FBI Director Robert Mueller was banned by his wife from doing online banking after he nearly fell for a phishing scam, he said on Wednesday during a talk at the Commonwealth Club of California.

He received an e-mail purporting to be from his bank that looked "perfectly legitimate" and which prompted him to verify some information. He started to follow the instructions but then realized that that "might not be such a good idea," he said.

"Just a few clicks away from falling into a classic Internet phishing scam," Mueller "barely caught himself in time" and admitted he "definitely should have known better."

He said he changed his passwords and tried to pass the incident off to his wife as a "teachable moment," but she was having none of it and told him, "It is our money. No more Internet banking for you!..."

Prank Call Blamed for $50,000 in Damage to Conway Hotel

...Police say a person called the front desk and said they were an employee at a fire sprinkler service. Officer Sharen Carter says the caller told the clerk there was a problem with the sprinklers and the clerk needed to reset them by pulling the fire alarm. She complied, which caused the alarm go off.

Police say the caller then told her to pull the lever on the fire alarm down, but she was unable to do so. Carter says the caller then instructed the clerk that she needed to break the windows to keep the sprinklers from activating. The clerk and a hotel guest then started breaking the windows with a fire extinguisher.

His instructions didn't end there. The caller then told the clerk she needed to remove a portion of a sprinkler head to keep it from going off. Carter says the clerk broke off the sprinkler head, but that caused the hotel to start flooding....

REID: I'm saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That’s very clear.
QUESTION: No one's talking about releasing them. We’re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.
REID: Can't put them in prison unless you release them.
QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit?
 

How does the idea of flying a jumbo jet low over New York City for a photo op get through all the all the layers of proposal and discussion and operation planning without anybody saying, "Ah... maybe we should just Photoshop it instead? Or at least give people a heads-up?"

Yeesh....
 

As a prank, students from local high schools have been taking advantage of the county's Speed Camera Program in order to exact revenge on people who they believe have wronged them in the past, including other students and even teachers.

Students from Richard Montgomery High School dubbed the prank the Speed Camera "Pimping" game, according to a parent of a student enrolled at one of the high schools.

Originating from Wootton High School, the parent said, students duplicate the license plates by printing plate numbers on glossy photo paper, using fonts from certain websites that "mimic" those on Maryland license plates. They tape the duplicate plate over the existing plate on the back of their car and purposefully speed through a speed camera, the parent said. The victim then receives a citation in the mail days later....

Graffiti wall is vandalised

A BLANK wall built for teenage graffiti artists has been vandalised by an angry resident writing – "I paid my tax and all I got was this lousy wall".

The £3,000 6ft high by 30ft long wall was installed so youths could practice their graffiti artwork without using local property.

But ahead of its opening on October 31 the fed-up resident sneaked behind a security fence and daubed a protest about the use of taxpayer's money.

The wall, in Wadebridge, Cornwall, was funded by Wadebridge Town Council, Wadebridge Town Forum and North Cornwall District Council.

It was built in the town's Jubilee Park and was the brainchild of Sergeant Robin Moorcroft who has vowed to investigate the graffiti....

As I was eating breakfast while flipping the pages of a French local newspaper this morning, my eyes caught the picture above, which accompanied an article about Sarah Palin. I couldn't put my finger on it right away, but I knew there was a problem with this picture....
All day, I tried to discover what was wrong with the picture. Thanks to Quebec's news station 93,3, which I listen to in the afternoon, I learned what was wrong about it: it's a picture of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler in a recent Saturday Night Live sketch! Oops!...
Thing is, the snafu wasn't only made in my local newspaper. Actually, the article, with the picture attached, was written by Agence France-Presse, a company similar to the Associated Press; this means that the article and the SNL picture was published around the world! Oops!...

Ohio is an election battleground state with perennial problems at the polls. So what have election officials in some precincts of the state been doing to keep their voting machines safe from tampering?
Taking the machines home with them and stashing them in their garages in the days before a big election.
If it sounds like something pulled straight out of an episode of Saturday Night Live, or Borat for that matter, it's not. The practice has become so widespread that it even has a nickname, "sleepovers."...

A giant inflatable dog turd created by the American artist Paul McCarthy was blown from its moorings at a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before landing in the grounds of a children's home.

The exhibit, entitled Complex Shit, is the size of a house. It has a safety system that is supposed to deflate it in bad weather, but it did not work on this occasion....

[Museum director Juri] Steiner said McCarthy had not yet been contacted and the museum was not sure if the piece would be put back on display....

Gary McKinnon, the British hacker who broke into military computers looking for evidence of UFOs in the "biggest military hack of all time," did so using his home computer and a 56k modem....

Using a limited 56-kbps dialup modem and the hacking name "Solo" he found many U.S. security systems used an insecure Microsoft Windows program with no password protection.

He then bought off-the-shelf software and scanned military networks, saying he found expert testimonies from senior figures reporting that technology obtained from extra-terrestrials did exist....

