When I briefly had a job scoring essays for the California Achievement tests, I was always sadly surprised at how much trouble some people had with them. I read one essay that just said “I did not finish” and another that said “don’t fale me.” I was reminded about this when I looked at the image on Aaron Schmidt’s post about the Jail Finds Flickr group about the things that this person found in books or on the book cart at the jail where they volunteer.
Category: libraries
library hacking, social engineering style
The secret to getting into the lovely Elmer Holmes Bobst Library and Study Center at NYU? Tell the guard you’re going to the Tamiment Labor Library on the tenth floor, the only part of the library that’s open to the public. [del.ico.us]
Prompt book return grows out of the barrel of a gun?
MAO and MPL have parted ways, but the new Minneapolis Public Library will opening May 20th with a less edgy but still dramatic ad campaign. Of course MPL.org is actually Milwaukee Public Library, perhaps they can get in a heavy domain name bidding war now.
project vote smart and libraries
If you’re a library that is getting a strange letter from Project Vote Smart talking about lack of support from ALA, please read these messages from ALA President Michael Gorman and ALA Executive Director Keith Fiels. Upshot, they claim they are forced to “…no longer provide materials to libraries because they had tried for five months, unsuccessfully, to get a letter of endorsement from ALA leadership.” Gorman: “I have never received a request for an endorsement.” Fiels: “[I]t was never clear to me from based on the conversations with Ms. Buscaglia what exactly she needed from ALA or that the funding for the project depended on a letter from the President. Of course we would have provided a letter of support.” I can’t imagine what happened here.
rfid library tags unlocked, vulnerable
RFID hacking in, among other places, libraries. More on RFID.
As he waves the reader over a book’s spine, ID numbers pop up on his monitor. “I can definitely overwrite these tags,” Molnar says. He finds an empty page in the RFID’s memory and types “AB.” When he scans the book again, we see the barcode with the letters “AB” next to it. (Molnar hastily erases the “AB,” saying that he despises library vandalism.) He fumes at the Oakland library’s failure to lock the writable area. “I could erase the barcodes and then lock the tags. The library would have to replace them all.”