



We had initially called the story about the school employee getting the boot for using school PCs to run SETI the weirdest tech story of 2009, but man, this one is giving the SETI one a run for its money at the tail end of the year. A former Massachusetts prison inmate has been nailed with an 18-month prison sentence for...get this..."hacking prison computers while he was incarcerated."We suspect things can get a bit boring behind bars, but hacking a computer system while you're already in jail for doing something illegal? Not exactly the brightest move. "Frank" Janosko is the guy at fault, and he was just sentenced on Tuesday in federal court in Boston for "abusing a computer provided by the Plymouth County Correctional Facility." The PC had been setup to assist the inmates with legal research, but obviously Frank wasn't interested in learning more about his rights.In '06, the inmate somehow managed to hack around the preventative firewalls and safeguards so to use the machine to "send e-mail and cull data on more than 1,100 Plymouth County prison employees." What's wild is that he managed to gather extremely sensitive data such as DOBs and social security numbers from the machine, even snagging some home addresses all the while. One may wonder why all of this information was so readily available at all, and one may also wonder why he didn't arrange for his escape via email.Either way, Frank's going to be paying the price for his little run with fun, and when he serves three additional years of supervised release, he won't be able to use any Internet-connected device without approval of his probation officer. Ouch.