Because they disabled cell phone service at four of their stations to prevent a planned protest from happening, one of the websites belonging to San Francisco’s BART transit system got hacked on Sunday, courtesy of Anonymous.

“By (cutting cell service), you have not only threatened your citizens’ safety, you have also performed an act of censorship. By doing this, you have angered Anonymous.”

The hacked website showed a page featuring the Anonymous logo above two crossed swords, all on a black background. In addition to the silly defacing, Anonymous also stole internal documents and the user database of MyBART.gov (containing the emails and phone numbers of hundreds of people), which they then posted online.

“We apologize to any citizen that has his information published, but you should go to BART and ask them why your information wasn’t secure with them. Also do not worry, probably the only information that will be abused from this database is that of BART employees.”

Indeed, taking one of the agency’s websites down for a few hours and releasing the personal information of hundreds of innocent people really made for some great justice. /sarcasm

I really, really, want to like Anonymous, but they keep doing shit like this…

If Anonymous really wanted to do something useful for society, they would have figured out a way to turn cell phone service back on after BART shut it down. That is, if they’re as smart as they claim to be. Defacing a website and leaking the personal info of its users is just plain stupid and doesn’t do anyone any good.

via CNN

A Dutch researcher by the name of Jalila Essaidi has created a composite of human skin that can literally stop bullets.

Made by combining spider silk protein with goat milk and implementing the mix in human skin, the result is so strong it can stop a (partially slowed) bullet fired by a .22 calibre Long Rifle.

This sounds great in theory, but I’m not sure about the usefulness of this in a real world situation. Even if it could stop any bullet, the impact would still be powerful enough to break bones and turn internal organs into jam. It would be similar to being hit with a baseball bat by an angry silverback gorilla. The bat wouldn’t pierce the skin, but severe internal bleeding and possibly death would likely occur.

So I don’t see the purpose of bulletproof skin unless the one wearing it is a 600 pound person with enough fat to absorb any impact. But in that case, getting shot would be the least of their worries.