It has occurred to me, however, that the effort to quit Facebook should be a little more organized, and a little more thought out.  Read on after the break for my suggestions for things we should do as we disable our Facebook accounts to make the point louder to other Facebook members, and to the owners of Facebook.

Right, so the steps that follow are the ones that I intend to follow.  A few of these things may be a bit extreme for some people, so feel free to pick and choose from these suggestions.  (And, yes, they are definitely suggestions).

1. Goto the Quit Facebook Day fan page and “Like” it.  Then write something on the wall.  Nothing speaks louder than the irony of Facebook having a “Quit Facebook Day” page.
2. Post a message on your wall that states that you are quitting Facebook on May 31st, and list the reasons why.  It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or long.  You just want to communicate clearly that you are quitting Facebook and why you are doing it.  If nothing else, you want to make certain that your “friends” know that you are leaving.  In the best of scenarios, some of your friends might be inspired to join us.  (At the end of this list is a draft of the message I am considering posting.
3. You might want to message all your “friends” and let them know that you are leaving.  Again, keep the statement simple and direct.  (Again, the statement at the end of this list might be useful.)
4. Remove any and all photographs you have uploaded to Facebook.
5. Go through all photographs, posts, etc. you have been tagged in, and remove your tag.
6. Edit your profile and remove all information that you no longer want to be visible on Facebook.
7. Remove any wall posts that you don’t want to leave behind.
8. Remove any widgets or applications from your profile.
9. This one may be the most difficult (but it will definitely cause the most attention): un-friend everyone.
10. And, of course, finally deactivate your Facebook account. And please, take a screen shot and post it someplace if it’s as amusing as the ReadWrite Web article.

Of course, you may not want to try to do all of these things on the Quit Facebook Day itself.  Some of them may take some time (like sending out messages to your friends, or un-friending everyone), so you may want to plan to start a few days early.

Finally, here’s a draft of the message I am planning to post on my wall, and possibly send out to my Facebook “friends”.

Dear friends and fellow Facebook users.  There has been much press recently regarding the Privacy Options that Facebook provides.  I have put some thought into this issue, and have decided to join over 13,000 people that have dedicated themselves to pulling the plug on May 31st.  During the next few days you may notice some changes in my profile as I clean things up, and I may even un-friend you as a result of this cleanup.  Do not take this personally, I am still your friend, and can be contacted in any of these locations:

Website:

Email:

IM:

Of course, you put in the information that you want your friends to have, and decide if that information is something that you want posted on your wall.

I hope that you all have found these suggestions useful.  Please, if you have any more suggestions or recommendations leave a comment.

• What will compete with iBooks and iBookstore?
• Is iBooks the best thing for the publishing industry?
• What damage is being done to consumers?

Those questions are discussed in the remainder of this article.

What will compete with iBooks and the iBookstore?

The automatic assumption (because Steve Jobs framed it this way) is that the competition is going to be between Apple and Amazon.  And that may be true for a while, but probably not for very long…

Remember, there is another horse in the phone and now operating system market: Google.  The Chrome OS is being designed to fit exactly the model that the iPad is offering: smaller screen, scaled down, connected functionality.  But, that alone isn’t why I have a gut feeling that Google may find itself in this market.

Remember Google went through a lawsuit regarding it’s Google Books, and they received very favorable terms (maybe not for the publishing industry, but for Google they were favorable).  They’ve been busy digitizing as many books as they can, and have been building a “library” infrastructure the likes of which I think Apple may have problems approaching, even with all the major publishers on board.

When you also consider there is some history of Google partnering with other companies, like Amazon, to provide services.  For example, the Amazon MP3 application that ships on the Droid.

Admittedly, there is current disagreement between Amazon and Google regarding Google Books (see references), however the entry of Apple into the eBook space might change things and force an alliance between Amazon and Google.

Is iBooks the best thing for the publishing industry?

As a pretty devout Free (Libre) Culture supporter, I don’t think it is.  And, when I consider the possible implications to our legal system regarding Trademark, Copyright, Patent, and Service Mark laws, I almost get noxious.

The fact is, the propagation of the store model based on Apple’s iTunes is a bad choking point on the propagation of culture.  We would have a distribution system that would only allow for materials that are acceptable to other publishers and to Apple to be allowed in the store.  At least with Barnes & Noble and Amazon, there are self-publishing partners for those that want to publish a book without an agent / contract / publisher, etc.  And, while Google offers it’s Market for applications on Android, you can actually install other applications without using the Market (you just have to enable this feature).  You can make a bet this kind of functionality will be available in Chrome OS.

