More airport madness

It appears now that you can be prevented from boarding an aircraft simply for wearing a designer T-Shirt -- this shirt (hilarious comments in the Boing Boing thread, btw) got someone banned from a flight because it depicts a transformer brandishing what looks like a cartoonish gun.

In other news, the EU is testing a flight system installed in every passenger seat that monitors your facial expressions for hints of terrorist inclinations. False positives, anyone?

FBI Abusing NSL

The FBI has been found to have been abusing National Security Letters, aka warrants sans judge. Here is the article from Wired and Slashdot. Is anyone surprised that when you give an investigative agency license to investigate anyone at the drop of a hat, it will (a lot)? I guess I just have more foresight than Dick Cheney, et al. Either that or they hate due process and privacy. Probably the latter.

Hack t3h heart

Ghee whiz, the future is here:

To the long list of objects vulnerable to attack by computer hackers, add the human heart.

The threat seems largely theoretical. But a team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal — if the device had been in a person.