Today started with a court thing to which I was tangentially involved -- and the court, running via Zoom, had forgotten that particular case was scheduled! A lot of sitting around and wondering, followed by a little testifying. I don't even know if I'll find out what will be decided.
The day ended when I went into the washroom at the North Campus, turned on the water -- and nothing came out! The water company was working in the area and with our one very isolated connection to the main, across a very wide field from the building, managed to nip it with their digger quite close to their quitting time. So they quit, not bothering to tell anyone or even put it on their outage map. Frantic calls from my boss and me eventually got a response that they would get around to fixing it tomorrow. I hope so. I knocked off early and finished work from home.
And a search warrant got executed on a guy in Florida. The procedure is right there in the Fourth Amendment, folks. Some flavor of law enforcement has got to convince a judge that the law has been violated and they have probable cause to believe a specific person or specific evidence is at a specific location; the judge then issues a warrant and the process works the same for anyone: said law enforcement arrives at that location, presents the warrant and goes looking for the stuff or individual(s) described in the warrant. Warrants are nearly always public records and you can bet there's a scrum of J-school grads trying to get a look at this one. On the other hand, if it was the National Archive-bound stuff they were after, some of that was super-duper secret and we might not get to find out what it was other than something like "File folders containing documents related to [REDACTED] meeting [REDACTED] about [REDACTED]." Pretty spicy!
Update
3 days ago
2 comments:
tangential, but I remember a dozen or more years ago, we lost all internet connectivity on campus for the better part of a week.
There was some construction being done, one of the guys cut the fiber optic line going in to campus, was *too embarrassed to report it* so just filled in the trench he had mis-cut and went about his business. It took at least a day to find the problem and several days to effect the repair.
Fortunately, that was back before the pandemic, before we were all leaning heavily on Zoom. Most of us just taught as normal and then went home and did what we needed to do online using our own, unaffected, ISPs.
It's my understanding the university no longer uses that particular construction company
When I was helping to design the County's new digital public safety radio system a few years ago, the primary threat we tried to design against was the actions of Backhoe Bob.
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