Ah, power. You give a person too much and they will abuse it. Such is the case with Thomas Langenbach, a 47-year-old VP at Palo Alto-based software company SAP Labs, who has been arrested for the nerdiest crime in recent memory. His abuse of power: computer-based.
Losing a computer containing unencrypted ISS codes earned NASA a stern talking-to from a House subcommittee but apparently didn’t change many attitudes. A NASA staffer in Kansas City just lost another at the start of March. There were no Space Station codes on-board, luckily, just the personal information of every NASA employee in Kansas City.
On January 7, someone strolled into a supply room at Camp Eggers, a coalition base near the U.S. embassy in downtown Kabul, pocketed two sets of car keys and walked out undetected. Sometime over the next 24 hours, the thieves drove away with two black-painted, armoured Toyota Land Cruisers belonging to the US Army’s 26th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade, a unit that escorts coalition personnel around Kabul.
NASA is the target of some scary hacks and and digital espionage. But if someone out there has control codes to the International Space Station, it might be because the laptop of some NASA knucklehead was stolen, and it didn’t have any of the data encrypted.
What would you do simple gas to cook or heat your home during winter? Would you be willing to fill a giant bag full with natural gas and carry it into your home, at the risk of, well, exploding? Because that’s what villagers in the Shandong Province of China are doing.
Sometimes life imitates art, and sometimes life imitates a series of stupid spy movie cliches: a briefcase detailing a joint French/UK military drone was stolen in Paris. A briefcase! A briefcase full of secret documents. Christ, man.
The Apple Store in Charlotte’s Northlake Mall is presumably like any other: clean, crisp, tidy. But underneath the pristine veneer, an unidentified employee spent nearly six weeks stealing iPhone after iPhone from the Genius Room. Twenty-five handsets, to be precise, worth $US16,425 retail. Steal different!
