I poked around and looked at CorrLinks since that’s what you get to use for “email” in federal prison. From a computer guy’s standpoint, it’s not super impressive… but I suppose it gets the job done.
While *I’m* not going to do it (I’m sure it’s probably some federal crime somehow), but it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to use it as a ghetto proxy to be able to read things like websites from prison (at least the text part of it).
That being said, if you are bored and want to send me a pseudo-email via CorrLinks while I’m in the clink and want to chat it up, my prisoner number is 13411-111.
It doesn’t have to be that ghetto – you could get responses back as quickly as the mail servers processed the data. In fact it’s super simple to do this with mime encoding, which email uses. You’d just need to write a robot to log in and check email frequently enough – not sure if that corrlinks uses imap or pop or has mail forwarding or whatever to make things easier to integrate with.
Except it’s not “true” email… Need to log into CorrLinks website which also requires a captcha to log in. But it’s a pretty simple captcha to break if someone wanted to do it.
Either way, it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to build such a system. But I think use of the system is monitored, so I’m sure someone would notice something funky going on. Then put you in prison for 20 years for something like unauthorized computer access.
Ah, I haven’t played with it. When are you going in, btw, or are you still in appeal-land?
July 14th is the day I asked for… Haven’t gotten official reporting info yet, but it should be that.
Awww, that’s the day after my birthday… I’ll put some cake aside for you 😉
I always fancied being a prison penpal, I might send you something random one afternoon!
Gotcha. Where do we send the cartons of cigarretes? 😉
I don’t smoke, and thankfully federal prisons have been non-smoking facilities for about 10 years now. 🙂
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-07-21-prison-smoking-usat_x.htm
It was a joke. But yes, make sure you read up on good pruno recipies – while also not allowed it might be a useful trick to know.