Remember back in February a school district in Philadelphia got slapped with a lawsuit for spying on students at home via the cameras on school-issued laptops?

You'd think they'd have learned their lesson. But now another lawsuit has been filed against them.

According to the Associated Press, Jalil Hasan, who graduated from Lower Merion High School last spring, "says the school district activated remote-tracking software after he left the laptop at school December 18."

The lawsuit filed in federal court says "the laptop was returned three days later, but the surveillance software remained activated for about two months," the AP reports, adding that the suit alleges that "more than 1,000 photos were taken, 469 from the webcam and 543 screen shots."

The Lower Merion School District, "in response to a suit filed by a student," the Associated Press said, acknowledged that webcams, which came standard in laptops issued to students - who were not told that the cameras could be remotely activated by the school district - were remotely activated 42 times in the past 14 months.

Read more here.

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Toronto-based BPS Resolver, which works in the Governance, Risk and Compliance Management field, has announced the release of their recently-enhanced Issues & Actions Tracking offering.

The product represents "a new step in composing fields, workflows and reports," company officials say, adding that IAT enables "the identification, allocation, prioritization, sizing, scheduling, additional testing and monitoring of issues and action plans."

It also uses features found in BPS Resolver's BPS Suite to "create meaningful relationships between issues/action plans and other risk-based activities," company officials say.

The idea is to give users the information and insight to locate systemic root causes of risk management failures, and to provide the oversight required by senior management.

In January, TMC had the news that BPS Business Propulsion Systems and Resolver Inc. announced a merger which took effect on January 1, 2010 to form BPS Resolver. This merger brought together two governance, risk, and compliance software product offerings. The new company's combined offering "will provide a complete product suite of planning, execution & refinement solutions for GRC and sustainability best practices," according to company officials of both firms at the time.

Read more here.

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A good recent post on BooshNews runs over the benefits of using the PDF format on a help desk. Some of it might be review, but you'd be surprised how many people are simply unaware of it.

Portable Document Format -- the "pdf" format from Adobe -- is an application for sharing or exchanging information or data across the platform. There are features that have made PDF file format popular and common among the users, including the fact that the compression algorithms make the file size of a Portable Document Format application smaller.

Plus, Boosh says, "another great ability is to convert this format to any other and vice versa. This ability of conversion is wonderful as it equips a user to make the task or the work process flexible."

Read more here.

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Brockton, Massachusetts is hoping new water billing technology will avoid the snafus plaguing the current system.

The local Enterprise newspaper is reporting that the city's Water Commission "is changing its billing policies to help up to 9,000 customers who have been undercharged for years and now have been ordered to pay the difference."

Evidently water commissioners are trying to rectify a faulty meter-reading system which, according to the Enterprise, "led to thousands of customers being back-billed for water use they already thought they had paid in full."

And we're not talking a few bucks here and there: "Some of those bills total more than $10,000 and date back 15 years. They were based on estimated water use, rather than actual readings."

One wonders how quick the city will be to refund any overpayments as well. Here, we're holding our breath.

Read more here.