- Football is not exactly the source of pride on the University of Colorado campus that it is at most Div. I schools across the United States. The Buffaloes are bad this year and have been for quite some time, posting a 3-10 record overall and 2-7 record in Pac-12 play this season after being so bad in previous years that combustible head coach Dan Hawkins was fired after five seasons with a combined 19-39 record. New coach Jon Embree stepped in this season and the Buffaloes were terrible once more, giving fans a wealth of regrettable memories to carry them through until next season. One female student on the school’s Boulder campus can add another CU football-related memory to that list courtesy of freshman receiver Austin Traig Vincent. It seems Vincent either does not understand the gender-designation signs on restroom doors or feels every one of them should be unisex, because he was arrested late Friday night on suspicion of indecent exposure and second-degree criminal trespassing after allegedly entering a women’s restroom in Willard Hall while a female student was showering and exposed himself to her. According to the police report, the alleged victim heard a man enter the restroom and announce to her he was going to take a shower. Vincent then allegedly attempted to make small talk as if his actions were normal. He even asked to borrow her shampoo and opened the curtain to her shower stall, allegedly standing before her naked as she tried to cover herself up with the curtain. Undaunted, Vincent allegedly went back into his shower stall as the woman wrapped herself in a towel and fled the restroom. When asked why she never asked Vincent to leave, the victim told officers she felt "vulnerable" and "exposed." She was able to easily identify Vincent because he lives next door to her in the dorm and had made flirtatious comments to her in the past. Another female student has since claimed that Vincent previously had entered the women's restroom while she was showering, but he did not open her curtain and a building RA informed police she had told Vincent before to stop using the women's restroom. However, both of the misdemeanor charges against Vincent may go away because he has a great explanation for his actions: He admitted to taking a shower in the women's restroom, but only because the men's showers were filthy, according to the police report. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is free on bond from Boulder County Jail, but is not allowed to return to Willard Hall pending an investigation. Ladies and gentlemen, your Colorado Buffaloes football team…………
- Election day in the Democratic Republic of Congo was a bit chaotic this time around. As the first results emerged from the voting, many voters still had not been able to cast their ballot and allegations of fraud tainted with widespread election violence cast an ugly shadow over the proceedings. Still, organizers forged ahead with the presidential and parliamentary elections in the Central African nation. Despite logistical delays and complaints over the process that could taint the results, the election continued to move forward. The U.N. mission in Congo known as MONUSCO is monitoring the election and as of Tuesday morning, workers were s still delivering electoral materials to some areas which have yet to vote, according to mission spokesman Mounoubai Madnodje. Among the areas yet to vote is the central province of Bandundu. "We've offered our helicopters to transport materials, so yes, we're still continuing to help," Madnodje said. The primary election is President Joseph Kabila facing off against 10 rivals, including veteran opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi. There are also 500 open seats in parliament and a whopping 18,500 candidates seeking them. Essentially, that is one seat for every 37 candidates. The country’s election commission described the ballot as "satisfactory," with voting in some areas carrying on into the night. Other voters were asked to wait until Tuesday to cast their ballot after some ballot papers did not arrive on time. Voter complaints streamed in from across the country over confusing voter lists and sporadic violence at some stations. Allegations of fraud sparked the violence and even those who were an active part of the process expressed skepticism over its integrity. "Here in Kinshasa we don't have any confidence in the process but in this polling station we have worked hard (to stop fraud)," said Henriette Kilonda, an election official at the Ecole de la Gare voting center in Gombe, central Kinshasa. Full provisional results are not due till Dec. 6, so the next week should be an extremely tense time throughout the country. Even the election commission did not have accurate figures on how many people were unable to vote on Monday or when they would do so, but a representative for an international election monitoring group put the figure in the hundreds of thousands. Further complicating matters for voters, some ballot papers in the legislative vote were dozens of pages long. "We have 63,000 polling stations. If of those we have even 1,000 which cause problems, that's manageable. For us we just want everyone to be able to vote," election commission spokesman Matthieu Mpita said Monday evening. The most prominent incident of violence occurred in the province of Katanga in the south, where at least three people were killed when masked gunmen attacked a polling station. TDH, a human rights group in West Kasai province, claimed that at least 12 polling stations had been torched in the provincial capital, Kananga, after residents allegedly discovered ballots already marked in favor of Kabila. Others claimed some voters weren't even allowed to go into polling stations unless they voted for a certain candidate. Congo is still relatively new at the whole free election thing, as its first post-war election was held in 2006. Ironically, that vote was largely seen as free and fair and was less chaotic than the current vote………
