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.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

Hwang has been on trial for more than two years on charges of breaking the law on research ethics and for misusing $2.8 million in state funds and private donations.

“The decision took into account the chief researcher’s past dismissal from Seoul National University for manipulating research papers in 2005 and ethical questions in procuring human eggs and his indictment for illegally trading in human eggs,” the Korean Health Ministry said in a statement.

Two landmark papers published by Hwang’s team on cloned human embryonic stem cells were withdrawn by the publisher after an investigation panel determined key data had been intentionally fabricated.

Oh how the mighty have fallen…

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Georgia said Monday that the erroneous mailings were primarily Explanation of Benefits (EOB) letters, which include the patient’s name and ID number, the name of the medical provider delivering the service, and the amounts charged and owed.

“A small percentage” of letters also contained the patient’s Social Security numbers, said Cindy Sanders, a Blue Cross spokeswoman. The EOB forms were mailed to the addresses of other Blue Cross policyholders.

“This is very, very serious,” Oxendine said. A person with knowledge of medicine or billing, for example, could determine if the patient was treated for cancer, HIV or fertility problems, he said.

Blue Cross said the mix-up was caused by a change in the computer system that was not properly tested.

Blue Cross has 3.1 million Georgia policyholders.

So without further a due, this year’s winner is…

<drumroll>

Debian for shipping a backdoored OpenSSL library for two years

(CVE-2008-0166)

On May 2nd, 2006 Kurt Roeckx commented out two very important lines of code in the OpenSSL pseudo-random number generator (PRNG). The reason? Valgrind and Purify complained about the use of uninitialized data in the function that seeded the PRNG. By commenting out these two lines of code, the randomness of all cryptographic keys generated by the Debian OpenSSL package was reduced to about 15 bits, or less than 32,768 unique keys in practice.

By crippling the PRNG in the OpenSSL library, not only were all cryptographic keys generated on Debian-based systems suspect, but all cryptographic operations performed by these systems as well. Since the flaw was announced, Luciano Bello, Maximiliano Bertacchini, and Paolo Abeni have released a patch to Wireshark that decrypts SSL sessions (bypassing Perfect Forward Secrecy) that involve one of the weak keys. To this date, Kurt Roeckx still hosts vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL library in his personal directory on the Debian servers and has not been stripped of his Debian developer status.

John Bruce “Jack” Thompson, born July 25, 1951, is a certifiably insane Florida attorney.  He is known for his crazy antics surround his various failed attempts at litigation, lobbying, and strong-arming of various parties for various reasons.  He also has a fairly clear track-record indicating that he really has no personal conviction, allowing himself to be paid off to go away repeatedly throughout his sordid history.  He is likely most notably recognized for his recent attacks against violent video games, their publishers, and their retailers.

Drops in the Bucket

1. Nov. 1975 – Failure to be hired for a job as an assistant State’s Attorney in Dade County.
2. 1988 – Failed campaign bid for Dade County State Attorney against incumbent Janet Reno.
3. 1990 – Ordered to submit to a psychiatric examination by the Florida Supreme Court for making bat-shit crazy allegations against Switchboard of Miami.
4. 1991 – Thompson fails repeated attempts to censor and limit distribution the rap group N.W.A.’s albums.
5. 1992 – Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare the Florida Bar Association unconstitutional.  ’nuff said.
6. 1997 – Failed lawsuit against various video game publishing defendants regarding the Heath High School shooting due to failure to present a legally recognizable claim.
7. February 2003 – Failure to manipulate a court case into being applicable to his own political interests regarding the aggravated murder in the slaying of JoLynn Mishne.
8. October 2003 – Failed lawsuit in Tennessee state court against Take Two Interactive regarding Grand Theft Auto.
9. 2005 – Removed from another similar suit in Alabama due to unethical behavior, resulting in the revocation of Thompson’s temporary admission to the state bar.
10. 2005 – Failed lobbying of Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell “cop-killing games” in association with a murder case because investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
11. 2005 – Failed lawsuit against major retailers to block Rockstar’s game “Bully” from being sold.
12. August 2006 – Failed attempt to get a congressional subpoena for an early release copy of Rockstar’s “Bully”.
13. Septermber 2006 – Failed lawsuit in Albuquerque, New Mexico against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey’s family.
14. February 2007 – The Florida Bar files disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct.
15. April 2007 – Thompson settles a suit filed against him by Take-Two to prevent him from further trying to block sales of their games through litigation, threaten to sue them, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sales of it’s games, which he then promptly disregards by doing exactly that.
16. May 2008 – Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused in his disbarment proceedings.
17. June 2008 – Prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended ‘enhanced disbarment’ for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing.
18. July 2008 Judge Dava Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court

And those are just the highlights… All of the drops in the bucket listed above and many, many more are steeped in ridiculous antics, which you can read in full detail at Thompson’s Wikipedia page.  It’s really going to be hard to top this guy in future Failure Profiles, as he truly is the epitome of FAIL.  He’ll inevitably try to sue us I’m sure…

Last week three people, including Eric Blackwell, Todd Ivens and Charles “Glen” May, were killed during a test for Branson’s space tourism company in the Mojave desert at the Mojave Air and Space Port facility. It’s still pretty hard to find much information on the incident, but we’ve learned that Keith Fritsinger, Gene Gisin, and Jason Kramb are still in the hospital with serious injuries. Wired Science also reported on the explosion on Friday.

To top off this bucket o’ fail, it sounds like this rocket wasn’t even trying to leave the ground.

The firm’s Falcon 1 rocket launched at 2334 EDT (0334 GMT on Sunday) from Omelek Island on the Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, roughly 4000 kilometers southwest of Hawaii.

The rocket carried three satellites and was intended to be the firm’s first ‘operational’ launch – the previous two launches were intended as demonstration flights and did not carry payloads. Roughly 2 minutes and 20 seconds after lift-off, the rocket’s first and second stages failed to separate, SpaceX says.

“It was supposed to make it to orbit and it did not,” says Diane Murphy, SpaceX’s vice president for marketing and communications.

What made them think that it was allright to load this one down with an operational payload after the failure of the first two attempts?  Perhaps hoping that the third time would be the charm?  It might be a good idea to get a successful test flight before going operational guys…

And to add a little additional fail to the bucket:

“We have a boat out trying to recover it, but we haven’t found it at this stage,” Murphy told New Scientist on Monday.

I’d like to welcome you to the Bucket o’ Fail Blog, where we aggregate all of the truly epic failures that we read about, hear about, or see ourselves over the course of whenever we feel like looking for them.