The Lunatics are on the Grass

From the Reuters article:

At least 116 inmates escaped from medium and low security psychiatric hospitals in Britain last year, according to freedom of information data published by the BBC on Tuesday.

Former chief inspector of prisons David Ramsbotham said the figures were horrifying and a wake-up call for the government.

“There is a difference between a prison and a secure unit,” said Louis Appleby, Professor of Psychiatry at Manchester University. “A secure unit is a hospital — the people who are in it are patients and they are ill,” he told BBC radio.

“If you give the impression that there are 100 people getting out and roaming the streets and threatening the public that is not an accurate impression about the risks that the mentally ill people present to the public.”

The escape figures were published a day after judge ordered the detention of a patient who absconded from a low security psychiatric hospital near Bristol and raped a 14-year-old girl.

Blast From the Past

Google’s web spiders apparently like to spin a web of lies.  An article about the 2002 bankruptcy filing by United Airlines that Google’s spider grabbed from the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s archive had no date on it, so Google’s spider assigned a current date to it which resulted in the article being placed in the top results of Google News.  An employee from a Miami investment advisory firm named Income Securities Advisors then ran a Google search on “2008 bankruptcies,” the results of which had the old article as the top link with a September 6, 2008 date on it.  Hilarity ensues.  From the Wired article:

The employee mistook the news for a current story and included it in a subscription newsletter that was distributed through Bloomberg.

Panic ensued, as they say, and United Airlines stock price plummeted 75 percent (down from $12.30 to $3 a share) before someone realized it was an old news story and things righted themselves. The stock rebounded to $10.92 a share by Monday’s closing. But not before United Airlines contacted the Sun Sentinel and demanded the newspaper retract its (6-year-old) story.

This reminds me of Google’s slogan, “Don’t be evil.”  Perhaps they should have appended their slogan with “Don’t be incompetent, either.”

Identity Theft in a Box

By all accounts, the point of shredding sensitive documents is to prevent the disclosure of the information contained in them.  Today’s one-two punch of failure comes to you from the WHH Ranch Company and their local bank.  From the article by The Consumerist:

A Texas cannery has been using shredded checks from the local bank as packing materials for the past twenty years. The WHH Ranch Company claims that Michelle McBride of Kansas is the only customer to ever complain about the checks, which plainly displayed routing and account numbers for hospitals, medicare, schools, businesses, and personal accounts.

“You get the wrong people get a hold of this information, oh my gosh! They could have a heyday with this one box,” Michelle McBride said.

“I was just in shock. I just couldn’t believe that they’re using shredded up checks as packing material,” Amelia added.

NASA + Alliant == KABOOM!

Two of NASA’s one-of-a-kind experiments were destroyed recently due to failure of the rocket that was to carry them into space.  What makes this failure rather spectacular is that the rocket’s flight engineers were forced to detonate the rocket themselves as the rocket veered off-course.  From the NewScientist article:

A sounding rocket carrying two NASA experiments was destroyed 27 seconds into launch on Friday. The failure is another setback for NASA’s aeronautics programme, which has suffered from years of declining budgets.

Engineers were forced to detonate the launcher, developed by Alliant Techsystems Inc (ATK), when it veered off course after an early-morning launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. It is not yet clear why the rocket strayed off course.

NASA fails at choosing 3rd-party rocket manufacturers.

Alliant Techsystems fails at their business.

Apples and Oranges

Reuters is reporting that in Warsaw, Poland, mobile operator Orange is paying actors to line up in queue for the Apple iPhone launch.  From the ZDNet article:

“We have these fake queues at front of 20 stores around the country to drum up interest in the iPhone,” a spokesman said.

As part of a marketing campaign ahead of the iPhone’s Friday launch in Poland, the country’s largest mobile operator Orange is paying dozens of actors to stand in queues.

I’m not sure what the bigger fail is, the iPhone’s popularity in Poland, or Orange actually admitting to such shenanigans.

Sony… ’nuff said.