Even now, there are numerous eBook applications for Android available through the Market.  I bet those applications  will quickly find their way to Chrome OS as soon as it is sufficiently developed.  This will alos open the door for public domain texts from the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg to find their way to this platform. This isn’t as likely to happen if Apple and the publishing industry have their say.

What damage is being done to consumers?

The more I look at the current situation, the more I see a major problem: iTunes, Amazon MP3, the Kindle, etc. are allowing the music and publishing industries to cling to a business model that is outdated and outmoded by the current technology.  At some point we need to make these businesses realize that they need to be accountable to society in general, and not just the narrow markets that they have set in their minds.  Unfortunately, until they do see that they need to change their models, they will continue to cling to whatever is closest to their current business models for as long as they can to the detriment of society at large.

Another factor of this is that they are still looking towards a false economy of scarcity to allow them to price items in the digital economy.  One of the things I noticed in several TV stories that I saw was taht some publishers were hoping this was going to provide them with a way to control the pricing of their content.  The New York Times is a big advocate of pushing pricing models that match their old pricing schemes (with the changes in the media and their losing market share and capitalization, they are searching for any model that allows them to put off the inevitable need to find a new model that works for them).

Don’t get me wrong, there have been, and continue to be good things happening: dropping DRM in iTunes, the Creative Commons, netlabels, more music distribution channels (like Jamendo and Magnatune), etc.  However, most of these are incremental steps.  The don’t represent the major strides that need to be made in order to remove the locked-down approach that the music and publishing industry take over and over and over again: such as with DRM on the Kindle.

I hope with Google having a tendency towards having a more open platform than Apple, that we might be able to see some real change in the direction of this new media technology.

References

• Can the Apple iPad iBook Store take on Amazon?
• Apple reveals iBookstore and app for the iPad
• Apple iPad and iBookstore: Is this the publishing industry’s savior?
• iBooks: Apple’s New iTunes-Like Store And App For Books (VIDEO)
• Google Books Settlement Agreement
• Amazon To Contest Google Books Agreement

• Last Sunday’s Re-spin was, I think, pretty well written.  I managed to get some information in there that will help guide me forward with the site, and it hit on some interesting topics.
• My Editorial on Jamendo’s Future was a hard written piece, and I am not completely certain that everything I have been thinking was well represented.  At least, that was the conclusion I came to after I read the response from Jorg Fischer, which was well reasoned, stated and quite insightful as to where some of my article was weak and could be improved on.
• I was very pleased with the launch of a new recurring series: Finding Music Online.  I think this is a series that is going to continue building, and will allow me to expand several other areas of the site. Be looking for the next installment in that series very soon.
• I write the first of the two-part January Classical Listening articles intending for it to be a filler.  But, as I got into it, the article took on a life of it’s own I hadn’t expected.
• The only actual libre culture review this week was OG’s 01. I felt bad that I spent so much space in the review on issues that were more about Jamendo, listeners, and my struggles than it was about his music.  Fortuantely, the music itself was wonderful, and the artist was very appreciative of my review.
• I finally posted my review of the Cowon iAudio 7 & 9.  I have personally liked all the Cowon music players I’ve owned so far, despite the minor flaws I found.

In looking over the things that I promised last week, I see there were a few that I didn’t hit:

• I didn’t get the new Shoestring Classical Collection article out. That was a matter of trying to resolve a technical issue.  I just resolved the issue today, and now plan to start working on the new article.
• I didn’t get around to writing up anything on my Droid.  I have set out a plan for reviewing some things with it (not the phone itself, rather some applications that are appropriate to this site), but haven’t had enough time to work with the applications.

I sat down and did a mini-brainstorming session yesterday, and came up with a few new things to add to the site.  Not posts or series, but rather longer-term articles / essays.  I’m not going to jinx myself by talking about them specifically now, as they are bigger in scope and will require more work to produce.

With a few of the pieces I have been working on lately, I’ve been doing more research.  The fun part about this is: there is a lot more that I can work with.  It also means there is a lot more research that I need to do, and some more things for me to consider.

