Florida Programmer hacks clients’ web cams to collect photos

Just…wow:

Marisel Garcia is one of eight or nine women in the Gainesville, Florida who is a victim of a Webcam Spy Hacker voyeurism scandal, orchestrated by Craig Feigin.

Craig Feigin, a computer programmer, worked on Marisel Garcia’s computer to fix her laptop. When she got her machine back from Feigin, it had a slew of other problems so she brought it to another area repair man. One of the new problems was that the computer’s built-in camera light came on every time she was near the machine.

When Marisel Garcia got her computer back, she learned that Craig Feigin had installed a program called Webcam Spy Hacker that was using her computer’s camera to take pictures of her and send them to a Web server. Apparently Feigin had 20,000 photos of Garcia and her friends, in some of which Garcia was not fully clothed.

I guess people think they’re never going to caught doing things like this. Truly astonishing.

California’s Search for a Legacy System Archaeologist

Pay cuts for some California state workers has been met with resistance. Not a wholly unpredictable problem, at least with respect to the political maneuvering that’s currently going on. However, there is another facet to the situation making it difficult to implement the pay cuts: the system used by the state is a legacy system that will require the assistance of a COBOL programmer:

COBOL programmers are increasingly hard to come by — find me a college that teaches it — and InfoWorld recently ranked “legacy systems archaeologist” as the seventh dirtiest job in IT. Maybe it’s time for California to ditch the existing system altogether and start over afresh?

As it turns out, there is such a plan in place. Aptly named the 21st Century Project, the modernization effort is scheduled to kick off next year. Unfortunately, the estimated cost of the project has ballooned to $177 million — not an easy pill to swallow for a state without a budget.

But hold on. Is this trip really necessary? If we read between the lines of a recent IDC study, sometimes “duct tape” can have advantages.

Click on the link above to read the entire article.