Public school accused of using webcams to spy on students' homes

In the "How Low Can Public Education Go?" file, an affluent Philadelphia suburb public school district has been accused of using webcams embedded in school issued Apple notebook computers to remotely spy on students in their homes.  The school had proudly issued the Apple Laptops to each of its approximately 2,300 high school students.

A suburban Philadelphia school district used the webcams in school-issued laptops to spy on students at home, potentially catching them and their families in compromising situations, a family claims in a federal lawsuit.

Lower Merion School District officials would not comment on the accusation, but angry students have already responded by putting tape on their laptop cameras and microphones.

Sophomore Tom Halperin described students as "pretty disgusted," and noted that his class recently read "1984," the George Orwell classic that coined the term "Big Brother."

"This is just bogus," said Halperin, 15, of Wynnewood, as he left Harriton High School on Thursday with his taped-up computer. "I just think it's really despicable that they have the ability to just watch me all the time."

The school district can activate the webcams without students' knowledge or permission, the suit said. Plaintiffs Michael and Holly Robbins suspect the cameras captured students and family members as they undressed and in other embarrassing situations, according to the suit.

Plane strikes Austin building

A small plane struck an office building in Austin, Texas, today. I worked in a nearby building which once housed Centaur's headquarters a few years ago. The CIA, FBI and IRS had offices in the complex struck by the plane. However, from the pictures I have seen, I believe those offices are in the building between the burning building and Centaur's old home (but I might be mistaken since I haven't been in that area for a while).

From Evil Google to WordPress

Google recently revealed the pitch-black nature of its evil heart when it suddenly announced that it was terminating its Google Blogger FTP service.  We currently use that service to publish our website to our Tera-Byte server in Canada.  Google is clearly doing this to coerce these high value blogs onto their blogspot servers where Google can control all of the content.

Fortunately, it is not an insurmountable task to migrate to the superior WordPress blogging system.  Unlike Google's Blogger, WordPress is an Open Source solution that fully runs on your web server.  In other words, no one is going to yank the rug out from underneath you like Google just did.

We are currently in the process of migrating to WordPress.  To use WordPress, your server or hosting service must support the following:

• PHP 4.3 or greater
• MySQL 4.1.2 or greater
• The mod_rewrite Apache module

To begin your migration, we strongly suggest that you obtain a secondary hosting account where you can build your new site and experiment with WordPress before pointing your URL to the new server.  A good and inexpensive web host is Blue Host, a company recommended by WordPress.  The basic Blue Host service offers unlimited hosting space and unlimited file transfer.  Blue Host also provides an outstanding control panel, called "cPanel," to administer your site.  Blue Host even keeps your WordPress installation up to date (you will receive an upgrade alert when you visit your cPanel which you will have to approve).

Additionally, Blue Host is currently offering a free domain.  This makes it trivial to set up your secondary website for the transition from your current Google Blogger site.

However, before purchasing your Blue Host service, visit this site first: http://www.bluehostreview.org/

By visiting that link, you can save up to 43% off the regular hosting price of $6.95 / month.  In either case, you will have to pay for a full year when you set up your hosting service.

Once you purchase your new hosting service (and new domain, if necessary), you can install WordPress by simply clicking on the "Word Press" icon under "Software / Services" in cPanel.  Be sure to set up WordPress using your secondary domain, otherwise your installation won't work until you point the WordPress specified domain to your Blue Host account.  It will be easy to change this to your primary domain name once you are ready to do so.

Once WordPress is installed, you'll want to choose a theme for your new blog.  There are many free and attractive themes available on the WordPress site here.  You will need to download the theme as a zip file and then upload it to your server in the WordPress administration page, usually set to "wp_admin" from you root site (example: http://myNewWordPressSite/wp_admin) .  You will then need to activate the new theme.

Changing from one theme to the next only takes seconds, so experiment freely with different themes.  With Blue Host, you have unlimited storage space, so you can upload as many themes as you want.

If you host advertisements on your site, you'll then want to load a WordPress plugin that makes adding ads easy.  A decent one is AdSense Manager which supports not just Google AdSense but other types of ad services as well.  AdSense Manager makes it easy to place ads in the header, sidebars or even embedded into articles.

Once you have your theme chosen and your ad plugin set up, it's time to migrate your Google Blogger site content to WordPress.  WordPress has support to directly import your Google Blogger account if it resides on BlogSpot (Tools | Import | Blogger).  I temporarily activated our site on BlogSpot (it only takes a second to toggle from FTP to BlogSpot from the Blogger Dashboard: Settings | Publishing | Switch to blogspot.com), but WordPress was unable to import our site due to timeouts from Google's servers.

Instead, I was forced to export (Settings | Basic | Export blog ) our Google Blogger site to a local XML file formatted in Blogger's Atom export format.

Unfortunately, WordPress can't read this file, so it must be translated into WordPress WXR format.  I used the Blogger 2 WordPress conversion application here.  You can then upload the file in Wordpress: Tools | Import | WordPress.

This process is good but isn't perfect.  All of the comments and tags appear to have been preserved.  Some of our posts needed to be edited to reestablish proper formatting.  A few embedded videos are not showing up.  However, the WordPress editor is as least as good as the Blogger editor, so fixing these problems is not too hard.

You will also need to copy any extra files that are not part of the Blogger system to your secondary site before pointing your primary URL to your secondary site.  You will probably want to copy all of the Blogger files over to ensure that all of your old links continue to work.

Of course, any edits that you make to your original site after the import will have to be made to your transition website.  However, you can simply delete all of your posts on your secondary website and import the last version of your original site immediately before pointing your primary URL to your secondary website.