I started listening to an unusual piece tonight: Ergo Phizmiz’s “The Faust Cycle: or, the House of Dr. Faustus”. It’s an amazingly large work: 14+ hrs.  It was released by the Headphonica Netlabel. This is more than a somewhat daunting piece to attempt to listen to, it seems about as insane to try to listen to it as it does to have created it in the first place.

According to the artists website, the piece too three years to complete and made his head hurt — and that’s only one of 46 Reasons to Download The Faust Cycle from the artists own blog.

I love an insane challenge!  Until next week…

Scope. This privacy policy covers all of Facebook. It does not, however, apply to entities that Facebook does not own or control, such as Facebook-enhanced applications and websites.

Yes, it is true that Facebook doesn’t own the sites of third party vendors, however they are allowing these third parties to write applications that interact through Facebook with their users.  So this leaves a gap, Facebook should start off with a requirement that any third parties interacting with Facebook users minimally comply with Facebook’s own standards.  How does Facebook make certain that this is true?  Simple enough – Facebook has already established a connection with TRUSTe.  Why can’t they specify that any third party applications and / or vendors comply with TRUSTe?  If TRUSTe isn’t enough, why not use a third party to resolve these kinds of things.  In fact, I have been thinking for a while that it would be a good idea for the EFF to maybe branch out in this direction: offering a service that uses a set of established privacy criteria to judge if two (or more) institutions are compatible on their privacy statements / options / etc.

This next statement is worrisome as well:

Transactional Information. We may retain the details of transactions or payments you make on Facebook. However, we will only keep your payment source account number with your consent.

Okay, so at least they aren’t keeping my bank account or credit card numbers.  But, they are keep track of the transactions I’ve made through their site.  That’s definitely information that the government may want to subpoena at some point in one of their grand-sweeping-investigations-for-whatever-reason.  Fortunately, I am a little less concerned about this for several reasons:

1. I have never made any transactions through Facebook
2. Our current administration is a little less zealous about going on witch hunts, and more focused on addressing the real issues
3. There’s nothing in any transactions I’ve done (on or off line) for me to be concerned about.

Then there’s information that you are making public, and might not even be aware of it:

Certain categories of information such as your name, profile photo, list of friends and pages you are a fan of, gender, geographic region, and networks you belong to are considered publicly available, and therefore do not have privacy settings.

Why don’t most of these things have privacy settings?  My friends are my business, not someone else’s (especially not a spammer or other businesses).  My geographic region is public information?  Really?  Since when?  The networks I am in is public information?  So great, anyone that joins a network can spam me using the network information.

Some of the content you share and the actions you take will show up on your friends’ home pages and other pages they visit.

Umm, okay, this is kinda okay — I know my status updates show up on friend’s home pages…and if I explicitly share content, that’s the intent of sharing it.  But, this is a vaguely worded statement “Some of the…” and “other pages they visit.” is just a wee-bit open ended of a statement.  This should be clarified — right now as a policy, it’s possible to drive a Mac Truck through it.

Now consider this statement carefully:

Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.

Okay – I understand the concept that if I shared information with others, and they chose to make copies, I cannot (easily) stop them.  However, this sounds like Facebook doesn’t take responsible action to remove information from their system when I delete it…  They only remove it from my immediate profile, but if it shows up in someone elses profile it isn’t removed from there.  Personally, this is a pretty big FAIL.

I think this was mentioned in the EFF article, but it’s worth mentioning again:

The default privacy setting for certain types of information you post on Facebook is set to “everyone.”

This means that some of your Facebook information is viewable to everyone – even without logging into Facebook.  Bears thinking about and checking your Facebook privacy settings.  And, this is a definite example of why I feel less secure with Facebook.  When you have to check your default settings to make sure things aren’t being shared with the world that you want secure that is a problem.

You can choose to opt-out of Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect altogether through your privacy settings

This is another item that I have had an issue with: most of these things should be Opt-In, not Opt-Out.  The idea that you have to go out of your way to turn something off is the wrong way to handle it. Why do I think this way?  If you have to Opt-In to something, you are more likely to make certain you understand what you are turning on (well, okay, maybe not, but it does make it the users obligation to understand what they are doing).  By having things turned on by default many people just “assume” that what the system (platform) does is correct and for the best, which may not be the case.

