I thought “oh, another copy of a classic 80s game” when I first read news about a Park Patrol application for mobiles.

This is an entirely different game, however. Park Patrol app was designed by a man upset about parking tickets. He hopes that drivers will warn each other about the location of the parking police.

Spot an officer, open ParkPatrol and click Send Alert! It’s easy and satisfying knowing you’ve contributed to the community not to the pockets of the municipality or council. If you have another 5 minutes, wait and report the officer a second time from a new location. Made a mistake? Just “Shake to Delete”!

ParkPatrol maps all enforcement officer reports using our own system of servers and databases, so when the community acts together we become a powerful data gathering and reporting tool. We call this system CRWD POWER – a groundbreaking community based infrastructure designed to help you stay one step ahead of parking tickets.

Is it just me or is the phrase “contributed to the community not to the pockets of the municipality or council” a lot like saying we contributed to the community by not contributing to the community? Did I miss something there?

I vaguely see an argument related to civil disobedience, but it lacks reason. It sounds more like an attempt to depict a municipality or council as not part of a community. Is that even possible? I mean are they in a dictatorship of parking rules or did their community elect representatives to set parking rules, who appointed…?

I could get mired in the political philosophy of it. Instead, I would like to point out that this app might have some interesting security implications. It seems, for example, to be a great way to fool your fellow driver into giving up their space earlier.

When you drive into an area where you want to park, you and your friends just start using CRWD POWER to scare all other drivers (who are past their time limit) into getting back into their cars and opening a spot for you. Send alerts early and often.

In other words, you can assume the authority of the park police simply by using this free app. The more alerts you send the more drivers may fear the presence of (your) authority, especially if the app servers do not properly assign and test for uniqueness in reports.

We also ask you to use this app responsibly and with respect for others

That surely will prevent abuse, just like those parking fines…who could be disobedient? I have an idea, the municipality can get rid of parking fines and just post signs everywhere that say

We ask you to park responsibly and with respect for others

What could go wrong with that plan? Even more to the point, the app developers say it is the responsibility of the app users to detect fraud.

How do I know these reports on the map are real?

You have to ‘feel’ your way around a bit here and use your best judgement [sic]. Here are some ways to have better confidence in the reports you see. If there are many reports around you, then what does the pattern and time stamps tell you? Click on the icon to open a flag showing how long ago it was reported. The reports remain on the map for 4 hours before dropping off. Councils usually don’t work overnight. In our area parking enforcement stops after 9pm. Look for patterns in the reports, are they along a logical path? Are they clustered into groups? Are they within minutes apart? The absence of reports reveals nothing useful.

If you hated worrying about parking enforcement before, something tells me you may really hate parking police + ParkPatrol. The parking timer might be helpful but otherwise it looks like it would only increase worry by sending false alarms and making you sort it all out.

If you really liked parking enforcement before, ParkPatrol extends police power right into your (and your friends’) phones. Now you can easily setup a program to send bogus police parking alerts in your neighborhood to keep pesky parkers away — you now have an active role in law enforcement.

I wonder if the developers account for the fact that the Parking Police may have phones too, which gives them the ability to monitor the signals reporting their positions. This opens up much more effective avenues of enforcement — sending a decoy vehicle one direction while an unmarked officer gives tickets in the other direction. That might not be necessary if they just send in bogus reports themselves.

It also begs the question whether enforcement will switch to digital photos mailed quietly to vehicle owners, like toll-booth violations. Why should they be conspicuous in their enforcement role at all? Is it a requirement that they wave a flag so their position can be known?

Many people swear it is a nice feeling to press that red button!

Maybe too nice a feeling…

KXLY gives extensive details on the FBI hunt for a person who tried to bomb the MLK holiday parade in Spokane:

From north to Colville, to the top of the Parkade in downtown Spokane and down south to Lewiston, federal agents cast a wide net as they chased down clues in the wake of the attempted bombing of the Unity March last Monday.

The way they describe the bomb reminds me of improvised explosives that a friend of mine in the U.S. Army used to tell stories about — part of his training for NATO operations in the 1980s.

Not far away the same news team found a receipt from a Lewiston sporting goods store. The FBI was notified, and they felt the receipt was a significant find because at the store a person could purchase black powder which could be used to power a bomb. That same store also sells ball bearings that could have been used as shrapnel to make that bomb even more lethal.

Because the bomb did not explode, it becomes a wealth of clues for the investigation.

A surveillance system could have helped, but it was offline at the time.

Members of the JTTF hoped the Parkade’s surveillance system may have picked up images of the drivers who used the garage Monday morning. Unfortunately, the security department was switching between servers at the time and the video not recorded.

I suspect they will be re-engineering that system with some redundancy now so that it does not go offline when they switch servers.

Police found the pigeon wandering around outside a prison with a suspicious-looking bag attached.

The bird was flying towards a jail in the north-eastern city of Bucaramanga when it was discovered nearby by officers with a bag strapped to its back.

Police recovered 40g of marijuana and 5g of a paste containing cocaine and believe the package was too heavy for the bird to clear the prison walls.

The Telegraph story also points out other cases of trained birds used in Columbia for security and transportation. A parrot was taught to say “run” when police approached.

The 45g of drugs is approximately 1.6 oz. It does not seem like a lot for a pigeon, since they weigh 10-16 oz themselves and are trained to fly with up to 70g (depending on distance and weather). I wonder how high the wall is.

Although the police called it ingenuity, it seems to me the parrot should have been taught a code word — anything less obvious than “run” — and the pigeons should have been sent more often with smaller amounts and in a flock. A single pigeon is an unusual sight, let alone with a backpack.

This reminds me of the case in Brazil where the pigeon was caught while it rested on a wire. Its backpack not only had parts for a cell phone, but also a note with the name of the intended recipient inside the jail. Not ingenious.