We had yet more power outages in Ardmore yesterday, one of which lasted about an hour.

Has anyone else been affected by this?

Here's the email I sent to PECO:

To:

Hi Ralph,

I haven't yet heard back from you on the cause of the power outage on Montgomery Ave avenue on Valentine's Day. I'm bringing this issue up again because we experienced not one, but two outages yesterday. Just to make sure we're on the same page, here is a list of outages we've experienced in the last 2 months:

- January 13th: for about an hour around 11:30 PM

- February 14th: about 20 minutes in the early afternoon

- March 6th: 1st outage: 10-15 seconds in the early afternoon (just enough to shut down one of my computers)

- March 6th: 2nd outage: About an hour starting at 11 PM

Just so we're clear on the area that's affected, it is about 2 blocks on Montgomery Avenue in Ardmore. I made a map in Google Maps:

View PECO Blackouts in Ardmore in a larger map

I've lived in my current residence for 8 years, and have never had power issues like the ones in the last 2 months. I'm sure I don't have to remind you about the weather we've had these last couple of months, but when it's 40 degrees outside, this causes us all concerns about how we're going to spend to the night without heat. I'm sure the elderly folks down the road in Sunrise Assisted Living have similar concerns.

Can we have this issue escalated with PECO, so that an underlying cause can be discovered, and fixed?

Thanks,

-- Douglas Muth
Ardmore, PA

If anyone else has been affected by these outages, please let me know! Feel free to leave a comment here, or toss me an email: doug.muth AT gmail.com.

An anonymous source let me use one of the Lower Merion School District laptops earlier tonight. My mission: to determine if the web cam could be turned on or off manually, or if I could access logfiles verifying whether the webcam was used or not.

I didn't bother taking any pics of the web cam itself, since the student smartly covered it with tape, and I didn't feel like getting my face on LMSD's naughty little camera.

First, let's confirm that it is in fact an LMSD laptop:

Note that there appears to be no way to actually control the webcam from the machine itself. That means that if someone were to turn on the camera itself, it could not be turned off by the student. That's scary. (Anybody know of another way to control the camera? Let me know!)

On a related note, there is a microphone in the laptop. This can be turned all the way down:

However, if the machine can be accessed remotely by the school district, since the microphone is controlled by software, there is no guarantee that it could not be turned back on. And unlike the web cam, there is no LED that goes on when the microphone is in use. Also scary.

My next task was to try and view the log files on that machine. Unfortunately, the application for viewing them was locked down:

The "Terminal" application was also locked down. My source indicated to me that it used to be accessible, until students figured out how to use the command line to get around the restrictions. (anyone with UNIX knowledge would not be surprised by this)

My final attempt was to try and boot the machine from a DVD so I could mount the filesystem and the hard disk and view the logs that way. Unfortunately, it looks like LMSD was using Extensible Firmware Interface or a similar product had an Open Firmware Password in place, as any attempt to bring up the boot device selection men by holding down the option key at startup asked for a password:

In conclusion, there is no way to turn off the webcam, nor any way to be certain that the microphone is not recording. This is a serious privacy risk and I cannot recommend the use of the laptops at this time.

For a future article, if I can get my hands on an LMSD laptop for several hours or more, I intend to fire up a packet sniffer and see just what hosts the laptop talks to, and create some nullroutes for those hosts that can be set up on any Linksys or Cisco router. Stay tuned!

Doug works as a software engineer for hire by day, and does system administration for a hobby, including that of the SAC website. Visit him on LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/dmuth.

[Edit: Fixed remark about Extensible Firmware Interface. Thanks, Jeff!]

Okay, there's the obvious way to do this: place a band-aid over the lens. A band-aid is preferred to masking tape, so that adhesive does not come in contact with the lens.

That said, I'd still like to develop a better solution to this problem, if possible. Does anyone have one of these student laptops I can take a look at? I'd probably need an hour or two with the laptop in question, and the make/model in advance so I can do a little research ahead of time.

