A mother in New York left her 9-year-old son in Bloomingdale’s with a Metrocard and a $20, and said, “See you later!” The son got home, in one piece and “ecstatic with independence”.

Of course, half the people she tells this story to want to turn her in for child abuse.

I just did the math, and I must have been 9 when I would take the Smith St. bus alone up to Mr. Falciglia’s for clarinet lessons. I truly doubt that the world is any more dangerous now than it was then: we’re just more aware of it, thanks to 24-hour news channels that need to fill programming time. I regularly post pictures of my daughters online, and proudly announced their births on the net — but any pictures of them that also show my brother’s kids have to be shared as friends-only, since he’s worried about people finding them on the Internet.

Apparently, the TSA didn’t know what to do with a laptop that had no drives and no ports.

Instead of my bags trundling through the x-ray machine, she stops the belt. Calls over another agent, a palaver. Another agent flocks to the screen. A gabble, a conference, some consternation.

They pull my laptop, my new laptop making its first trip with me, out of the flow of bags. One takes me aside to a partitioned cubicle. Another of the endless supply of TSA agents takes the rest of my bags to a different cubicle. No yellow brick road here, just a pair of yellow painted feet on the floor, and my flight is boarding. I am made to understand that I should stand and wait. My laptop is on the table in front of me, just beyond reach, like I am waiting to collect my personal effects after being paroled.

I’m standing, watching my laptop on the table, listening to security clucking just behind me. “There’s no drive,” one says. “And no ports on the back. It has a couple of lines where the drive should be,” she continues.

The Texas Observer has a lengthy and well-researched article about how the border fence is bypassing the property of the wealthy and well-connected.

Stephen Russell on the Profox list points out the six dumbest ideas in computer security.

It seems to be illegal to drink water in an airport.

Especially while wearing sunglasses.

Guess that’s what happens when you listen to bloggers instead of the experts. :-)

Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended “pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing.”

In light of this article about a 12-year-old runaway getting on a plane and not being discovered until they were serving him his snack, I’d have to agree with O’Leary’s assessment below… Thanks for the link, Laura.

Cory@BoingBoing reports that the British budget airline RyanAir is threatening to sue the UK government for lost income if they don’t return security to normal within a week.

Their CEO, Michael O’Leary, described the current situation as “Keystone Kops” security measures that had the terrorists laughing at them. He also announced 1 million 25£ one-way flights over the next couple of months to get people flying again.

Now if only the airline CEOs on this side of the pond had gonads that big….

James Boyle at the Financial Times asks a few questions.

You have to design a global computer network. One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open — open protocols and systems so anyone could connect to it and offer information or products to the world. Another group – scholars, businessmen, bureaucrats – points out the problems. Anyone could connect to it. They could do anything. There would be porn, piracy, viruses and spam. Terrorists could put up videos glorifying themselves. Your activist neighbour could compete with The New York Times in documenting the Iraq war. Better to have a well-managed system, in which official approval is required to put up a site; where only a few actions are permitted; where most of us are merely recipients of information; where spam, viruses, piracy (and innovation and anonymous speech) are impossible. Which would you have picked?

Thanks to Cory@BoingBoing for the link.

The Lieberman campaign is claiming that a Denial of Service attack took down their website, and that it’s Lamont’s fault. However, a commenter on Lamont’s campaign blog points out the following.

C:Documents and Settings\gfitzgerald>ping www.rksguitars.com

Pinging www.rksguitars.com [69.56.129.130] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 69.56.129.130: bytes=32 time=89ms TTL=46
Reply from 69.56.129.130: bytes=32 time=90ms TTL=46
Reply from 69.56.129.130: bytes=32 time=90ms TTL=46
Reply from 69.56.129.130: bytes=32 time=90ms TTL=46

Ping statistics for 69.56.129.130:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 89ms, Maximum = 90ms, Average = 89ms

C:Documents and Settings\gfitzgerald>ping www.joe2006.com

Pinging www.joe2006.com [69.56.129.130] with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 69.56.129.130: bytes=32 time=89ms TTL=46
Reply from 69.56.129.130: bytes=32 time=89ms TTL=46
Reply from 69.56.129.130: bytes=32 time=89ms TTL=46
Reply from 69.56.129.130: bytes=32 time=90ms TTL=46

Ping statistics for 69.56.129.130:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 89ms, Maximum = 90ms, Average = 89ms

If it were a real DOS, you wouldn’t be able to access anything else on that box. RKS Guitars is just fine, thanks. Another Lieberman person says that it was a SQL Injection attack. That doesn’t explain why they didn’t wipe everything and republish from their last backup.

You do have backups, Joe, right?