Eideard

The man held in jail accused of launching a cyber coup against San Francisco gave up the passcode to the city’s computer system during a secret prison visit by mayor Gavin Newsom.

Terry Childs, a 43-year-old computer technician with the city, had allegedly blocked access to a new computer system. He was arrested at the weekend and held on $5m bail.

But following a press conference at which Newsom said Childs was “very good at what he did” but had become a “bit maniacal”, the technician’s lawyer contacted the mayor’s office to arrange a meeting.

Without the knowledge of police or his own city attorneys office, which is prosecuting Childs, Newsom visited the technician and the password was divulged.

A spokesman for the mayor said that he, “figured it was worth a shot, because although Childs is not a Boy Scout, he’s not Al Capone either”.

Probably not any loonier than the average network administrator, either.

Trevor Paque toiling in a client’s back farmyard

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?

That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores – city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

Even couples planning a wedding at the Plaza Hotel in New York City can jump on the local food train. For as little as $72 a person, they can offer guests a “100-mile menu” of food from the caterer’s farm and neighboring fields in upstate New York.

“The highest form of luxury is now growing it yourself or paying other people to grow it for you,” said Corby Kummer, the food columnist and book author. “This has become fashion.”

And “fashion” advances progress in a society – exactly how?

Greece’s holiest pilgrimage site on the Aegean island of Tinos has launched an email service allowing those too poor or sick to visit in person to have their prayers read to its icon of the Virgin Mary…

“Those of you who are not in a position to visit the holy island of Tinos and pray to the icon, can write to us via email and we are happy to send you (free of charge) a blessing (an icon of the Virgin Mary, holy water etc),” the church said on its Web site.

“You can communicate with us by email sending your heart-felt prayer to the Virgin Mary and we will read the names in front of the icon,” the Web site said.

Then, you get the spam…

A longtime television newscaster has been charged with illegally accessing the e-mail of his glamorous former co-anchor, who suspected details of her social life were being leaked to gossip columnists. Larry Mendte and Alycia Lane co-anchored the TV news in Philadelphia. Both got fired; he got charged.

Federal prosecutors say fired KYW-TV anchor Larry Mendte accessed Alycia Lane’s e-mail accounts hundreds of times and leaked her personal information to a Philadelphia Daily News reporter.

Lane’s personal life had routinely become tabloid fodder and eventually led to her own dismissal from the station.

“The mere accessing and reading of privileged information is criminal,” acting U.S. Attorney Laurie Magid said. “This case, however, went well beyond just reading someone’s e-mail.”

Mendte was charged with a felony count of intentionally accessing a protected computer without authorization. A conviction could bring a six-month prison term under federal sentencing guidelines.

What a creep! Jealous over popularity, bucks, whatever – his rationale for privacy invasion.

Who does he think he is? Richard Nixon?

Engineers have made a new tiny DelFly Micro air vehicle. This successor to the DelFly I and II weighs barely 3 grams, and with its flapping wings is very similar to a dragonfly. Ultra-small, remote-controlled micro aircraft with cameras, such as this DelFly, may well be used in the future for observation flights in difficult-to-reach or dangerous areas.

The DelFly Micro is a ‘Micro Air Vehicle’, an exceptionally small remote-controlled aircraft with camera and image recognition software. The Micro, weighing just 3 grams and measuring 10 cm (wingtip to wingtip) is the considerably smaller successor to the successful DelFly I and DelFly II. The DelFly Micro, with its minuscule battery weighing just 1 gram, can fly for approximately three minutes and has a maximum speed of 5 m/s.

The ‘dragonfly’ has a tiny camera (about 0.5 grams) on board that transmits its signals to a ground station. With software developed by TU Delft itself, objects can then be recognised independently. The camera transmits TV quality images, and therefore allows the DelFly II to be operated from the computer. It can be manoeuvred using a joystick as if the operator was actually in the cockpit of the aircraft. The aim is to be able to do this with the DelFly Micro too.

Big Brother will be flying through your picnic – and you won’t even notice.

Name-brand products make regular appearances on television shows, where they are typically written into a drama, comedy or reality program. “American Idol” viewers, for example, have come to expect to see a Coke cup in front of a judge on the show, Simon Cowell, as he berates contestants.

But TV news?

In recent weeks, anchors on the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas, KVVU, sit with cups of McDonald’s iced coffee on their desks during the news-and-lifestyle portion of their morning show. The anchors rarely touch the cups.

Executives at the station, one of 12 owned by the media company Meredith, say the six-month promotion is meant to shore up advertising revenue and, as they told the news staff, will not influence content.

The arrangement does raise questions about potential conflicts between the intended message and news content. The ad agency that arranged the promotion said the coffee cups would most likely be whisked away if KVVU chooses to report a negative story about McDonald’s.

Neither the agency nor KVVU would reveal the price of the six-month deal.

What a society we live in. Everything you can think of is reduced to its commercial value.

A police officer shocked a handcuffed Baron “Scooter” Pikes nine times with a Taser after arresting him on a cocaine charge. He stopped twitching after seven, according to a coroner’s report. Soon afterward, Pikes was dead.

Now the officer, since fired, could end up facing criminal charges in Pikes’ January death after medical examiners ruled it a homicide.

Dr. Randolph Williams, the Winn Parish coroner, told CNN the 21-year-old sawmill worker was jolted so many times by the 50,000-volt Taser that he might have been dead before the last two shocks were delivered.

Williams ruled Pikes’ death a homicide in June after extensive study…

But Winnfield police Lt. Chuck Curry said race “isn’t an issue at all” in the matter. “This has come down to a police officer that was trying to apprehend a suspect that they had warrants for,” he said. “He done what he thought he was trained to do to bring that subject into custody. At some point, something happened with his body that caused him to go into cardiac arrest or whatever.”

Curry said Pikes told officers he suffered from asthma and had been using PCP and crack cocaine. But Williams said he found no sign of drug use in the autopsy, and no record of asthma in Pikes’ medical history.

One of my least-fond memories of Louisiana is a cop explaining to me – eventually with his club – why Freedom of Speech wasn’t legal in Louisiana.

An inmate known as the “spam king” for sending hundreds of thousands of unsolicited e-mails has walked away from a federal prison camp in Colorado.

U.S. Marshals, the FBI and IRS are looking for 35-year-old Edward “Eddie” Davidson, who left a minimum-security facility in Florence on Sunday. The U.S. Attorney’s Office announced his escape on Tuesday.

The office said Davidson was last seen in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, which is about 90 miles north of the prison camp.

Davidson was sentenced in April to 21 months in prison and ordered to pay $714,139 in restitution.

Put the sleazebag’s photo all over the Web. There should be tens of thousands of geeks willing to turn his butt in.