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Hey Homeland Security! by MillionthMonkey · 2007-05-30 22:33 · Score: 5, Interesting · on Sci-fi Writers Join War on Terror

I wonder if a science fiction writer could have come up with a story as screwed up as this one about the tuberculosis guy. A patient with tuberculosis flew to his wedding in Greece and while he was on his honeymoon in Italy he was notified by the CDC that his tuberculosis was a scary drug resistant strain, to avoid travel, and to turn himself in to Italian authorities to be quarantined. They also told him that he had been put on the no-fly list. But damn it, he's on his honeymoon. So what did he do? He flew from Prague to Montreal to successfully avoid the no-fly list, and then he drove across the border into New York State, with no-flying:

Health officials said the man had been advised not to fly and knew he could expose others when he boarded the jets from Atlanta to Paris, and later from Prague to Montreal.
The man, however, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that doctors didn't order him not to fly and only suggested he put off his long-planned wedding in Greece. He knew he had a form of tuberculosis and that it was resistant to first-line drugs, but he didn't realize it could be so dangerous, he said.
"We headed off to Greece thinking everything's fine," said the man, who declined to be identified because of the stigma attached to his diagnosis.
He flew to Paris on May 12 aboard Air France Flight 385. While in Europe, health authorities reached him with the news that further tests had revealed his TB was a rare, "extensively drug-resistant" form, far more dangerous than he knew. They ordered him into isolation, saying he should turn himself over to Italian officials.
Instead, the man flew from Prague to Montreal on May 24 aboard Czech Air Flight 0104, then drove into the United States at Champlain, N.Y. He told the newspaper he was afraid that if he didn't get back to the U.S., he wouldn't get the treatment he needed to survive.
...
The man told the Journal-Constitution he was in Rome during his honeymoon when the CDC notified him of the new tests and told him to turn himself in to Italian authorities to be isolated and be treated. The CDC told him he couldn't fly aboard commercial airliners.
"I thought to myself: You're nuts. I wasn't going to do that. They told me I had been put on the no-fly list and my passport was flagged," the man said.
He told the newspaper he and his wife decided to sneak back into the U.S. through Canada. He said he voluntarily went to a New York hospital, then was flown by the CDC to Atlanta.
He is not facing prosecution, health officials said.
"I'm a very well-educated, successful, intelligent person," he told the paper. "This is insane to me that I have an armed guard outside my door when I've cooperated with everything other than the whole solitary-confinement-in-Italy thing."

So what was unfortunately revealed by this episode?

After six good years of hysteric overspending we still can't track down TB patients on their honeymoons much less bioterrorists
So we put patients with communicable diseases on our handy terrorist no-fly list
Handy travel tip for anyone on the no-fly list: fly Czech Air to Canada and enter the U.S. via rental car!
Tuberculosis causes dementia as is shown here by the illogical desire to get to the U.S. for medical treatment

mail.com by arekq · 2005-03-23 07:11 · Score: 1 · on Yahoo Ups Mail to Match Google's Gig

Regarding webmail providers' response to gmail (the 1GB storage in particular), I think mail.com's response is the most laughable. While yahoo and hotmail respond by increasing their quota, mail.com just remove the line 10MB mailbox from their front page.

Besides that, mail.com also joined the crowd and added a link to "Report Message as Spam". However, they don't even have a working spam filter. (They are still using the ancient method that you tell the system a list of sender email addresses that you want to block.)

Re:your mission, should you choose to accept it .. by Lord+Dimwit+Flathead · 2004-09-14 03:40 · Score: 1 · on Batch-o-Moz: Firefox, Thunderbird, Suite Released

The Google toolbar's popup blocking is pretty good, but mail.com manages to thwart it on their homepage (it blocks most of them, but they slip in a pop-under). I never got around to digging into the source to figure out what they're doing, but whatever it is, it doesn't work in Firefox. No idea about XP SP2.