Apparently, with the massive loss due to failure of the PS3, Sony has eaten through their entire stockpile of profits from the wildly successful PS2.  From the Escapist article:

Here’s an interesting bit of trivia to toss out at your next social function: According to industry veteran Dave Perry, Sony has lost more money selling the PlayStation 3 than it made selling the PlayStation 2.

Perry, best known as the founder of Shiny Entertainment, made the statement at the Games Convention Developers Conference today, citing statistics gathered by DFC Intelligence. According to those numbers, Sony has blown more cash selling the PlayStation 3 at a loss than it made during the five peak years of PlayStation 2 sales, a figure some estimates put as high as $3 billion.

Way to blow your wad Sony…

Virtual Downtime

Two days ago, a bug in VMware’s most recent software update has blocked many users from booting their virtual servers. VMware confirmed the flaw exists in its Update 2 for ESX 3.5 and ESXi Server 3.5. From the Computerworld article:

The flaw, which appears to be only in Update 2, which was released about two and a half weeks ago, prevents virtual servers from powering up, according to user reports. “Starting this morning, we could not power on nor VMotion any of our virtual machines,” said someone identified as “mattjk” on a VMware support forum. “The VI Client threw the error ‘A general system error occurred: Internal Error.’”

After digging into the virtual server log files, mattjk found notes indicating that VMware’s software thought his license had expired. “This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly,” the log files read.

The date-related bug is triggered today, Aug. 12, mattjk and other users said. “Also in Australia, and experiencing the same issue just as you have described,” noted “McBain.”

Way to lock legitimate customers out of their systems VMWare! Especially on arguably one of the most important days of the month for IT administrators, Microsoft Patch Tuesday.

Objection… Overruled?

A presentation from some MIT students was recently blocked from being given at last weekend’s DEFCON hacker conference by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority.  The MBTA sued the students on Friday in an attempt to achieve a gag order on the vulnerability information about the Boston subway’s ticketing system, but ended up disclosing the information themselves in doing so.  From the DarkReading article:

In ironic twist, court documents that argue for suppression of Defcon presentation help distribute data about the hack.

The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority wanted to stop some students at MIT from revealing the security vulnerabilities they had discovered in the Boston subway system.

Unfortunately, the MBTA did just the reverse: It helped publish the flaws across the Web.

In a turn of events that sounds like a soap opera — or, more accurately, a situation comedy — the MBTA sued the students on Friday to prevent them from making a presentation at Defcon in Las Vegas about “how to generate fare cards, reverse engineer magnetic stripes on cards, and hack [radio frequency identification] cards” used in the Boston subway network

Way to go MBTA.

Drunken Idiot Passes Out on Street

What, this happens all the time you say?  Why would we bother mentioning it here? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that this man happened to do it at ever so perfectly a time as to have images of his passed-out self captured by Google’s roving band of creepy StreetView photography vans:

A man who fell asleep in a drunken stupor on the grass outside his home was horrified to find his embarrassment posted on the internet.

He had been drowning his sorrows over the death of a friend and collapsed after climbing out of a taxi.

As he slept off his excesses, a car-mounted video camera passed by to record pictures of the street for Google’s StreetView website.

We call that a definite FAIL.

No HIgh V for HIV Vacciene

Back on the 17th of July, a plan to test the latest generation of HIV vaccine on more than 8500 people was canceled. They test subjects were to be injected with viruses containing payloads of harmless HIV genes.  This delivery system was designed to prime an immune response to HIV-infected cells.  From the NewScientist article:

AFTER a string of failed clinical trials, the HIV vaccine is going back to the drawing board.

“We were maybe on the wrong track,” said Anthony Fauci, director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, in a podcast produced by Science. In the journal, Fauci outlined NIAID’s plan to shift HIV resources away from clinical trials and back towards fundamental questions (Science, vol 321, p 530).

Yea, it kinda helps to really understand what you’re doing before you try and do it.  “Fundamental questions” indeeed.