Apparently having too much to drink and getting some liquid courage going, 19-year-old Wilnelia Rivera Caraballo decided that she was going to rob a store. Seeing as she didn’t have any real weapons or the creativity of our favorite stick up man, Ricky New, she decided to use a toy gun as her weapon of choice. [...]
You may have heard about the Conficker Worm from way back in 2008. It caused quite a scare as it was infecting a huge amount of computers, was able to spread on it’s own, and no one knew how to stop it. Well, at this point this worm isn’t as popular or thought of as much, especially as there are now patches and protections from it, however, this worm is still alive and well with an estimated 12 million computers under its control. [...]
Facebook is planning on rolling out yet another feature which will make sharing that much easier for its users. However, security specialists are concerned that this new feature might make the sharing of personal information too easy, leading to an increase in hacking and harassment. [...]
Car owners read carefully: if your car was ever signed up for OnStar, even if that means you might have bought a pre-owned vehicle where the previous owner was an OnStar subscriber, the car tracking and communications service is about to start tracking your vehicle once again. [...]
Internet security company McAfee conducts an annual study that classifies the top celebrities that might be harmful to your computer’s health. By harmful we don’t mean that the celebrities themselves might wreak havoc on your system, but instead that searching for websites or images of these people might bring up malware-loaded websites specifically created to look like innocent celebrity content. [...]
This week, the BrickHouse family spent some time together outside of the confines of our office. We retained the services of the good people at CityHUNT, who put together a fantastically fun scavenger hunt for us. We were broken down into teams and wandered the streets of Manhattan around Grand Central Terminal, looking to take a specific list of photos. Goals ranged from getting a picture of a team member driving a cab to a photo of your entire team under water. It was a great time, and we really want to extend our deepest thanks to CityHUNT. You can find out more about them here: http://cityhunt.org/
Click this link to see some of our better pictures.
After a series of break-ins in Hockley, Birmingham, UK that all seemed to be carried out by the same serial burglar, local authorities decided not to leave his arrest up to chance and to instead set a trap. We’re not sure exactly how the police knew that this trap would work or just how quickly it would catch the crook, but it sure did get the job done. [...]
Emile Pratt Jr., a 28-year old Sharon, Pa. man had successfully robbed a jewelry store of about 100 pieces and sold them to various pawn shops across Pennsylvania. He was in the clear and could have most likely remained free, but the money from the heist wasn’t enough, and he decided he wanted to get more from the store. [...]
GPS accuracy and lock-on speed depends on how many GPS satellites have a clear view of your device at any moment of the day, however, what most people aren’t aware of is that there are plenty of non-GPS satellites oribiting Earth that are capable of doing the exact same job of providing location. It only makes sense that U.S. cell providers would eventually tap into these additional satellites. [...]
Lately, we have been hearing a lot about people getting into legal trouble for recording on-duty police officers with their cell phones or camcorders. Not only are these people being harassed, having their cameras and other recording equipment confiscated, but in some cases they’ve been arrested and jailed. The interesting thing here is that these people were not breaking any laws, but were in fact entitled to recording police by the first amendment. This right was confirmed by a federal appellate court last week. [...]
Surveillance security systems and smart DVRs have come a long way in the past decade with the invention of features such as motion detection, scheduled recording, and live video streaming over the web. The lastest development, however, not only surpasses these features in usefulness, but downright puts their technological breakthroughs to shame. [...]
GPS ankle bracelets are a pretty ingenious idea; you strap a GPS tracker onto the leg of the person you want to track, and wherever they go, you stay informed in real-time. And to make sure that the bracelet remains on the leg, there are safety measures that alert the tracking party whenever the bracelet has been unlocked, broken, deactivated, or simply travels outside a designated area. However, as two employees of a British private security firm recently found out, there is a loophole that compromises the reliability of such a device: artificial limbs. [...]