While Blue Host is fantastic in many ways, its servers do not appear to be nearly as fast as our Tera-Byte server.  We will be transitioning soon to Blue Host.  Depending on how well the Blue Host server can handle the traffic, we might be on Blue Host for just as long as it takes us to install our new WordPress site on our old Tera-Byte server.

In the meantime, you can view our Blue-Host secondary site here.

Obtaining 'Common Sense Renewed'

Bill let me know that he was able to order a copy of Robert C. Christian's Common Sense Renewed by calling the Elberton Granite Association and sending them a $15 money order.  The contact information is as follows:

Elberton Granite Association

P.O. Box 640

Elberton, GA 30635

Phone: 706.283.5651

Expect delivery to take about two weeks.

Felling the Beast: an intro to a new novel

It’s Tuesday, May 30, 2017.  My name is Winnie Smith and I just turned 13 last month.

Our new home is hard to get used to.  It’s real pretty here and the weather is nice right now.  It’s a little like our old home in Arkansas.  I miss that place a lot.

I miss the rain at night and the cool mornings.  I miss the smell of the dogwood and honeysuckle flowers.  I miss the friendly little hummingbirds that were always flying around our shoulders.  I miss fishing in our ponds, working in our garden with Mama, skipping rocks on the Cossatot with Daddy, eating Hope watermelons and swimming in the ice cold creeks under a warm sun.  In a way, I even miss the chiggers, seed ticks and poison ivy which are all usually bad this time of year in the Ouachitas.

Daddy probably misses Arkansas more than anyone else.  He was born and raised there.  Even though I was born in Texas, Daddy managed to find a way to get us back to a good home in Arkansas where we could be safe during the War.  Daddy never wanted to move again, but, when we had no other choice, he told Uncle John that he didn’t want to move too far away from home.  That’s one of the reasons why he and Mom picked this place.

Daddy took us outside tonight for a surprise.  We had a marshmallow roast and told spooky stories around a camp fire.  A little after midnight, Daddy set up his telescope and asked us to guess what we were looking at.  It was a dim yellow star, just a tiny, flickering speck of light, even through his telescope.  It was the sun -- or at least our old sun.  It was hard for me to imagine that our old, green house still circled that little, yellow dot 2,110 light years away.

We had a good time tonight.  Everyone was happy.  Everyone but Daddy.  When he thought everybody was asleep, he walked back to that telescope and looked at earth for a long, long time.  He only quit when he began crying.  I’ve never seen Daddy cry before, even after all that he went through during the War.

It’s very late and I need to go to sleep.  I miss Arkansas a lot right now.   I love you, Daddy.

Elevator Failure Blamed for Burj Khalifa Closure

As we mentioned earlier this week, the Burj Khalifa has been shut down indefinitely to tourists.  An elevator failure is now being reported as the cause of the closure.  One witness described the failure as sounding like a "small explosion."

Burj Khalifa Closed to the Public

Mikey sent us a link to a story reporting that the Burj Khalifa has been suddenly closed to the public after being opened only one month ago.  Formerly known as the Burj Dubai, the Burj Khalifa is the by far the tallest building in the world at 2,717 feet or well over 1/2-mile high.  The structure appears to represent a new Tower of Babel as our Georgia Guidestones investigation (see here and here) recently revealed.

Two more Radio Liberty interview archives are ready

My Radio Liberty interviews from Wednesday and Thursday are now ready for download.  You can obtain them in MP3 format by following the links below.

Wednesday is here.
Thursday is here.

9-Year Old A-Student Busted for 2" Lego Gun

A 9-year-old boy was nearly suspended from public school because the Lego figure he was playing with at lunch toted a tiny two-inch plastic toy gun.

To PS 52 Principal Evelyn Mastroianna: Go ahead, punk, make my day.

Listen to my new 2-hour radio interview

Dr. Stan Monteih interviewed me for two hours on his Radio Liberty program last night.  You can now listen to MP3 archives of the broadcast.  Part 1 is here.  Part 2 is here.

Dr. Monteith has scheduled to interview me again tonight at 11PM Central / 9PM Pacific.  You can listen to that interview live here.

I will also be interviewed on his afternoon show tomorrow at 5PM Central and at 9AM on his morning show on February 8th.

Google Kills Bloggers!

In an astounding, disruptive, indefensible and perplexing move, Google sent out a termination of service email today to all current users of Google's Blogger FTP facilities.  We use that service to publish Van's Hardware Journal to our Tera-Byte server located in Canada.

The Google service will end March 26, 2010, giving bloggers less than two months to migrate to another blogging service or to follow Google's solution which is to upload all external Blogger databases to Google's servers and then point associated blog URLs to Google.

In other words, if you have been using Google's Blogger FTP service, which has been around for several years and is used by many now very irate people, Google is holding a gun to your head in order to take control of your content.

Here is a comment I posted earlier on the Google Blogger site:

I do not understand why Google is terminating existing FTP blogging services. Why not simply remove the FTP/SFTP option from new blogs while maintaining current support for existing FTP blogs?

At the very least, why doesn't Google release an open source blogging tool (either web-based or standalone) that allows current FTP bloggers to continue to maintain their sites?

Giving less than two months formal warning to current Google bloggers that their publishing service will be cut off unless they migrate their blogs to Google's servers is a lot like placing a gun to our heads. This is one of the more "evil" things Google has ever done.

There is no valid technical reason for Google to suddenly pull the plug on all external, existing Blogger websites.  This is an outrageous act of Internet piracy in what appears to be a play to take control of hundreds if not thousands of valuable blog sites.