In the Meantime, IT Revenge

I am working on a synopsis of the past week or so.  It has been busy, U2 and East-West-East trip, and some other goodies.  So to tide you over, here are two things going on in Ol' Baltimore:  NASA is going to be flying planes all over the city looking for pollution, and be careful who you piss off in the IT department.


WASHINGTON -- NASA said it will be sending aircraft over the Baltimore-Washington region beginning next week to help improve how satellites monitor air quality.

NASA said two aircraft will make a series of flights to measure gases and particles in the air. The flights will be coordinated with an extensive network of ground observation sites from the D.C. Beltway to northeast of Baltimore.

NASA has scheduled a news conference for Thursday morning to discuss the flyovers.

The space agency said satellites already monitor many components of air pollution, but it is difficult to use measurements from space to detect pollution near the ground.

The multi-year study is designed to help improve the ability of satellites to measure conditions near the surface.

Read more at WBAL


IT Revenge

Sometimes, revenge is bitter.

The reason for this is that sometimes you get your revenge and then you get, well, caught.

Please consider the feelings of Walter Powell, a 52-year-old IT manager at Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems. Actually, he became a former IT manager there. Which, perhaps stimulated a desire for a little revenge.

I am grateful to The Baltimore Sun for offering this story which begins with revenge, has porn in the middle, and whose denouement is played out in court.

Powell, you see, was reportedly fired in 2009. He wasn't very happy about this, so began to use his significant expertise to tap into his former employer's computer systems, according to the story.

It seems he may have had a piece de resistance in mind. I cannot be sure that this particular piece actually involved any sort of resistance, or even bondage. However, Powell managed to remotely control his former CEO's presentation to the board of directors of this nonprofit organization, which distributes public funds to substance abuse programs.

At the point at which the CEO was to unveil a particular PowerPoint slide and give forth, Powell remotely shut down the system. When it rebooted, there, alas, was porn.

Well, to be precise, it was some kind of a picture of a naked woman on the rather sizable 64-inch screen.

I know that there will be those will admire his ingenuity. I know there will be those who can only imagine the smirk that must have come across his face--and perhaps those of one or two Baltimore Substance Abuse Systems board members--when the lady was projected.

However, court papers show that Powell admitted his guilt--at least to two counts of "unlawful access to a computer causing it to malfunction" and one of "possessing a pass code without authorization."

He reportedly received two years suspended (all but time served), 100 hours of community service, and three years probation. He was also barred from "possessing software that enables remote access and monitoring of other computers."

How, though, might that last part be enforced? He's an IT guy. IT guys know how to do everything surreptitiously.

They can get everything from everywhere with every kind of software. They press a couple of keys in Baltimore and traffic lights stop in Mumbai. They slip a little custom software onto their MacBooks and the prime minister of Montenegro is heard to talk like Donald Duck.

I know that they occasionally get caught.

But you cannot keep a clever IT guy down. What price a porn movie gets projected onto the doors of a courtroom in, say, Baltimore in the very near future?

Read More at CNET.com