Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

The alleged takeover of the City by the Bay may sound totally rare, but, unfortunately, it has happened before that disgruntled employees take to modern technology as a means for revenge.

City tech employee Terry Childs, allegedly modified the city system so that he was the only one with top level clearances. The city is still in a tizzy trying to regain control of their new fiber optic municipal network that handles everything from the mayor’s email to electronic court records. Childs, who was arrested on Sunday, is still being held on $5 million bail, after allegedly refusing to hand over the passwords. He at first did supply some, but they turned out to be bogus.

It isn’t even clear why he did what he did, although it’s been said that in days leading up to his arrest, his behavior towards his colleagues was becoming erratic. A new security chief had been brought in to oversee the group’s security, and over the past few weeks some evidence of tampering had been found. It was escalated to the police, who in turn brought in their own forensics team to investigate their network.

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Recently, we reported on how the OpenTable Beta version has made it possible to set up a reservation at your nearest restaurant, however it would appear that restaurant reservations aren’t the only thing that have been updated for mobile technology.

Police departments in Boston, Cincinnati, and 100 other communities have adopted a text message tip-line. So if someone sees a crime being committed, all it would take is a dropped line to alert the authorities. 

So far, this new department system has produced “great drug information, specific times, dates, names of suspects, locations, pick-up times, and license plate numbers”. 

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YouTube, while being widely popular and still taking more than its fair share of criticism over the use and what videos get uploaded still has some very good potential uses. It’s just up to the user or in this case the group to make good use of such a wide potential audience.

The Palm Bay Police Department, located in Florida has become the latest to attempt to make good use of YouTube’s potential. They have created their own channel and use it to share videos ranging from one about the “Florida Tour de Force” to clips of criminals in action and people they are looking for. While its always fun to watch those silly videos that go viral, its refreshing to see a law enforcement department be able to fit in with the craziness.

Watch [YouTube] Read [TampaBays10]

Is GoDaddy playing censorship God again or did the police ranking site RateMyCop actually really hit its bandwidth limit? RateMyCop has been gaining popularity lately because it allows visitors to post comments and ratings on police officers. It would have been alright if the site was not disclosing officer names and badge numbers, but unfortunately it does. 

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