I’ve been waiting for an excuse to slip a Colbert Report video clip here, and this is my chance. Stephen Colbert has had a running joke about how horribly backwards the various cities/villages/”incorporated outhouses” of Canton are in the states.
He first started by taking a jab at Canton, Ohio, which caused a media brouhaha. While “apologizing,” he happened to insult Canton, Georgia, and then the ones in Kansas, Texas, South Dakota, etc.
Here’s a clip from last night’s show.
Just like the Oscars have “seat-fillers” to hide the empty seats when people go to the bathroom, the Chinese are busing in state-trained “cheer squads” to fill the surprising numbers of empty seats at the Olympics.
Dressed in identical bright yellow t-shirts, the cheer squads are meant to improve the Olympic atmosphere and avoid embarrassing television shots of all the no-shows at the Games. As the Washington Post notes, “The U.S. softball team played in a stadium only about 30 percent full on Tuesday, while the day before, 10 of 18 venues did not reach 80 percent capacity.”
Officials blame the poor crowds on everything from the weather to strict visa regulations to spectators not wanting to watch the less exciting sports.
Beijing hotel owners, who were expected to be some of the biggest beneficiaries of the 2008 Olympics, have been underwhelmed by the amount of business the Games have brought. From the Washington Post: “‘Business is worse than at this time last year,’ said a receptionist at a 22-room hotel in Beijing’s Chongwen district, where rooms cost $28 a night. ‘It’s the season for traveling and last year the hotel was full. The Olympics should have brought business to Beijing, but the reality is too far from the expectation.'”
The opening ceremony last week in Beijing was quite memorable. The sheer magnitude of the spectacle was, in fact, almost unbelievable. When former Olympic medalist and millionaire clothing designer Li Ning made his lap around the roof of the Bird’s Nest without falling or extinguishing his torch, China must have breathed a collective sigh of relief. The whole thing went off without a hitch.
But a bit of controversy has come to the surface recently. Remember that little flying singer with the pig-tails who almost stole the entire show? According to the ceremony’s music director, Chen Qigang, she was simply mouthing the words.
That’s not really a controversy. Singing in front of so many people is a lot to ask of someone so young.
But wait. The little girl, Lin Miaoke, was not even supposed to be part of the show. She was a replacement for the original singer, seven-year-old Yang Peiyi. Yang was not going to lip-sync. What happened? A sore throat? Stage fright?
Government officials and the ceremony’s producers decided to cut Yang in favor of Lin because Yang, with her crooked teeth and baby-fat cheeks, was deemed too ugly.
Chen explained: “The reason why little Yang was not chosen to appear was because we wanted to project the right image…”
Yang’s voice was still heard on the stadium’s sound system. Apparently, Lin didn’t have the singing chops to match her good looks.
Much has been made of airlines charging for checked baggage. Most people have grudgingly accepted this trend with a “what else can we do” shrug.
What else can we do indeed. It seems that even soldiers on their way to a war zone are not immune from these charges. Military personnel have been hit with fees as they have tried to check heavy rucksacks for flights overseas. Some airlines, like American Airlines, have made allowances for troops, letting them check twice as much baggage as average passengers.
Also, the military is supposed to issue passes exempting troops traveling to Iraq and Afghanistan from baggage charges. Apparently, though, these aren’t reaching everyone.
According to a CNN report, many soldiers have been charged as much as $100 to check their rucksacks and field kits. American Airlines, for one, has promised a refund for those who had to pay up front.
I wonder how long it will take for that $100 to get to the war zone and how much longer it will take the soldier to cash the check.
The VFW has been lobbying the Air Transport Association of America to wave the fees, but a spokesman responded by saying that the organization had no control over the baggage fees charged by individual airlines.
Frequent travelers on any metropolitan subway system know that the two major means for fare tracking and billing are via magnetic strip and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). And every nerd and his RPG character know that those systems can be both readable and exploitable.
To see how secure the Boston subway system was, several MIT students decided to run an analysis on the security of the infrastructure; what they found was a little disturbing. By simply wandering into unlocked doors, opening unlocked cabinets and peering around they were able to find keys to the system, get access to network hardware and find and copy employee identification.
On looking into the security of the magnetic and RFID systems, they were able to reverse engineer the code on the magnetic stripes and reconfigure the data to post $653 to a subway card. Similarly, the group analyzed the RFID contents and were able to disassemble the code.
The students point out that numerous transportation systems around the globe use these systems and technology.
Naturally, all of this quite illegal — the students were just illustrating a point to the MBTA that there are security vulnerabilities in the system that can fairly easily be exploited. Hopefully, they and the company that makes subway infrastructures perks up and makes some serious security changes as a result of this reserach.
Check out the full 87 page presentation on the execution hosted at MIT.