'Swatting' Prank Sends Police to Unsuspecting Residents

North Toronto resident Jason Myles believes he is the latest victim of a rather vicious prank known as “swatting,” which involves calling 911 with a spoofed phone number to report a crime in hopes of convincing the police to send over a SWAT team.

“Somebody spoofed that number calling 911,” says the software consultant, referring to a canceled landline number still registered to him, “and what they told police on the 911 call was that they had just killed their mother and were about to kill their sister.”

Unfortunately for Myles, he happened to be wearing noise-canceling headphones when SWAT stopped by and couldn’t hear their calls to open up. “The first thing I heard was when they attempted to kick down the door,” he says. The police handcuffed him and searched his apartment only to discover that no crime had been committed.

After determining that they had played a part in someone’s twisted prank, the officers apologized to Myles and told him they would pay to have his busted-down door fixed.

This latest instance of swatting comes just days after a family in Langley, British Columbia, fell victim to swatting, which is becoming increasingly popular thanks to prevalence of VoIP phone services that let users select the number visible through caller ID.

[ctv / thestar / northjersey.]

Pirate Captain Morgan's Ship Wreckage Found in Panama

Yes, THAT Captain Morgan. He was real, and he was a real, ruthless pirate. Archaeologists now believe that they've discovered his 440-year-old ship sunk off the coast of Panama. The liquor company even went along for the ride.

Hailing from Texas State University, the scientists say the ship was one of five that ran aground near the Lajas Reef in 1671. And you could smell the treasure. Near the wreck was a series of cargo boxes and chests, all unopened and ready for plundering research.

For Captain Morgan USA's part, they hope the chests hold a whole lot of booze. I hope not. I'm not a rum kind of guy.



[The Daily, Discovery News, Image Credit: Claude Beaubien/Shutterstock]

The Ever-so-rare Paris in a Flood

Yesterday’s heavy rainfall in Paris had transformed the staircase above Lamarck-Caulaincourt Metro Station into water cascade eye candy. Kinda cool, but still hope everyone is safe.

Google's Self-driving Car Involved in Fender-bender

One of Google’s self-driving Priuses got into a little fender-bender with another car, says Jalopnik. Unfortunately for anyone on the human side of the ongoing struggle between man and machine, the automated car didn’t cause the crash.

In an official statement, Google said, “Safety is our top priority. One of our goals is to prevent fender-benders like this one, which occurred while a person was manually driving the car.”

That’s lucky for Google, because I don’t think they’ve programmed their automated cars to exchange insurance information.

[popsci]

Study Wants Teens to Breakup on Facebook

The NY Times has a story about how a conference was held to teach 200 teenagers from Boston how to have "healthy breakups". Unsurprisingly, a lot of the discussion revolved around proper Facebook breakup etiquette.

Sure from reading other sites about how to breakup properly may do you more harm than good, still, no one seems to know what's the best way to handle online breakups. One kid said "racing to update his relationship status after a breakup" was healthy. Others said no way. Some people talked about how they learned about breakups through Facebook. While others said they have enough problems to worry about "some stupid boy breaking up with me on Facebook".

It's so interesting yet so utterly unsurprising that the views of what to do after your breakup can be so different. Breaking up is hard! It's even harder now since there's so much 'physical' (as in, documentable) evidence of your relationship online. Can we really expect young kids in young relationships to act like adults? Can we even expect ourselves to 'act like adults'? What does that even mean?

The conference, which was sponsored by the Boston Public Health Commission, tried to be cool with the kids, letting them use cell phones throughout the talks and showed pictures of good celebrity breakups and bad celebrity breakups, but it still focused on the idea of "Face it, Don't Facebook It", which meant to break up in person and "reach an agreement" as opposed to sending a break up text or changing your status. It's all good in theory but come on, we're talking about kids who probably hate confrontation as much as they love Twilight. My advice to the kids: don't get a Facebook. [NY Times]