Wires Crossed #102 – October 16

Party Busted Thanks To Facebook

Party Busted Thanks To Facebook
Teenagers have been busted partying in a house in North Carolina. So what? I hear you say. It happens all the time, right? Sure, but it’s the ‘how’ that is interesting. For a start, the owners of the house in question were on holiday at the time. It’s only because they posted the pictures on Facebook that the house owner found out at all. Even though the kids cleaned up after themselves and left no mess, the father called the police after recognising the different rooms in his house. It is being treated as a burglary.

Sony Sues Actor Over Copyright
Actor Jerry Lambert had a nice little number playing fictional Sony vice-president Kevin Butler in a series of ads for PlayStation over the past couple of years. When the campaign ended, like any jobbing actor, he moved on. However, the next ad he appeared in caught the eye of Sony execs who are now suing because he looks too much like their character he plays in the advertisement. At first glance it looks like a silly lawsuit – isn’t that an actor’s job to play somebody a different person? I mean, it’s not like they can change their looks at the drop of a hat. God forbid Robert De Niro play a brooding character who grunts a lot or Johnny Depp really steps out and plays a weird/quirky individual , right? However, after digging a bit deeper it appears that Lambert’s latest ad is for Bridgestone tyres who are also giving away Wii consoles in a promotion, and it also seems that Lambert signed an exclusivity agreement with Sony that he wouldn’t promote other gaming consoles. Now that makes much more sense.

Google Maps Offers Hizbullah Better Picks
In a strange admission a former Israeli air force general believes Google Maps would provide better information to Palestinian group Hizbullah, than the drones the group sent across the border to Israel. Dan Halutz is the former general in question and he raised the issue on a radio programme when asked if he was worried about the drones crossing Israel’s border and causing security issues. He believed that the quality of the pictures were so low that the enemy would be better using Google Maps to get the job done. However, he forgot to mention, or didn’t realise, that some of Israel’s most sensitive government installations are blurred by Google Maps, which is probably why the drones are used in the first place.

No Jail For Facebook “Troll”
A British man who posted all “soldiers should die and go to hell” on his Facebook page was sentenced to 240 hours of community service by a British judge after she found the post “offensive”. Azhar Ahmed went on a tear on his Facebook page about how innocents were being killed in Afghanistan and couldn’t understand why there was no sympathy towards civilian deaths compared with the death of soldiers. Judge Jane Goodwin thought he went a step to far, and even though he took it down after complaints, she still felt it warranted a conviction.