Weird news - Cryptocurrency CEO dies without sharing password

The wonders of modern technology can sometimes make things pretty difficult. Modern privacy is built on using cryptology, with its system of private and public keys (and other key mechanisms). The more recent development of cryptocurrencies use encryption as their basis, which makes storing of these keys the 'key' to everything. There have been many cases in the past where hackers have managed to get the key and stolen the money held in cryptocurrency wallets, with no recourse to the people who owned the money held in these wallets.
This is a different kind of problem, but one that can also suddenly arise, with the problem of knowledge being held only by one person, who suddenly dies, not having transferred the knowledge to anybody and leaving the cryptocurrency money locked up (link to article):

This is a story worthy of a film script -- which will doubtless be realized. A 30-year old CEO of a Canadian cryptocurrency firm reportedly died in India from complications from Crohn's disease (an intestinal inflammation disorder) taking with him passwords that has locked up $190 million in investor cryptocurrency. Top security experts have been unable to unlock the encrypted password throwing his clients into a tizzy. The saga, just unfolding in the western media, goes back to December when Gerald Cotten, 30-year old founder of QuadrigaCX, died due to complications with Crohn’s disease, according to the company and Cotten’s wife, Jennifer Robertson. Cotten died “while traveling in India, where he was opening an orphanage to provide a home and safe refuge for children in need,” the company's social media page said.

Weird news - Passengers removed from flight after tossing noodles at crew

After the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, the concept of flight security has become much more serious. It's not just hijacking (increased security measures ensures that it is more difficult to hijack a plane nowadays, and the penalties are much more significant), but even tantrums by passengers that were tolerated earlier, when airlines did not want to get some sort of action against misbehaving passengers are not tolerated now. At the minimum, when there is some sort of misbehavior by passengers, the crew and pilots would land at the closest airport possible, deplane the passengers who are involved, and in many cases, the local police would get involved and charges would be filed against the misbehaving passengers.
This is even the case when passengers have not really misbehaved, but have made some sort of joke about terrorism or bombs (acting weirdly since it would be clear that in an enhanced security environment, making such jokes is likely to get them into more trouble, as has happened once in a while). But when passengers take actions against cabin crew, there is very little tolerance for such actions and passengers are quickly offloaded. Consider this case where the passengers asked for some seat arrangements that was not possible by the cabin crew, an argument occurs and the passengers throw water on the crew and also throw hot noodles. In the current environment, pilots would typically try to deplane such passengers (link to article):

Chinese authorities vowed to severely punish Chinese travelers who threw hot water and noodles on a Thai flight attendant and threatened to bomb the plane after they became enraged over sitting arrangements. A Chinese passenger berated a crew member of the budget airline Thai AirAsia before pouring hot water and throwing noodles at her during a charter flight to Nanjing last Thursday. The flight returned to Bangkok and the pilot asked the passenger and her entourage of three others to disembark. They were reportedly upset after being told they couldn't sit together and even after a flight attendant helped them change the seats. In footage aired by China's state television CCTV, a male passenger loudly threatened to bomb the plane. He later said the attendant was scalded by accident during a tussle over a bill they had requested for the hot water.

Weird news - Family defy no-smoking warnings on plane, forced to get off

There was a time when smoking was considered fashionable, and there were very few restrictions on smoking. It was only in the past few decades that the health problems of smoking became clear, and the restrictions on smoking started growing. Of particular concern was the impact of smoking on those who did not smoke themselves, this being called as 'second hand smoking', and more restrictions implemented to ensure that people who did not smoke did not get affected by those who did so. As a result, there were more laws passed to ensure that if people did smoke, they were prevented from doing so in a way that the smoke would impact others; one of these was about ensuring that smoking is totally banned on planes.
Given the closed environment of an aircraft, there was no way to ensure second hand smoking prevention, unless smoking was totally banned on a flight. Now it is strictly enforced, and there are warning messages that come on in aircraft, calling out that people cannot even smoke in the bathrooms (and in fact, there would be smoke detectors meant to prevent people from smoking there). Combine this with the fact that in this age of aircraft security, any unrest or disturbance on a plane is treated as a security problem and if the situation gets out of hand, then the plane can even land and the concerned people handed over to security (link to news article):

A family of three -- a father, a mother, and a son -- were arrested after they refused to stop smoking inside a plane, forcing the aircraft to land in the island nation of Bermuda. The flight from Halifax in Canada to the Dominican Republic landed in Bermuda, and police boarded the plane and arrested the three passengers, the Daily Mail reported.

Such a diversion can be pretty bad for the schedule of everyone concerned, since this causes delay in the transit of everyone, and if the time takes longer, then people may even need to stay overnight.