You can block specific applications from accessing your information by visiting your application settings or the application’s “About” page

Another item I have issues with: having to go in and turn things off in Apps.  This should be designed such that when you are allowing an application to access your information, the application has to ask you for the specific items it wants to access.  I’ve seen some applications do this: good for them.  However, there are many that don’t.  This has meant, for me at least, that I have had to go through all of the Apps that I allowed access to my profile and turn them off — especially the ones that kept nagging me for stuff.  They just got severely annoying.

Continuing on down the Privacy Policy, there is a whole section dedicated to “How We Share Information“.  Now, I’m just going to say as a start: this section is too long and complicated.  It should be as simple as: we don’t share information unless you Opt-In or direct us, a partner, or application to share your information.  There is the questionable situation of “legal” issues, and those really need to be handled on a case by case basis with a strong bias towards keeping your information private.

That being said, I’ll pick out a few of the more worrisome points:

We share your information with third parties when we believe the sharing is permitted by you…

That’s one of the worrisome points right there: “we believe”.  That doesn’t mean that they require some validation, just a belief, which is far too subjective, in my opinion.

To advertise our services. We may ask advertisers outside of Facebook to display ads promoting our services. We may ask them to deliver those ads based on the presence of a cookie

So, the cookies that Facebook uses to keep track of our status can also be used for advertising?  That seems rather suspect to me.

We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law.

Now, I don’t want to tell Facebook that they should put them selves in the way of a legal issue, however “good faith” shouldn’t be the measure here.  There should be a firm, solid legal basis for compliance with a subpoena or any request of a legal nature.  Even worse is this part of the statement:

This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.

Umm, no.  Court orders / subpoena’s and Government Entities are one thing.  But, lawyers and companies are something else altogether.  Under no situation should our private information be shared with anyone that doesn’t have a specific and legally binding reason to have access to our private information.

The bigger concern I have with this clause is this: no where does Facebook state that they will notify the user if there has been a request for their private information from the site.  This seems to me to be a major problem.  As private individuals we have the rights to understand and any all circumstances under which our private information is being accessed.  I would say this should be even more of a concern when there are legal issues tied to the access of this information.

Transfer in the Event of Sale or Change of Control. If the ownership of all or substantially all of our business changes, we may transfer your information to the new owner so that the service can continue to operate. In such a case, your information would remain subject to the promises made in any pre-existing Privacy Policy.

Admittedly, this isn’t a concern just with Facebook, but any company that handles a lot of your private information.  This is something that is always worth being aware of…you never know who could end up your information.  (For example, who would have guessed that News Corp. was going to buy out MySpace?)

Limitations on removal. [...] Additionally, we may retain certain information to prevent identity theft and other misconduct even if deletion has been requested.

IMO, the above statement seems somewhat odd.  If you have deleted your account because you don’t want people to have your information, Facebook thinks they need to keep part of your information?  Seems somewhat odd, and I would love to hear a clarification as to what they are trying to prevent.

okay, so that brings us pretty close to the end of the Privacy Policy document.  And, as you can see, there are a lot of things that I feel that users really need to be aware of in this document, as well as some things where I just feel the policies need to change.  And, as if that weren’t enough, there are plenty more documents to go through on Facebook’s site, such as: Statement of Rights and Responsibilities and Facebook Site Governance Page just to name a couple.  There’s a whole list of pages that are worth looking at at the end of Privacy Policy document, including:

• reporting a deceased user
• reporting an impostor
• reporting abusive content
• reporting a compromised account
• requesting deletion of data for non-user
• removing Friend Finder contacts
• reporting and blocking third-party applications
• general explanation of third-party applications and how they access data

That’s just a lot more information to sort through than I have time or space to work on.  And, I suspect, it’s more information than the average user of Facebook can keep track of.  It’s this basis that I have problems with many of the social media sites now, and keep feeling that I am a little less secure than I was just a few years ago: the documents are getting more complicated, the interactions are getting more complicated, the things that you can do to protect yourself are getting more complicated.

IMO – someone needs to start telling these companies: you are dealing with PEOPLE not legalistic lawyer-bots.  Make policies that are understandable by people and don’t take several hours to interpret, and require that you have to watch carefully for every time there is some change on your website.

The Site and The Code

To be brutally honest, there are quite a few things about Jamendo that I don’t personally care for.

