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Man dressed as The Joker gets ID card
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A Dutchman dressed as the unpredictable master criminal The Joker from Batman managed to get himself a national ID card, despite supposedly stringent new rules which outlaw grins, funny faces, and head coverings from passport pics.
To avoid confusing facial recognition scanners, travellers in Europe have been ordered not to look too happy in their passport photographs. Eyes must also be open and clearly visible, and there must be no sunglasses, tinted glasses, or hair across the eyes. In the Netherlands, these rules were introduced last August.
But a 35-year-old man from the Dutch town of Hellevoetsluis decided to paint his face black and dress up as Batman’s goofy trickster-thief rival and was astounded that his new appearance was accepted without a hitch. Initially, the man was asked not to wear a hat, but when he argued it was because of religious beliefs, he was allowed to leave it on.
The incident has stirred quite a controversy among Dutch politicians. Interior minister Johan Remkes now has to explain how this could have happened. “We don’t think there are many people dressed up as clowns in this country,” his department said.
Michigan treasurer falls for Nigerian scam
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A public treasurer in the Michigan county of Alcona stands accused of embezzling tax payers out of more than $1.2m, at least part of which was used to cover costs he incurred falling for a Nigerian banking fraud.
Thomas Katona, the former Treasurer of Alcona County, was charged with nine felonies. According to the Michigan Attorney General’s office, the 56-year-old beancounter, who held his post for 13 years, also plowed $72,000 of his own money into the fraud.
County officials first suspected something was amiss late last year, when bank employees informed them Katona had sent eight payments totaling $186,500 to overseas accounts, six of which were associated with peddlers of the Nigerian scheme. He stepped down in November as authorities commenced an investigation.
They found that bank employees had warned Katona that the investment was a sham, but the treasurer ignored the warnings. An audit eventually showed that more than $1.2m was missing from county coffers. It remains unclear how much of that was paid to the scammers.
Last week a judge set Katona’s bail about $1m.
Diebold voting machine key copied from pic on Diebold site
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Good lord in heaven. How dumb are these guys at Diebold?! Can you believe the United States has actually entrusted them to build a security system for the original U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights?!
After everything else… now comes this.
It was revealed in the course of last summer’s landmark virus hack of a Diebold touch-screen voting system at Princeton University that, incredibly, the company uses the same key to open every machine. It’s also an easy key to buy at any office supply store since it’s used for filing cabinets and hotel mini-bars! That is, if you’re not a poll worker who already has one from the last time you worked on an election (anybody listening down there in San Diego?).
The Princeton Diebold Virus Hack, if you’ve been living in a cave, found that a single person with 60 seconds of unsupervised access to the system, who either picked the lock (easy in 10 seconds) or had a key, could slip a vote-swapping virus onto a single machine which could then undetectably affect every other machine in the county to steal an entire election.
But the folks at Princeton who discovered the hack (after our own organization, VelvetRevolution.us, gave them the Diebold touch-screen machine on which to perform their tests) had resisted showing exactly what the key looked like in order to hold on to some semblance of security for Diebold’s Disposable Touch-Screen Voting Systems.
But guess what? Diebold didn’t bother to even have that much common sense.
This idiotic company has had a photograph of the stupid key sitting on their own website’s online store! (Screenshot at end of this article.)
Of course, they’ll only sell such keys to “Diebold account holders” apparently — or so they claim — but that’s hardly a problem. J. Alex Halderman, one of the folks who worked on the Princeton Hack and tried to keep the design of the key secret for obvious reasons, revealed Tuesday that a friend of his had found the photo of the key on Diebold’s website and discovered that was all he needed to create a working copy!
State of the Union
Clinton Video
The Democratic National Committee released on Saturday a video running approximately 18 mins in length purporting to show a speech by Sen Hillary Rodham Clinton. Its authenticity could not be immediately confirmed. In fact there was some question raised as to when and where the tape had been made. Sen Clinton was shown not in typical Senate surroundings, but in a casual living room setting with the outdoors visible through a window in the background. Presumably the announcement was shot in one of Hillary’s homes, Chappaqua or Georgetown. But there is no mention on the tape of recent events, and some experts were of the opinion that the recording was old and had not been made recently.
On the tape the speaker, tentatively identified as Sen Clinton, is shown exhorting her followers and making attacks on President Bush and other US government officials. The tape ends with the threat of her own intentions to run for president, and a list of forthcoming steps that she would be taking in that direction. A CIA spokesman said while they had no specific reason to doubt that the person on the tape is in fact Hillary Rodham Clinton, they would have a higher degree of confidence in its authenticity after performing a voice and facial analysis.