Weird news - Fight between 2 Chinese on board Swiss flight forces it to turn back

When people book a ticket on a flight, their need can be very critical. They could be going to meet a sick relative on the deathbed, could be going for an important business meeting, or the flight could be part of a vacation. In such cases, the delay or cancellation of such a flight can be very tricky, and cold cause huge effort for the people involved. Such delays and cancellations also have impacts on airlines; it means impact on their customers, it means heavy new logistics including maybe having to arrange for food and lodging for the flying customers, means having to pay charges at the airport (could be the one from where the flight was delayed, or a different airport in case their flight was diverted), and extra fuel that any change in their flight plan can cause. And for these extra costs, they cannot get more from the passengers, and in fact, they face some loss of goodwill for any such thing.
On a flight, any nuisance is treated very severely (the captain of the flight has responsibility and authority over whoever is on the flight) and in many cases, disturbances creators can face trial and jail terms depending on what they had done. Given the problems that can happen, it seems strange that a flight had to get diverted because of some quarreling passengers. The quarrel must have been very intense and the crew would not have been able to get the passengers pacified; as a result, the Swiss International flight bound to Beijing had to return to Zurich. The passengers were then taken off and arrested by the police at Zurich after disembarking (link to article):

A mid-air brawl between two Chinese passengers onboard a Swiss International airplane disrupted the Beijing-bound flight and forced it to return to Zurich, where the duo were arrested. According to media reports, a 57-year-old Chinese man travelling on the flight last Sunday felt disturbed while eating his meal when the passenger in front of him , another Chinese citizen, aged 27 reclined his seat. The elderly person who was reportedly drunk, hit the younger passenger when he did not respond to his protests. A fight then broke out between the two, which caused one of the passengers to bleed, state-run China Daily reported.

Weird news - Hacking into a bank without any special skills

Banks routinely tout their extra high security, with most instances talking about bit length (256 and above) encryption keys. Given the nature of business that banks are involved in, ensuring that there is a high amount of security is also critical. Also, given today's fast paced world, there is a need for banks to ensure that they remain on all the time, with no delays. A downtime can cause problems to many customers of the bank, and can cause them to take their business to other banks along with penalties to the bank concerned, especially if their security measures are not as strong as they should be.
So what do you do when it seems that a person can stop a bank's operations or trigger a stoppage on the operations of the bank, such as in this case when a person called into a number that was tied to a back end service machine in the bank and entered some codes that caused the software to trigger an alarm and stoppage of services. The person was arrested by the police, but finally exonerated by the court after there was no malice detected in the 'hack' (link to article):

A Frenchman has been cleared of wrongdoing after a court accepted he accessed the Bank of France's internal telephone systems by accident. An unnamed 37-year-old Breton longed to avoid premium-rate calls while using Skype back in 2008, and set about hunting for a cheap-rate gateway number to the public networks. Judges sitting in a criminal court of Rennes, northwest France, dismissed the case against the man on Thursday, citing the prosecution team's failure to demonstrate any criminal intent in his actions.

Weird news - Lady strips in Bermudas airport after security check

Modern aviation suffers from increasing security issues. Hijacking of planes has happened for many decades now, and as a result, security measures have only increased over the years. As technology has advanced, and the concealment and miniaturization of terrorist technology has increased, the level of security scanning has become more intensive. Further, earlier hijacking still ended up killing at the maximum, only a few of the passengers of the plane, but the 2001 New York attacks showed up a breed of terrorists who were determined, who were not averse to killing all the passengers of the plane, and who were hard to totally exterminate. Then, in 2001 again, there was the shoe bomber who tried to blow up a plane by setting fire to his shoes. And in the recent past, there was the case where explosives were sought to be smuggled onto a plane in the form of printer cartridges.
This has in turn led to a much higher level of security before a plane can take off, and this security is getting more intense, and seemingly much more invasive of the privacy of people. When explosives can be hidden in body cavities, it gets much more difficult; however, this increased security (including devices such as deeper penetrating X-rays that reveal the outline of the body) also puts off a lot of people. This in turn led to a weird reaction from one lady (link to article):

A 36-year-old woman faced with a customs search at Bermuda's LF Wade International Airport rather brilliantly responded by instantly shedding her clothes and telling officers: “If you want to see me naked, you can do it right fucking here.”
Loukai Phillips, a Bermudian native now living abroad, had just flown in from London on 19 August to close her bank account, but had to schedule in an appearance before magistrates on a "indecent exposure in a public place" rap following her protest strip.
Her lawyer, Charles Richardson, explained to the court that because of an unspecified "past association", his client had been strip-searched every time she faced customs operatives.

Weird news - Man strips inside the plane, and causes trouble for others in the flight

Sometimes people behave so strangely that normal people cannot believe as to why something happens. However, when it troubles other people, then it gets beyond weird and becomes something that needs to be avoided, and also prosecuted if the annoyance becomes intense.
In this case, what do you do when you see behavior where a man comes on a plane, and then takes off all his clothes ? In today's security conscious environment, in such cases, safety is the higher criteria, and pilots are no longer willing to take risks if something weird or out of the ordinary happens (link to article):

Spanish airline Iberia says a man stripped naked on a flight bound for Germany carrying 110 passengers, causing the pilot to turn back to Madrid airport minutes after take-off.
"The flight took off around 7:45 p.m. Thursday and not long after a man took all his clothes off, became disruptive and then locked himself in a toilet," Iberia spokesman Santiago de Juan said Saturday.
He declined to give the passenger's nationality but said the incident caused considerable inconvenience to a "nearly full flight of passengers who reached their destination of Frankfurt late, after police had to come aboard to take the man off."

