Teenage Girls and Terrorists

Hi folks -- here's a story about people using online tools in unexpected ways: InformationWeek blogger Mitch Wagner found that two schoolgirls, "steph" and "chey," were using the comments in his blog to pass notes to each other.

Apparently, the computers at their school were blocked from using other types of chat and messaging, so the two just picked a blog they could get to and left messages for each other in the comments.

This worked until the InformationWeek folks figured it out and deleted the comments. Burned! (or "Killjoys!" depending on your perspective)

Outside of the fact that there are lots of other ways to circumvent this kind of filtering, using this method does have the drawback that it's completely public. Plus, if the blog owners don't want random comments cluttering up their blog: *poof*

But it's kind of a funny story. Kind of clever, but not clever enough.

[Link via boingboing]

Actually, this reminds me of another story about people using online tools in an unintended  manner. There were reports in 2005 of terrorists using free Web mail services to pass messages to each other. Here's what they would do:

1. Terrorist #1 logs onto the free Web mail service and writes a message.
2. However, he doesn't send it. He saves it as a draft, which is saved on the Web mail service.
3. Terrorist #2, who has the login and password for the account, signs in and reads the draft message. Because the message is never actually sent, there's minimal chance of interception.

Fairly clever.

For those of us who aren't terrorists (which I hope is most of us), storing some things online can make it easier to transfer information from one computer to another, or if you're going to be moving around from place to place.

For example, I have a Mac and a PC on my desk here, right next to each other. Oftentimes, the easiest way for me to pass information between the two, like a hyperlink to a site I want to blog about, is to just send it in IM.

Or, by uploading links to social bookmarking site del.icio.us, or Google docs, or even just e-mailing it to myself, as long as I can get online, it's available.

People -- good, bad and indifferent -- will always find new uses for technology.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: social media