehow *forgot* to report to the AP yesterday.”
If these newly discovered votes are allowed to stand, it will reverse the upset in the state Supreme Court election that saw the judgeship go to a candidate who attracted a large anti-Walker protest vote.
Today’s announcement by Nickolaus drew immediate suspicions from Scot Ross, executive director of One Wisconsin Now, a liberal activist group.“Wisconsin deserves elections that are fair, clean and transparent,” Ross said. “There is a history of secrecy and partisanship surrounding the Waukesha County Clerk and there remain unanswered questions.”
Nickolaus, a former staffer for the Assembly Republican Caucus, has been criticized in recent months for her handling of recent elections. The Waukesha County Board sharply condemned Nickolaus after past elections, demanding an audit of her practices last year.
The auditors criticized Nickolaus for moving some sensitive files, such as election results, onto her personal computer.
Newly discovered Waukesha County votes would give win to Prosser (Thanks, Saljake, via Submitterator!)
Boing Boing reader lokayukta says, “India is going through its ‘Egypt moment,’ and for our version of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, we have the Jantar Mantar in New Delhi, where a 72 year old social acitivist named Anna Hazare is fasting ’til death’ to force the government to pass a comprehensive anti-corruption legislation, the Jan Lokpal Bill. The movement has already caught fire in hundreds of cities around India.”
Declan McCullagh at CNET reports that many federal Web sites will likely go offline if the government shuts down Friday night. “A 16-page memo (PDF) to federal agencies says their Web sites may stay online only in a small number of situations, including tax collection and handling ‘exempted’ activities such as payments and other functions that are paid for by previous annual budgets.”
Last month, an elderly Georgian woman wielding a shovel accidentally cut off internet access to the entire country of Armenia. Local media has nicknamed her “the spade hacker”. (Via Jad Abumrad)
Editor’s note: Alison Criado-Perez, a nurse with Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) shares this first-person account of evacuating war-wounded people out of Misrata. Ali is a nurse working for MSF in Libya and Tunisia. She has previously worked in Nigeria, Colombia, Uganda and Central African Republic. The video embedded in this blog post shows Ali actually treating a patient on the boat described in the account shared below.
It’s 11.30 on Sunday morning, and we are sitting in international waters, 20 miles off the Libyan coast, trying to make a vital contact to give us the all clear to enter the port of Misrata. The tension is rising, as we only have enough fuel to wait for another half hour or so. We’ve been here on stand-by for several hours – where has our contact disappeared to? Earlier this morning, in a briefing, we’re told of precautions to take in a war zone……. Am I really doing this? It’s all rather surreal.
We are a team of 13, a mixture of international MSF expats and Tunisian volunteer medics, who have opted to come on this mission to rescue war-wounded from Misrata and transport them to the safety and medical care of Sfax in Tunisia. The trip has been discussed and planned for a couple of weeks, following a plea from overwhelmed medical staff in the hospital of Misrata for assistance, but the final green light only came a day or so ago. We left early yesterday evening, aboard the 216-seater San Pawl ferry, converted to carry about 60 patients on mattresses, and 30 walking wounded. We don’t know what the exact patient list will be, especially as Misrata was shelled last night, but the potential list of 90 includes a couple on ventilators, many open fractures and amputations, those with multiple organ injuries, head injuries, post-gunshot chest injuries. It’s all very daunting.