Category Archives: Security

Penguin Flight Leads to Arrests in Prague

Three stand accused of stealing a plastic penguin from an art installation in Prague.

Prague police said on Tuesday that they had arrested three foreigners and charged them with stealing a penguin sculpture from Prague’s central Museum Kampa. The yellow plastic sculpture was one of an identical series perched on a stone wall outside the museum on the Vltava river and illuminated at night.

Three foreigners? Vague description.

The thieves had to get past a two-meter high fence to snatch the penguin, police said. Hulan added the financial damage to the museum totaled Kč 70,000. “It only took the police four days to apprehend the criminals,” the police boasted on their website.

The accused were reported to be a Russian, a Spanish speaker and a French speaker, all in their 20s.

Perhaps the Spanish speaker and French speaker refused to reveal their nationality. Or perhaps the Czechs are trying to make the point that if you speak Russian, then you are from Russia. Spanish and French…they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt — could be from anywhere. The Czech dislike of Russians could thus be similar to the American security analysts who find software that runs in Chinese and call that proof enough to say there’s a connection to China.

Virtualization and the DHS 20 for FISMA

The Department of Homeland Security recently released FY2011 CIO FISMA Reporting version 1.0, which has some interesting updates from prior requests.

Their new guidance that really caught my attention, however, is a working draft released by NIST that shows the DHS top 20 security controls for FISMA are “negatively impacted” by virtualization. No details or clarification of those terms has yet been posted, just this list.

Homicide and Cupcakes

Mission Local discusses a new map that overlays cupcake shops with gang territory

Gangs and Cupcakes Map

I am disappointed that the overlay does not have homicide data mapped, since that is the underlying data that makes the story interesting.

Is the occasional shoot-out bad for business? To the clientele of the St. Francis Fountain, four blocks east on 24th and a hangout for the young and hip: No.

“This is the best place in town for breakfast,” said Tex, a small man in denim work clothes drinking coffee Thursday morning at the counter.

He feels safe in the Mission as a whole, though he’s been warned to be careful to not seem especially gay anywhere around the intersection of 24th and Mission. “What I was told was, there are these gangs from El Salvador, and to be in the gang you have to kill a queer.

The data on crime is publicly available, as I have written before. It might be easiest to map cupcakes to the 3D maps already created to show areas with peak crime.