If so, please reply to this post, or contact me privately and we'll set something up.

Thanks!

Seen on Boing Boing just now:

School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home

By Cory Doctorow at 11:49 PM February 17, 2010

According to the filings in Blake J Robbins v Lower Merion School District (PA) et al, the laptops issued to high-school students in the well-heeled Philly suburb have webcams that can be covertly activated by the schools' administrators, who have used this facility to spy on students and even their families. The issue came to light when the Robbins's child was disciplined for "improper behavior in his home" and the Vice Principal used a photo taken by the webcam as evidence. The suit is a class action, brought on behalf of all students issued with these machines.

The rest of this story is at http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/17/school-used-student.html

This is rather scary that a school is potentially spying on their students... not just when they're off school property, but when they are in spaces they consider to be private. Namely their own homes. No warrant. No due process. I find this sort of behavior nothing sort of Chilling.

Then there's another possible motive. Is Lower Merion School District spying on students so they can determine who the plaintiffs are in the case of Students Doe v. The School District of Lower Merion? Hmm. The mind wonders.

Here's the legal filing for anyone who wishes to read it:

School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home

Well, installing that anti-spam module yesterday turned out to be more trouble than it was worth. The module decided that it would randomly pound the database server, taking us from 40 queries a second to 15,000 queries a second, as this graph illustrates:

No rhyme or reason to why all the database activity, and since it showed no signs of letting up after 2 hours, I decided I had just about enough of this, turned off the module, and the system load immediately went back to normal.

Sorry about that.

For now, I set the system so that all new user accounts must be approved by an admin (i.e., me). In the last 2 hours, this kept two obvious spammers from registering, so that's a start. I'll look at further solutions while trapped at home in tomorrow's blizzard.

Hey folks,

Due to a sudden increase in spam (going from 1 spam every few days, to 10 spams a DAY), I've installed an anti-spam module. It works by catching duplicate messages and looks for other suspicious patterns.

One of the filters is a bayesian spam filter, which does require a little training to correctly identify content which is spam versus content which is not.

If a post or comment is flagged as spam, you will be notified with a message, and the message will be held in a special queue for my review. If your content is incorrectly flagged as spam, please let me know, either by commenting on this post, or by emailing me (my email is doug.muth AT gmail DOT com) and I'll take care of it.

Thanks.

Ohhhh did we ever get hammered in Ardmore today. I wandered out later in the afternoon and took some pictures. Enjoy!

Just got power back after about a 45 minute blackout on Montgomery Ave. I did a walk of the area while power was out and saw that both homes and stoplights were affected from Anderson Ave to somewhat west of Woodside Ave, or about 2 blocks.

I heard a rumor about some sort of construction accident that took out power to the area. Does anyone have details about what might have caused it?

Believe it or not, after living here for 8+ years, this is the longest loss of electricity I've had.

So I spotted this on the lawn in front of my apartment building this morning:

I was standing on the sidewalk a few feet from that sign I took the picture. The sign was set up to face Montgomery Avenue, no doubt to get as many eyeballs as possible.

Unfortunately for Julie, that's private property. Since our landlord doesn't have an on site presence, I'm pretty sure they didn't place the sign there either.

Then again, maybe a bunch of Julie's supporters live in my building, I dunno. Anyone else have similar tales of inappropriately placed Julie Sokoloff Constable signs?

(For those who think the last name is familiar, Julie is the wife of Steven "Take No Prisoners" Sokoloff)

So, I was on my way to run an errand today, and I ended up getting a front seat to this around 5 PM:

This went down on Woodside Ave., just by the Wawa on Lancaster Ave. As best I can tell, it was only shrubbery that was burning. No other property appears to have been harmed.

The Merion Fire Company's Ardmore truck arrived on the scene shortly after I did and promptly extinguished the blaze. Woodside Ave was closed for all of about 20 minutes.

The rest of the pictures can be viewed in this slide show:

The full set can also be viewed at this link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157621934261475/