First, I think the website user interface is poor.  It has the look of the Playskool Windows XP user interface, only very very orange and purple.  The visual flow of the home page is cluttered and difficult to follow.  The three column layout doesn’t make a whole lot of sense: the organization of the content just doesn’t flow all that well.

Finding things on the site can be more complicated than one would think.  I was talking with someone in IRC right after I read the TechCrunch story, and we started looking for a place to make a donation to Jamendo.  It took two of us nearly half an hour to find the place to do it, and even then I don’t think I could find it again without searching.  Why isn’t there a button or someplace easy right on the front page to make a donation?

Then there is the forums.  The way the forums are organizationally a mess.  I keep trying to go in there to read some things, just to see who likes what artists, and what topics there are regarding the site, etc.  But I keep being confronted with a long list of topics, none of which look like things I want to read.  And there is no real navigation or heirarchy to allow me to zoom in on the things that I want.  And, even trying to search for the information I wanted was unsuccessful (mostly becuase I didn’t know the terminology used to describe what I was looking for…).  When I posted a message about it (making a suggestion) I was immediately ponited to a thread that provided a work-around, but didn’t really address the issue itself.  It’s possibly just me, I just feel that if there were more structure to the message boards, I could have found the information I needed.

After this story broke, I spent some time digging around the Jamendo website, getting a feeling for a few other things about the way it is put together and run.  The thing that was a surprise to me is that the whole system appears to be closed source.  There are open API’s for communicatnig with Jamendo, and there is a developers area for those that are working on applications.  However, when it comes to the system itself, it seems that there is no review of the code.  There isn’t any open source tracker system.  Okay, there is a Google Code site, but there is all of three defect reports, and only API code in the repository.

Artist Problems

On the same weekend that Jamendo’s problems came out in the public, one of the most prolific and most listened to artists on the site write a blog entry: Jamendo Corrupto (originally in Spanish, translated into English).  The blog entry lists a number of issuse that PeerGynt Lobogris had with Jamendo, to the point where he has left the site.

If even a portion of the allegations made in PeerGynt’s post are correct, there are some very deep problems with Jamendo as a company.  This personally leads me to the think that the future of the current company is quite bleak, and should be seriously considered when think about any solutions.

One More Problem

There is something else that has to be considered about the downfall of Jamendo: there will be collateral damage:

• The many hundreds or even thousands of artists that will lose their place to host their music, and try to build a reputation and a following is a serious impact to the community.
• Music players like SongBird, Amarok, Rhythmbox and others have built in support for Jamendo.  While it’s possible to remove this support, losing the site and the potential for bringing new listeners into the cause is major loss to the Free (Libre) Culture community as a whole.
• Libre.FM – the fledgeling Last.FM replacement relies heavily on using Jamendo’s database for identifying free music that people are listening to.  Again, it’s possible to do something to replace Jamendo (and this has been discussed in the Libre.FM channel on freenode), it still represents another major loss to the community as a whole.

And those are just the ones that are coming to my mind immediately.  There are probably others that I have not even considered at this point.  However, just those three items are serious enough.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

It seems to me that it is probably time for there to be a major consideration about Jamendo.  I personally don’t think that it is going to survive in it’s current form.  While there is a movement to raise funds to keep Jamendo going, this may not be the best thing for the future of Free (Libre) Music and Culture, and that suggests it is time for something else to happen.

Recent history has shown us the path in cases that I would suggest are similar to Jamendo: StatusNet was born in reaction to the closed nature of Twitter, Libre.FM was born in reaction to Last.FM.  Both of these projects make the case for movnig from Jamendo’s current structure into something newer, open source based, open development based, and a more distributed system.

Another case to consider (as pointed out by Fab on Linux Outlaws Episode 131) would be the idea of moving into a foundation type structure / organization.  This would be much in keeping with the way Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation have organized themselves.  And it makes sense, this would allow there to be a formal entity behind any future development, while making it more open to the community as a whole, and hopefully generating new interest in the project.

Another possibility would be to look at something similar to OpenOffice.org.  Wether you like their product or not, one can’t argue with the fact that they are an open source environment, and have managed to weather many storms, changing of hands, etc.  And are now in a position where it wouldn’t be easy for them to be taken out of the community.  (Which couldn’t be said in the days when they were owned by Sun, and much of their source code was not available under free software compatible licenses.)

