Student claims school spied on him via computer webcam

Philly.com News
By Dan Hardy and Bonnie L. Cook

Inquirer Staff Writers




A Lower Merion family has set off a furor among students, parents, and civil liberties groups by alleging that Harriton High School officials used a webcam on a school-issued laptop to spy on their 15-year-old son at home.


In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court, the family said the school's assistant principal had confronted their son, told him he had "engaged in improper behavior in [his] home, and cited as evidence a photograph from the webcam embedded in [his] personal laptop issued by the school district."

The suit contends the Lower Merion School District, one of the most prosperous and highest-achieving in the state, had the ability to turn on students' webcams and illegally invade their privacy.

While declining to comment on the specifics of the suit, spokesman Douglas Young said the district was investigating. "We're taking it very seriously," he said last night.

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Stripping away the disguise of derivatives

Satyajit Das

Financial Times
February 18, 2010

Reaction to revelations that Greece used derivatives to disguise its true level of borrowing is reminiscent of Captain Renault (played by Claude Rains) in Casablanca: “I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”




Use of derivatives to disguise debt and arbitrage regulations and accounting rules is not new. In the 1990s Japanese companies and investors pioneered the use of derivatives to hide losses – a practice called “tobashi” – “to make fly away”. +



Derivatives, such as interest rate and currency swaps, are used to alter the interest rates and currency of the cash flows on existing assets or liabilities. Transactions entail exchanges of one stream of payments for another. At the commencement of the transaction, if the contract is priced at current market rates, then the current (present) value of the two sets of cash flows should be equal (ignoring any profit). The contract has “zero” value – in effect, no payment is required between the parties.

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