- Finally…….remotely flammable printers are here and just in time for Christmas! Thanks to the wicked smart Ivy Leaguers on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the world now knows that Hewlett-Packard sells printers with a flaw that could let hackers gain remote control over the device, thereby stealing personal information, attacking networks and even setting printers on fire by feeding them a continuous stream of instructions designed to heat them up. Two security researchers at Columbia University have accused HP the supposedly dysfunctional printers. Their work, funded by government and industry grants, unearthed the flaw. It was reported to federal officials and HP this month and Columbia PhD student Ang Cui and Professor Salvatore Stolfo performed a demonstration of how the printers could be hacked this week. HP admitted that it is still reviewing the details, but denied that the problem is as extensive as Cui and Stolfo claim. The two researchers claim they can remotely install malicious software onto HP LaserJet printers because the printers accept software updates without examining digital signatures and check for updates each time they accept a print job. In one of their demonstrations, Cui and Stolfo showed how a hijacked computer could be fed instructions that would steadily heat up the printer’s fuser, which dries ink once it’s applied to paper, eventually causing the paper to turn brown and smoke. From there, the fire was only a formality. Yes, a thermal switch inside the printer automatically shuts it down before a fire started, but Cui and Stolfo believe other printers without thermal switches might be used as fire starters. Armed with these remote-controlled tools of destruction, hackers would have a dangerous new weapon that would allow them to start fires from afar. Not only that, the researchers also showed how a hacked printer can be forced to send tax forms and other sensitive documents to a source of the hacker’s choosing and also disable printers by the thousands. Oh, and any printers hooked directly into a computer could also be used to launch attacks and join botnets. HP Chief Technologist Keith Moore did his best to debunk Cui and Stolfo’s claims, insisting HP's printers have required digitally signed firmware upgrades since 2009, that the majority of users have InkJet printers that do not allow remote upgrades and that printers behind a firewall are not vulnerable to the flaw. That’s not what Cui and Stolfo say; they allege that vulnerable printers are still readily available at most retail stores. In other words, the pyromaniac in your life just added a new entry to the top of their holiday wish list…………….
- Don’t believe the rumors, fans of actual quality rock music. Just because some ass hat out there started and went to great lengths to perpetuate the rumor that British rockers Muse had parted ways doesn’t mean it’s actually true. Whoever this loser is, he or she went to great lengths to make the hoax seem real, even setting up a fake website mimicking popular British music site NME.com that featured a story alleging that the band had split after an argument. The news came as a surprise for Matt Bellamy and Co. after they headlined Reading And Leeds Festivals earlier this year and headed to the studio to begin work on their sixth album, which is due to be released in late 2012.
Hearing that the band was breaking up even as they were starting to record the follow-up to the band's 2009 LP “The Resistance” just seemed wrong and out of place and sure enough, it was. Even though the story quickly circulated throughout Twitter and on the band's official message board, Board.Muse.mu, a representative for Muse adamantly denied the story. The denial may take a while to sink in given the temporary uproar caused when the rumor first surfaced, but hopefully the responsible party is identified, tracked down, flogged and forced to listen to a truly crappy band that really does need to break up, someone like Nickelback, the Hack Eyed Peas or Maroon 5. There are enough quality bands who don’t last for any number of reasons, both internal and external, that break up before their time. The world does not need some tech-savvy ass hat setting up fake music news websites claiming to break news that one of the better rock bands in the world is calling it quits…………
- I’ve long suspected Goodwill is one giant scam and this essentially confirms it. Look no further than an unidentified 80-year-old Moline, Ill. resident who has been fleeced out of $13,000 by his local Goodwill store. This poor octogenarian was looking to do a good deed by donating some of his old clothing to Goodwill, like so many kind people do every day. However, one of the suits he donated had $13,000 in cash stuffed in its pockets and he didn’t realize his mistake until at least a week after he donated the clothing. One could attempt to fault this old guy for not being more cautious or for leaving that much cash inside suit pockets, but just remember that he is 80 years old and probably forget things. As for who keeps $13,000 in cash in an old suit and forgets about it……who knows? Maybe he’s a former pimp and hasn’t been slapping around his hos for a decade or two, or perhaps he’s a retired drug dealer who hasn’t sold an eight ball of coke since 1990. Either way, this poor guy is attempting to care for his terminally ill wife and he needs his money back immediately. Goodwill claims it’s attempting to assist him and track down the lost loot. "We're sorting through the donations that came in at the time," said Goodwill spokeswoman Dana Engelbert. Engelbert claimed the Moline store was searched, but the item could have already been sold.
Employees and volunteers are also sifting through donated clothes in bins transferred from Moline to a warehouse in Iowa City. "We're hoping it's still there and we can find it for them," Engelbert said, "It's their life savings. It's important." A likely story, Engelbert. The man who a ccidentally donated his life savings has elected to remain unidentified because he is so "devastated and embarrassed" by the costly mistake, according to his family, which is offering a $1,000 reward if the new owner comes forward and "does the right thing." Of course, it could easily be argued that someone so forgetful and careless would eventually be bilked out of their life savings by some unscrupulous Ponzi schemer who preys on old people sooner or later, so maybe it doesn’t matter……….
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