Possible explosives at Harvard | Hacker News Reader

Possible explosives at Harvard

harvard.edu

34 pointspaulasmith15 comments

It should be noted that this is happening in the middle of finals. I would lean heavily towards this being false threat by a student who didn't study.

You'd think a Harvard student would be smart enough to realize that the criminal consequences of such an act far outweigh the negatives of failing a test...

If caught.

Common sense experiences a severe decline at most schools during finals.

That starts to happen, when you are halfway through your fifth red bull in an hour ;)

A similar event happened last year at the University of Pittsburgh, although the threats went on for months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_University_of_Pittsburgh_b...

When I was in college, UVA '04, we had bomb threats regularly from desperate kids who wanted to cancel finals. MO was always someone used a pay phone, called the tip line, and exams got pushed a day in the building they were threatening. Eventually the pay phones got removed. Though I'm sure you could do a VOIP call these days and obfuscate your number? (I'm not sure how though)

This just says that someone called in a bomb threat, aren't those common? It's a school during finals. And I just realised I'm wasting far too much precious time reading the internet.

There are two big final exams today, and the buildings targeted are where they are held. It seems very likely that someone didn't want to take their tests.

How does this have any relevance to HN? Practically every university gets bomb threats during exams...

Bomb threats happened quite regularly where I went to school, probably 3 or 4 in my 4 years there. None of them were real, but they always got a huge response and shut down buildings. Professors just started giving out exams in a different building instead of rescheduling.

It's almost strange how my little city of Chattanooga is so well-equipped to handle bomb threats. We just had a mysterious package reported on a street corner a month ago, and there was a whole bomb squad there within an hour. A major intersection closed down. It was just an old briefcase next to a lamp post in an uncrowded business area. It's sad.

but but they have all our cell phone and internet records. How can terrorism still happen?

This just shows cellphone records alone are not enough.

And purchasing history, credit records, driving patterns and others. Clearly this isn't enough. I sense a new patriotic start-up opportunity.

PatriotNow - check in with your fingerprint and we'll automatically log your location, browser history and 10 most recent phone calls and SMS messages.

Get our complete corporate or government package, PatriotSense, to issue check-in requests to all employees, students or members of your organization. Members will have 5 minutes to check in or be logged for follow-on questioning.

PatriotNow and PatriotSense - Show your patriotism, foil terrorism and do your part for total information awareness.

The Harvard Crimson has some more detail in realtime: https://twitter.com/thecrimson

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