Getting inside the White House uninvited

Imagine what could be one of the most secure locations in the world ? The White House would be one of these locations, one would think of locations such as those housing huge sums of money, those housing the secret of Coke's formula, and also those housing nuclear weapons; but there should not be any comparison with the White House. The White Houses the most powerful man in the world, who commands a huge army and holds the key to the economic well being of the world. And in such a secure place, the thought that people could gate-crash and get inside may seem incredible, but it is the truth.
This has left the Secret Service totally red-faced, after all, they are responsible for the security of the American President, and the fact that somebody was able to get inside even though they were not invited is a horrible security breach (link to article):

A White House photograph taken Tuesday evening shows Michaele Salahi, wearing a gold-accented red sari, clasping her hands around Obama's right hand as her smiling husband, Tareq, looks on. The dinner was held for visiting Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who is smiling next to the president in the photo. An investigation into Tareq and Michaele Salahi has found that Secret Service agents did not follow protocol at a security checkpoint, the Secret Service said.
The Secret Service's statement says that although the Salahis went through magnetometers and other levels of screening, "they should have been prohibited from entering the event entirely." "That failing is ours," the statement said.

Using your own Robocop for chasing off people

Imagine loitering on a street in Atlanta at night, when suddenly you see something from a science fiction movie, a contraption that can throw icy water at you, or use its infrared camera at you, and then shines a spotlight at you. Further, you can hear what unmistakably sounds like words on a loudspeaker. Enough to scare most drug dealers or other such unsavory characters. And this is exactly what a bar owner in Atlanta does at night = he has built this device to scare people away from a property in the downtown area. And the reason for doing so ? It is a place where children play during the day, but is used for far worse things at night by drug dealers and other criminals:

It's a barbecue smoker mounted on a three-wheeled scooter, and armed with an infrared camera, spotlight, loudspeaker and aluminum water cannon that shoots a stream of icy water about 20 feet. Operated by remote control, the robot spotlights trespassers on property down the street from his bar, O'Terrill's. Using a walkie-talkie, Terrill belts out through the robot's loudspeaker, "That's private property. You guys need to get out of here."
Terrill, an engineer by trade, is also a board member at the day care center. Tired of cleaning up after the shady characters, he decided to take action. That's when he built his downtown Darth Vader of sorts.
"He's a neighborhood vigilante," says Meredith, "and when he came up with this -- you know, I call it Robocop -- I said, 'Praise God.' "
The daycare center is a block from a homeless shelter. Meredith has a security guard at the center who leaves in the early evening. "They know when the guard leaves," she says. "They know when the cleaning crew leaves and then here comes the drug dealers to prey on the homeless people."

The police are not yet opposing this, although if somebody is sprayed with icy water, they could potentially sue and get the police involved.

Peeking at roommates through hidden cameras

Technology works in strange ways, it can assist criminal activities by misuse of available technology. For example, the technological drive towards making things smaller makes it far easier to conceal cameras in inconvenient ways. So, camera phones are now banned from a lot of gyms and public swimming pools.
In another incident, a voyeur placed a small camera concealed in a shampoo bottle inside a bathroom used by female roommates so as to be able to take pictures and videos of them when they were undressed. He was caught only when another roommate got curious about the shampoo bottle and noticed wires trailing from the back (does that mean if he used a wireless camera, he would never have been caught ?). When police were called in to investigate, they found the wires eventually leading to another roommates TV.
Now the fellow is sitting in jail with numerous charges on him. However, what he has done will make the other roommates more paranoid, and far less willing to trust someone or share with another person. Such invasion of someone's privacy and betrayal of trust needs to be severly punished.

Man dressed as Joker gets Dutch ID card

In Europe, to get a national ID card, the rules have become more stringent. The rules prohibit grins, funny faces, and head gear. In addition, to avoid confusing scanners that are based on facial recognition, travellers in Europe have been ordered to not look too happy, eyes must be open and clearly visible, no glasses must be worn, and so on. One is supposed to look straight and without any emotion. In the middle of all this, a practical joker managed to beat the system by dressing up as The Joker from the Batman series.
He painted his face, and managed to convince the staff that because of his religious convictions, he could not take off his hat. And he now has a ID card with this very face.



This has now caused a political issue. Read more about this story here.

Baby in X-ray

In an accident, a woman put her 1-month grandson through an X-ray machine at the Los Angeles International Airport. This was obviously an accident, and I am sure that this would have happened due to the hustle and bustle at the X-ray machine where the woman would accidentally have put her baby on a tray.
In a sign that security workers are actually looking at the contents of the baggage, one of the X-ray personnel noticed the shape of a child on the carry-on baggage check and pulled the child out. Doctors determined that no harm done.