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I'm about to catch my first flight out of the U.S. since the OOPSLA PC meeting in May last year. They have a new procedure: Anyone with a foreign passport has to logout of the country at an exit terminal station. You have your passport scanned, fingerprints and photos taken, and are finally given a piece of paper that will be collected when boarding (and apparently is mandatory).
In a funny reversal of acoustic signaling, when it gives you that exit permission, the machine will play a well-known sound: The sound that Outlook plays when new email has arrived. First of all, this means that the designers of this machine probably have no HCI background whatsoever. Second, it means that Microsoft Windows is presumably running these machines.
Now, over the next few months I'll be watching the blogs to see whether someone figured out how to send a "kill -9" to these machines.
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