Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Charlottesville, Virginia attained a certain moderate level of fame when his operation was featured in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Now he’s got a book of his own called Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.
illegal
LA Has 4,000 Illegal Billboards, But City Looks On Helplessly
By 4.30.08
In 2002, LA banned any new billboards from going up in the city. Since then, an estimated four thousand have been put up by advertising companies who have ignored the law, which obviously the city’s billboard inspectors—”a tiny, and some say incredibly inept, group”—have never bothered to enforce.
Cheap Tattoos Come With Free Drug-Resistant Staph Infections
By 12.18.07
If you’re in the market for a cheap, illegal tattoo, you might want to make sure that you have good health insurance, because your new ink might come with a free drug-resistant staph infection.
A West Rutland [Vermont] couple is facing charges for allegedly giving tattoos that infected a number of people.
Gap Responds To Child Slave Labor Scandal
By 11.20.07
The Gap has pledged $200,000 to to improve working conditions in India, where only some forms of child labor are outlawed, and it also promised to tighten its own standards. The retailer canceled half of its orders with the vendor in India that was responsible for subcontracting the workshop in which children who had been sold to the factory were working off the debt by embroidering clothing for Gap Kids.
Cellphone Jammers Are Effective, Illegal
By 11.5.07
The power to silence the annoying schmo yabbering away on their cellphone rests within a small black box the size of a cigarette pack. Selling for as little as $50, cellphone jammers can spew radio signals powerful enough to disrupt all nearby cell signals. The downside? It’s illegal.
The Federal Communication Commission says people who use cellphone jammers could be fined up to $11,000 for a first offense. Its enforcement bureau has prosecuted a handful of American companies for distributing the gadgets — and it also pursues their users.
Travelocity Fined $182,750 For Booking Trips To Cuba
By 8.17.07
As a travel company, you would think Travelocity would know that there is an embargo on Cuba. The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control filed a complaint against the company earlier this month, alleging that Travelocity violated the prohibition nearly 1,500 times between January 1998 and April 2004.
How Did The Walmart Spy Intercept Text Messages?
By 3.9.07
It’s also possible to intercept unencrypted or poorly encrypted messages directly as they’re broadcast over cellular channels. (If the network uses sophisticated encryption, you might be out of luck.) To steal messages with your phone, you would need to upload illegal “firmware” onto your phone. This essentially turns your phone into a radio and allows it to pick up all the texts broadcast on a given channel–instead of limiting you to the ones addressed to you. You’d also need to know the network for the target phone–Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, etc.–and you’d have to make sure that both your phone and the target are within range of the same base station. This method isn’t too expensive since you don’t need much more than a computer, a phone, and some firmware that any serious techie could find online for free.
Hmm. We do not know anything about illegal firmware, so we’ll take Slate’s word on that.
HOW TO: Disable RFID in Your New Passport
By 12.27.06
Despite the fact that RFID chips are not secure and can be read by hackers, any U.S. Passport issued after Jan 1 will contain an RFID chip. If you’d like to risk 25 years in prison for tampering with it, Wired has a primer on how to disable the chip and protect yourself from ID theft.
Does Harper Collins Know What You’re Downloading?
By 12.27.06
We were looking through the Freakonomics blog this morning when we came across this post from Dec 18th, concerning Harper Collins contacting the ISPs of customers thought to be sharing of illegal copies of the book Freakonomics. The post had a link to a letter that a customer received after illegally downloading the book.