Associated Press expects you to pay to license 5-word quotations (and reserves the right to terminate your license)
In the name of "defin[ing] clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt" the Associated Press is now selling "quotation licenses" that allow bloggers, journallers, and people who forward quotations from articles to co-workers to quote their articles. The licenses start at $12.50 for quotations of 5-25 words...
It gets better! If you pay to quote the AP, but you offend the AP in so doing, the AP "reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher's reputation."...

singingpatient

A man wearing a T-shirt depicting a cartoon character holding a gun was stopped from boarding a flight by the security at Heathrow's Terminal 5.
Brad Jayakody, from Bayswater, central London, said he was "stumped" at the objection to his Transformers T-shirt....
[The official's] supervisor comes over and goes 'sorry we can't let you through and you've a gun on your T-shirt'," he said.
Mr Jayakody said he had to strip and change his T-shirt there before he was allowed to board his flight.
"I was just looking for someone with a bit of common sense," he said....

A group in Santa Fe says the city is discriminating against them because they say that they're allergic to the wireless Internet signal. And now they want Wi-Fi banned from public buildings....

LAND O' LAKES -- A Florida substitute teacher said his job disappeared after he did a magic trick in front of his students.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas made a toothpick disappear, then reappear, in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land O'Lakes.

The Pasco County School District said the trick is just one of the reasons Piculas was let go.

"I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, 'Jim, we have a huge issue. You can't take any more assignments. You need to come in right away.' I said, 'Well Pat, can you explain this to me?' 'You've been accused of wizardry.' Wizardry?" Piculas said.

Piculas says the parent of a traumatized student complained after he performed the toothpick trick.

The assistant superintendent said Piculas had other issues, such as not following lesson plans and allowing students to play on computers that were not approved....

What would drive one of the nation's most successful and respected school systems to report which racial and ethnic groups demonstrate the soundest moral character and ethical judgment?

But in Fairfax, and in schools across the land, the instinct -- no, the compulsion -- is to amass data points and "disaggregate," ed-lingo for looking at children not as individuals but as members of a group. The move to quantify grows from a religious devotion to test scores, a faith that the shaping of a mind can be mapped like a cancer cell and expressed as a number. And the resort to race stems from the balkanization of society, the self-destructive notion that we are a collection of groups rather than a nation of individuals who believe what it says on the coins in your pocket: e pluribus unum -- out of many, one.

"The superintendent told me that the reason they broke it down by race was that two years ago, the board decided to report all data by race," Hone says. "That was part of the No Child Left Behind frenzy. This is a classic case of a pendulum overswing."

...Jose Velasquez's Mufflers 4 Less shop got more excitement than they bargained for Monday -- the first customer of the day was a masked man with a gun.
"He had his gun out, walking in the office," said mechanic Antonio Diaz.
The three mechanics on duty told him they didn't have any money and the owner would have to come in to open the safe. The man gave them his cell phone number.
"He just told us he would give us the number, and we would have to call when the owner was here and the money was going to get here," Diaz said....

BORDEAUX, France (Reuters) - The mayor of a village in southwest France has threatened residents with severe punishment if they die, because there is no room left in the overcrowded cemetery to bury them.

In an ordinance posted in the council offices, Mayor Gerard Lalanne told the 260 residents of the village of Sarpourenx that "all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried in Sarpourenx are forbidden from dying in the parish."

It added: "Offenders will be severely punished."

* Phone not included.

Max Moser and Philipp Schrödel say that decryption was very easy because the devices use a simple XOR mechanism for encryption and the keys are only one byte long.

grayhawkfh

Camelot has withdrawn its short-lived "Cool Cash" scratchcard after it required a higher than absolute zero grasp of how numbers work to understand it.

According to the Manchester Evening News, to qualify for a prize, punters had to "scratch away a window to reveal a temperature lower than the figure displayed on each card". Sadly, as the card had a decidedly wintery theme, this initially-shown figure was often below zero....

Among these was Levenshulme's Tina Farrel, a 23-year-old who admitted "she had left school without a maths GCSE". She explained: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't.

"I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher, not lower, than -8, but I'm not having it....

fuzzface00

...Appellate Judge Margaret McKeown responded by paraphrasing public comments by U.S. President George W. Bush, whom she reported as saying, "There is no surveillance of domestic phone calls without a warrant." 

The Bush comment came up again when AT&T attorney Michael Kellogg, also argued for dismissal on the Wonderland-like grounds that allowing the case to go forward, yet not violate state secrets, would prohibit AT&T from presenting a defense. 

"Any sort of program is a state secret," Kellogg said. 

"Even if the program doesn't exist?" McKeown replied, referencing the president's claim. 

"Whether or not it exists is a state secret," Kellogg answered. 

"But if President Bush said it's not happening, how could that be a secret?" the judge asked. 

These are some of the reasons the hearing lasted two and a half hours....

I think this guy testified as a character witness in the Knave of Hearts' trial.