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| Stoned, dumb, jerking off, Hawkeye. |
UI music professor Brent Sandy, 55, reported his laptop stolen on Jan. 13. Sandy told police the laptop had been taken from his office during a three-minute window, according to Iowa City Police complaints.
Using a Mediacom IP address, UI Information Technology Services employees traced the missing laptop to Sandy’s home on Fifth Avenue, according to police.
Police executed a search warrant and found the laptop - along with a small container of marijuana and a one-hitter - in Sandy’s house, according to complaints.
Sandy told police he removed the laptop from his office because in contained pornography and he was scheduled to get a new laptop, police say.
The rest of the misery.
The most submitted link I can remember.
ReplyDeleteReminds me a bit of this guy. Given the timing of both events, one might argue that the breaks between semesters are dangerous times for some professors. Or just that these particular professors need better hobbies -- or to move to Colorado, thus eliminating at least one problem.
ReplyDeleteThis guy also apparently needs to buy his own netbook to be used for certain content. University policies regarding pornography may be a bit silly, but they exist, and are enforced, and buying your own porn-access device is a lot cheaper than losing your job, and/or paying a lawyer to help you try to keep it. It also removes the temptation to perpetrate coverups worthy of a 15-year-old afraid his parents will find his stash. This guy should have learned from the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal: the coverup is often far more damaging than the initial crime.
The relevant issue here is whether they are now going to be hiring or not. Seriously. Sheesh.
ReplyDeleteHe'll undoubtedly be replaced by 4 adjuncts, at lower cost to the university. Yet another reason not to do stupid stuff.
DeleteI know what you all are thinking. It's ok, admit it.
ReplyDeleteIt's not me.
It wasn't me, either. It was Walter!
DeleteWalter would have known how to fling that sucker into a river and claim it stolen.
DeleteWhat disturbs me is that a professor isn't smart enough to google "how to wipe a hard drive." Then again, do we really WANT him to be smart enough to cover his tracks? Sheesh.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure you can really wipe it, though. Someone motivated enough would probably be able to recover the contents.
DeleteMy IT friend tells me there are few options: shoot the hard drive with a .22, dump it in an HCl bath or "degauss it" a la Walter White. See, the guy was greedy and wanted to keep the computer and all the stash instead of doing one of those things and burying it.
Now, don't you start thinking I've given this matter a great deal of thought. I bought a cheap Chinese laptop for things like...College Misery. It's what I'm using now.
I'd guess that the IT folks at most schools aren't busily trying to recover deleted files from decommissioned laptops (well, not unless they want the porn for their personal use). They're not the FBI, after all (or the NSA), and they're probably busy enough trying to keep up with questions from faculty and students who can't figure out their new laptops, the latest malware introduced by stupid faculty and/or student behavior, etc., etc. Barring their stumbling across the sort of pornography that would be illegal in any context (not just a violation of guidelines for use of university equipment), I'd think that a good-faith effort to fully erase the drive would probably get him a pass, even if the IT folks discovered some traces. I suppose he could have the bad luck to run across an especially self-righteous stickler-for-the-rules IT staffer, but even then there's the possibility of saying "oh; I loaned it to my son/nephew/best friend; I had no idea he did that; I'm sorry; I know I shouldn't have let him use it; it won't happen again." This guy's just dumb (and/or is proof that long-term pot smoking does sometimes addle the brain).
DeleteThere's software that'll give you a sure-fire wipe, because it doesn't just delete the index table, it individually resets each bit to 0. But this guy was in the arts, so what I'm really surprised by is that he knew how to download porn in the first place. (Joking! Sort of!)
DeleteHe could have at least hidden the damned thing somewhere besides his house.
ReplyDeleteInnocent until proven guilty, right? Even here?
ReplyDeleteSure, he could be innocent. He could be guilty. We don't know. But the comments are funnier if you assume he's guilty.
DeleteI wonder if he was just trying to preserve all the porn he had downloaded.
ReplyDeleteI knew the IT guy at the Department of Hamsterology, where I went to grad school, pretty well. He didn't give any details, but he said that faculty members' office computers were simply loaded with pr0n.
ReplyDelete