You’re not muted: The Hawaiʻi State Council on Developmental Disabilities was holding a public meeting over Zoom earlier this year when a member of the public tuning in informed staff that they were having “audio issues.” At some point the person, who appeared to have a legitimate user name, turned on their screen to reveal a pornographic video.

The council removed them from the meeting.

“We are aware that our meetings are required to be public and posted on the state website under sunshine laws, however we are concerned that we will continue to face this difficulty,” Julia Althoff, a program specialist with the council, asked the state’s Office of Information Practices in an Oct. 17 email. “What is the guidance for how to prevent this?”

The developmental disabilities council is not alone in its experience with the disruptive video conference practice known as Zoom bombing.

According to a public records request from the Public First Law Center, dozens of boards and commissions have reached out to OIP this year. They include the Board of Land and Natural Resources, the Oʻahu Metropolitan Planning Organization, the Executive Office on Early Learning, the Island Burial Council and the Commission on Water Resource Management.

The pattern is invariably the same and often repeated.

“We at the Hawaii Island Game Management Advisory Commission have had 2 instances of outrageous Zoom hacks (race crimes and porn) by people that were let into the Hawaii County Zoom meeting,” district commissioner Robert Duerr told OIP in September. “The hacks were so bad that the County is considering stopping virtual meetings.”

Fortunately, help is on the way.

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Earlier this month, OIP posted a press release linking to “A Step-by-Step Guide to Secured Zoom Meetings (Zoom-Bombers Beware!)” It was compiled from the state’s Enterprise Technology Services, which has also updated a similar guide for meetings hosts using Microsoft Teams.

Here’s a few tips:

• Require all participants to identify themselves with first and last names.
• Limit chat to “host and co-hosts only” or disable private chat to prevent link sharing.
• Assign both a moderator and a facilitator for important meetings. (“A moderator manages security/disruptions whereas a facilitator manages content/flow.”)

And the winner is: The city has finally inked a deal with an executive search firm to help the Honolulu Police Commission in its quest for a new police chief. The bid has been awarded to Public Sector Search & Consulting Inc. of Rocklin, California.

The contract, which hasn’t been made public yet, is for $121,900, according to a posting on the state’s contractor website.

In 2022, the city paid a consultant $145,000 to conduct the search for the Honolulu police chief which is how we got the now-departed Joe Logan. He was the third police chief in the last 10 years and stuck it out about three years before taking an early-ish retirement.

To recap: Logan announced in June he would be retiring. This after Mayor Rick Blangiardi made it clear he didn’t think Logan was doing a very good job. Gun violence was erupting on the Westside and Logan was seemingly doing little about it except increasing traffic enforcement in Waiʻanae which was angering the community more than anything. The mayor was taking the brunt of the criticism over public safety failures.

The Police Commission, which, as always, steered clear of giving the Honolulu Police Department any direction or input on how it should be dealing with public safety problems, found itself once again in the middle of having to hire a new chief. Hiring Logan took a year and despite strong public concern (including from the mayor) that the process shouldn’t take so long this time, it’s shaping up the same way.

The police commission decided in July to go with a headhunter rather than try to tackle the hiring process on its own, which The Blog has no real gripe with given the importance of the job and the fact that the commissioners who were in place this past summer had always showed little enthusiasm for actually actively overseeing the police department.

Still, the city procurement department had to be the one to find and contract with a search firm, something that the commission itself had no control over. That’s now taken five months, pretty much the same reason Logan’s hiring was delayed three years ago.

So on we go. The Blog asked the city last week for the proposal submitted by Public Sector Search & Consulting but was told to file an official public records request. So we did and will hopefully get that before too much longer and be able to tell you what the plan is from here.

The newer commissioners are insisting on plenty of public outreach and input this time around including some serious conversations with the rank-and-file via the police union. But The Blog isn’t holding its breath that the commissioners will ever get out of that terrible meeting room hidden inside police headquarters. Definitely a buzzkill for the public.

But it’s all playing out as the Honolulu Charter Commission considers numerous proposals to revamp the Police Commission. The commission and chief hire will definitely remain in the public limelight in the coming year.

Senate communications: The state Senate has cycled through a handful of comms personnel over the past few sessions, as compared to the more steady House. The Blog thus welcomes Sheryl Turbeville as the Senate majority new communications director.

Turbeville, according to a press release Friday, “brings more than three decades of experience in journalism and government communications.”

She served for nearly 10 years as the communications and services director at the State Public Charter School Commission and spent 25 years in broadcast journalism at KHON2 News.

Turbeville is a graduate of Waiʻanae High School and received a bachelor’s in journalism with a minor in political science from the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa.

Analogue intelligence: The University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa Department of English has selected “analogue” as its 2025 Word of the Year for Hawaiʻi.

“Many of our students are contemplating careers in writing, teaching, the law and other fields involving communication, interpretation, critical thinking, and creativity, and they have concerns about the impact of GenAI on their future prospects,” said John David Zuern, UH Mānoa Department of English chair and professor, according to a UH News report.

“They have welcomed opportunities to engage in what might be called ‘analogue intelligence,’ reading printed texts and annotating them by hand, drafting essays on paper, hand-crafting their own books, and taking part in oral presentations and performances in class.”

In related news, UH News tells us that Merriam-Webster recently announced its 2025 Word of the Year as “slop” — “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”

Analogue, Zuen observes, appropriately trumps slop.

And the 2025 Hawaiian Word of the Year, selected by the UH Hilo Ka Haka ʻUla o Keʻelikōlani, College of Hawaiian Language, is kāhuli — to change, to alter, to overturn.

“In the Kumulipo, kāhuli describes the transformation that warmed the earth and unfolded the heavens, catalyzing the formation of the universe itself.”

Not mentioned by UH: “Tariff” is Digital.com’s word of the year, Dictionary.com prefers “67” (also spelled “6-7” and pronounced “six-seven”) while Oxford University Press went with “rage bait.”