One suggestion that has been made a couple of times that is interesting: Google should buy out Jamendo.  This is something that I don’t think is totally out of the question.  Recently Google has bought several music services for integrating into their platform(s).  Jamendo would make a good addition to this.  However, some have suggested that they shouldn’t make changes to the service.  I would disagree with that, given what I have discussed earlier about the platform not being open.  If Google purchased Jamendo for the good of the community, and to better integrate their technology into their platforms, I would want to see the code opened up for everyone’s good.

Conclusion

So, Jamendo’s current problems seem to go well beyond the funding problem that they have stated they are having.  The blog post from PeerGynt Lobogris makes Jamendo out to be “corrupt”.  I personally doubt that they are truely corrupt, however, I think their problems have been making things difficult.  I think they are understaffed, and there possibly could be a level of incompetence based on what I have seen…  I say this because I see that Jamendo has the facilities to add advertsiting, yet no one appears to be selling ads on the site.  They have the Jamendo Pro service, and that might be useful for generating revenue, but certainly that is a more difficult route to go than selling advertising.

The platform itself is another issue.  It seems quite strange to me to be supporting the Free (Libre) Culture movement with an essentially closed platform.  Don’t take that the wrong way, I think that Jamendo has done great things to support the Creative Commons and Free (Libre) Culture.  However, I would think that they would be better served to open the platform, involve more developers, and build an Open Community around their system.

A combined issue: I noted how difficult it was to find the location to make a donation to Jamendo.  This points to a weakness in the platform itself: it should be easy to make the dontation spot more visible.  And, it shows a level of incompetence that the fundraising hasn’t been approached more broadly.

As I mentioned above, I think we’ve seen the relative success of alternative platforms such as StatusNet and Libre.FM. If this approach was combined with the idea of a Mozilla Foundation style organization might be the best thing for replacing the current Jamendo structure.

I’m not altogether sold on the idea of Google buying out Jamendo. I think they have their own irons-in-the-fire so to speak, and while it could be a good idea, I would like to see a situation where the people working on the project are more distributed.  The idea of distributing the people working on a project amongst multiple companies it becomes more difficult to tear apart the project.

So, those are my thoughts, as such.  There really is no end to the complications of this sitaution, or the possibilities for what can happen.  All we can hope is that whatever does happen happens for the best.

Summary of the story: a kid brought a science project to school that consisted of a Gatorade bottle and some electronic components and was seen showing it to some classmates.  The school administrator then over reacted, called local authorities and evacuated the school, despite the child explaining that it was not dangerous.  (The fact that isn’t explained clearly is that there weren’t any chemicals in the bottle, nothing that would make a rational person think that it was a bomb, despite that being the reaction of the school.)  It was determined that the device was a type of motion detector.

The part that really, really, really bothers me is this:

Both the student and his parents were “very cooperative” with authorities, Luque said. He said fire officials also went to the student’s home and checked the garage to make sure items there were neither harmful nor explosive.

This was well after it was determined that the device was not dangerous.

The reason this bothers me is the authorities found nothing suspicious about the device.  it was exactly what the kid said it was.  And, even worse, it took the authorities a lot more to determine what it was than it should have:

A MAST robot took pictures of the device and X-rays were evaluated. About 3 p.m., the device was determined to be harmless, Luque said.

This suggests to me that the local authorities don’t have anyone with the expertise on their staff to look at a simple electronics device and determine what it is.

But the part that irritates me the most: the parents have had their privacy violated.  There is no reason that the fire department or anyone else should have gone to their property when there was no basis to do so.  They found nothing suspicious about the device.  That’s it, end of story.  Any further investigation, as conducted in this case, needs to be on the basis of a reasonable suspicion, which there wasn’t here.

The final thing about this case: the kids were evacuated from the school.  The parents were called to pick up their kids.  The parents of the child were interrogated.  And then the school recommends that the child and parents should seek counseling.  Hopefully the counseling would be for the despicable manner in which the child and his parents were treated by the school and local authorities.  The child in question is never going to live this down, and the parents are likely to have to deal with the fallout and problems that arise for their child as a result.  The school and authorities should be held liable for creating this situation.  They should be offering to do something for this child who is likely now scarred by this situation.

This is one case where I hope the parents give some thought to this, and turn around and sue the school and the authorities for the abuse of their powers, the invasion of privacy, and the damage done to their reputations, and the damage that was done to the student in the process.