Brian

The Chicago Tribune reported yesterday (registration req’d) that the Oak Park Public Library temporarily turned off its public computers after being informed that a kid pulled up porn pics that someone saved.

In a follow-up report about the use of the USA PATRIOT Act in a strip-club corruption case, Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo says something that really ought to be a front-page headline (instead of buried deep inside a story deep inside the newspaper, where I saw it yesterday):

“The PATRIOT Act was not meant to be just for terrorism.” (Capitalization corrected by me. Pop quiz: What does the second “T” in the acronym USA PATRIOT stand for?)

I first saw this in the Chicago Tribune (registration required), but the same article was also in the Boston Globe. Maybe other papers, too.

A Kansas high school librarian who was fired from his job (and later reinstated) is suing the school district, the former superintendent, and a middle school librarian for $500,000.

Robert Hicks was fired for accessing pornography sites on a school computer, but he claims it was part of his job to test the school’s censorware. Five words for Mr. Hicks: Get advance approval in writing.

The article doesn’t say why the middle school librarian is being sued.

Update on an LISNews item posted a few months ago:

One of two employees fired from the Savannah branch of the Rolling Hills Consolidated Library in Missouri for refusing to work on Sundays has filed job-discrimination complaints with the EEOC and the state’s human rights commission.

A former University of Utah documents librarian has been charged with 10 felony counts for viewing child pornography on a university computer. He claims to have just been doing research on how easy it is to find the stuff online. Story in the Salt Lake Tribune.

An accountant will do a full audit of the accounts of the Tonganoxie (Kansas) Public Library to deterimine just how much money the former director actually stole, er, “diverted for personal use.”

The board says it was $17K, but the crook, er, former director, says it was only $726.

Picked up from BoingBoing:

The robots.txt file for the White House website keeps search engines from crawling a bunch of directories which include the word “iraq” in their names. Most of the directories don’t exist (the names were created by adding /iraq to a real directory), but “this robots.txt file does exclude external search engine robots from some 75 directories that actually exist on whitehouse.gov.”

For instance, a Google search of whitehouse.gov for the phrase “david kay” doesn’t pull up this page, titled “Statement by David Kay.” (An internal search of whitehouse.gov doesn’t pull it up, either, but at least gets a page that links to it.)

A landmark Carnegie library building in Minneapolis is being remodeled into a spa (Strib registration apparently required unless you get to the story through Google News), which opens for business in December.

“The upper level will have six pedicure chairs and a large manicure area, along with two plasma TVs. … On the lower level are locker rooms and a pool room for water shiatsu, a type of massage therapy done while the client floats in warm water. There also are rooms for aroma and mud therapy and a VIP room with a fireplace, a two-person Jacuzzi, a two-person steam bath and direct access to three treatment areas that can be used by couples and groups for $150 per hour per person. A day at the spa might cost $450.”

City officials in Urbandale, Iowa, are having a cow because kids are able to check out R-rated movies from the local library. The library board will discuss the video policy at its meeting tomorrow night.

Rhino Linings, as in spray-on linings for pickup truck beds, is offering a discount to customers who bring in children’s books to donate to local literacy programs. Kind of a cool connection, which will probably generate a lot more PR for the company than, say, giving away keyrings.