Slashdot Mirror
Aqua Teen Hunger Force Brings Boston to a Halt
An anonymous reader writes "An ad campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force featuring the Mooninites Ignignot and Err caused major security concerns in Boston, MA when magnetic light displays were mistaken for possible bombs. The displays included one of Ignignot flipping the bird (as hard as he could), but Gov. Deval Patrick was not amused."
I wonder how they'd react to actual guerrilla street art?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
A Link to the Moon: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vanderlin/tags/aquate enhungerforce/
Supposedly these are in three cities, and have been for a matter of weeks, supposedly maybe with permits even. All hearsay. Hope you enjoy the link unless it has already been posted.
This used to be on youtube, but it's been pulled. It's now up at a safer place. Some local people I know have actually been able to deduce locations from the video and obtain a couple of these "devices." Boston area slashdotters up for some scavenger hunting? athf-lightsnipes-boston.flv
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
Can something so harmless be taken for
a bomb..
plenty of howto's here regarding LED bombing
http://graffitiresearchlab.com/?page_id=46#video
I said normal channels, NOT normal trains of thoughts.
Sheesh.
If Cartoon Network wanted to buy space on buildings or work out a deal with the city then fine- but as I said, don't put up weird shit with batteries and electronics in odd places and think that you'd not get the wrong attention.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Along comes the anthrax attacks - a pub run, and the men in BioHazzard suits come out investigating the strange white powder. I really wish someone would get on a pay phone and tell the police that it was flour.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
CNN is running this article, but the picture has been edited out the offensive finger.
I find that interesting they will edit a "drawn" finger but will show blody dismembered bodies.
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
True. But you don't see Boston's finest detonating every trash can in the city do you? After all, more bombs have been placed in trash receptacle's than placed under bridges shaped like Err...
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Actually it is a known fact that law enforcement typically have an IQ at 100 or below.
you do not want smart cops out there, you want them to follow training and not waiver from that. It'
s just like the ARMY. you do not under any circumstances want smart cops.
Because smart people think independently and you cant have that in a police or military force... They wont violate personal rights if they do.
Yes, I AM a cop, yes this is all very true. Posting ANON to keep from getting fired.
Kinda like when I was in High School and they banned backpacks (but not purses, which is a whole other story) from classrooms because bombs could be hidden in them, which, according to the administration, would make for a lot more effort for a bomb squad to find a bomb in case a bomb threat was called in. Of course, this just meant that the bombs would be left in lockers for the bomb squad to search, which I don't see as making things any easier. The high school wasn't being cautious, it was being retarded.
See, it's not about making things safer -- it's about making gullible, naive people (i.e., a good majority of the population) THINK that things are safer.
Makes me think of the USPS instituting that "packages over one pound can no longer be put in mailboxes -- they must be brought to the counter" garbage. Never mind that the incident that prompted the rule (TWA 800) had nothing whatsoever to do with explosive packages, or that much less than a pound of C4 could do some serious damage. As I commented to a postal clerk in the wake of the change: "Yeah, so instead of the bomb blowing up a mailbox out on the street, it'll blow up inside the post office. Sounds a LOT safer to me....."
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
I distinctly remember going to school aged 6 or 7 in Northern Ireland as a dependant of a British military personel toward the mid 1980s and being having a regular 'security' class taken by someone in combat fatigues every week (IE someone from the military). In that class we were shown explosive device designs in use by the IRA at that time - pipe bombs, nail bombs et al, anything we should not ever touch in any circumstance if we found.
I also went to school in Berlin toward the end of the 1980s (yes, I was there for the wall coming down) and there were adverts on TV (BFBC iirc) that detailed carbombs and how to check for them, along with what to look out for with regard to suspicious persons.
Some of us grew up in a security climate vastly worse than the current one. And no, Im not the AC above.
The other lesson they seem to have learnt is how to avoid the precise event that just happened - so airport security bans knives (despite the high probability that a terrorist with just a knife would get beaten to death on an airplane now).
They ban lighters and check the soles of your shoes (in case like Richard Reid, you choose to have an explosive, detonated via a burning fuse, in the bottom of your shoes).
They ban liquids, but not malleable plasticised materials, on the grounds that people once planned to use liquid explosives.
The parrot like nature of the security services is frankly embarassing. I can see two reasons why they do this - 1) fear of getting fired - if a terrorist does something exactly the same way and succeeds a second time then you look grossly incompetent, and will get fired, and 2) security does not attract the brightest sparks. The better wages and conditions in the private sector, IT, meds, energy etc. attract away the intelligent people we need running this stuff.
This ad campaign won't do anything to fix it, didn't even try, but the ad geek who came up with it deserves massive respect. Exposing publicly funded stupidity like this deserves an award. I just hope that many many heads roll.