Eideard

What – no American flag tattooed under that chest hair?

A married US congressman has resigned after a half-naked picture and emails that he sent to a woman he met on the internet were published online.

Chris Lee, a Republican who has represented a northwestern district of New York for the past two years, announced he was quitting just three hours after details of his extramarital liaison emerged…

The picture of Mr Lee was published on Wednesday by Gawker, the New York gossip website. The congressman had sent it to a woman appealing for contact on Craigslist, the classified listings site.

In her Craigslist posting, the woman asked for respondents to come forward and prove that not all men were “toads.” In his reply, Mr Lee wrote: “Hi, Hope I’m not a toad “

An email exchange between Mr Lee and the woman, who was not named, was also published. The congressman had claimed to be a 39-year-old divorced lobbyist and described himself as a “fit fun classy guy”.

Asked by the 34-year-old woman “so do you always send shirtless pics to women from [Craigslist]?“, Mr Lee responded: “Sorry. It’s all I had”. She replied: “I was only joking”.

The pair then exchanged stories about previous dates. It is unclear whether they met. The woman is said to have cut off contact when she searched the internet for Mr Lee and discovered his true identity.

Proving that a congressman can be as dumb as a high school sophomore who just discovered sexting.

Steven Ortiz, 17, dreamed of one day owning a luxury sports car — a dream that became reality after he posted a used cell phone on Craigslist.

“My friend gave me a free phone and said, ‘Do what you want with it,’” … “So I put it on Craigslist on the barter section.”

After some serious patience, research and a lot of talking, his cell phone trade landed him an iPod touch, which he managed to barter up for a dirt bike and then to a Macbook Pro laptop computer. Before long, he was the proud owner of an 1987 Toyota 4Runner.

Eventually, he landed a classic Ford Bronco SUV — the golden ticket that would soon get him into the driver seat of a luxury sports car. “I just went for it,” he said. “I knew the Bronco was worth more at the end.”

So what’s his secret?

“It’s trying to catch people who want what you have,” Ortiz said. “The man that needed the laptop had an extra car,” so both parties got what they wanted, he added.

A story like this one comes along more often than you think. I wonder how often the horse-trading ends up a a disaster. It did for me – at least once.

OTOH, I have a classic AMP mountainbike and a Klein road bike I no longer ride, a fly rod or two and some tackle I don’t use anymore. Maybe I should check out placing a notice in Craigslist?

After the Vegas DEFCON ATM debacle where hackers hacked hackers by setting up a fake ATM in front of the facilities security office, I needed to see how stupid easy it was to buy an ATM and just set it up anywhere. So my search began.

I started looking on e-bay and found plenty of new and used ATMs ranging from $500-2500 but quickly determined I didn’t want to pay $300 for shipping. Next was Craigslist…

I quickly found an ad from a bar north of Boston. They were selling pool tables, Budweiser neon signs and an ATM. I took my hacker with me and met Bob. Bob rented a room above the bar and was doing the deed for the owner. The bar was an old relic that was closing and liquidating its grungy assets. The ATM was sitting right next to the bar covered in 5 years of beer. Thank heavens they were smart enough to cover the keypad in clear plastic…

Needless to say I wanted to unbolt this thing as quickly as possible, get out of there and douse myself head to toe in pure alcohol hand sanitizer. After my hacker played with the manual, got it working and determined it was worth the financial risk, we loaded it on my trailer, paid $750 (down from a grand) and brought it home and put it in my garage.

My hacker comes over to my garage, manual in hand, all giggly, like hackers sometimes do and says “Watch this”. He punches the master codes to access the machines data on a device called an eprom and hundreds of credit and debit card numbers just start falling all over the floor…

Here’s the first of a few upcoming videos of what happened next:

This could make you never want to use an ATM ever again. And stay out of sleazy bars.

Craigslist, the Web’s largest classified advertising site, says that it will close its controversial “erotic services” category, which critics have said is a forum that facilitates prostitution and other illegal activities. In its place, the company has created a new category called “adult services” in which postings will be reviewed by employees, who will look for indications of activity that violates the site’s guidelines.

The move comes in the wake of pressure from officials in several states. But it does not appear to go far enough to satisfy everyone in the growing chorus of Craigslist’s critics.

That’s newspaperese for politicians preparing to run for higher office.

Andrew Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, said that an impending criminal case brought by his office implicated the erotic services category. “Rather than work with this office to prevent further abuses, in the middle of the night, Craigslist took unilateral action which we suspect will prove to be half-baked,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement.

Mr. Buckmaster said the move was “strictly voluntary” and that Craigslist has always been on solid legal footing under the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which says that Web sites are not legally responsible for material contributed by their users.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said…“We are going to be extraordinarily watchful,” he said. “We are concerned about any possible new area where ads may migrate. We are not going away.”

Blumenthal is getting ready to run against that world-class flip-flopper and moralist, Joe Lieberman. Normally, I’d say anyone is a better choice than Joe. Now, I’m not so sure.

Solar power, with its promise of emissions-free renewable energy, boasts a growing number of fans. Some of them, it turns out, are thieves…

Police departments in California – the biggest market for solar power, with more than 33,000 installations – are seeing a rash of such burglaries, though nobody compiles overall statistics.

Investigators do not believe the thieves are acting out of concern for their carbon footprints. [No kidding!] Rather, the authorities assume that many panels make their way to unwitting homeowners, sometimes via the Internet.

In Contra Costa County, detectives accustomed to handling thefts of copper began to notice solar panels disappearing in the past six months, according to Jimmy Lee, a spokesman for the county sheriff’s office.

“We were surprised and kind of caught off-guard” by the solar panel thefts, said Lee, who recommends that people engrave their driver’s license numbers onto their panels for better identification.

In Europe, where the solar industry is well established, thievery is entrenched, and measures to ward it off have become standard, including alarm systems and hard-to-unscrew panels.

I like the engraving idea. Include your social security number and we can add identity theft to the whole process.