Anyway, I’m not going to post anything half clever here tonight because it’s getting late plus I’m not sure I’m sufficiently clever tonight anyway. In fact, I’m not sure I’m clever at all but since some think (rare) I actually know what I’m doing in this whacked global economy I will play along with their plan and continue to respond to enquiries  :-o   But I digress…

I’m posting tonight a fantastic interview with Marissa Mayer that appeared on Charlie Rose. I’m a hugh Marissa fan, and a long time Charlie Rose fan too of course, BTW. The run time is about an 55 minutes, there’s not a bad moment in the video. She’s got absolutely the right tone in everything she says, she’s one in a billion. Enjoy!

It gets better, it’s said a private detective hire by a fund to track Alexander down get’s the credit. The FBI is apparently looking into it.

The investigator, identified as Moshe Buller, said he was retained by a U.S. venture-capital investment fund that wanted to stop the drop in Comverse’s stock price. He traced Alexander after the high-tech veteran placed a phone call to Israel via the Skype Internet service.

Geopolitical risks are simply too high, in this environment, we shouldn’t be risking an outage. An oil shock, let’s say $100 / barrel could be triggered by numerous known types of attacks.

Ethanol mixed with gasoline 85/15 (E85), the E85 is a must do, E100 vehicle popularity is attainable within a few years. Read the Woolsey-Schultz piece to learn why. Biodiesel, I’m not so sure, I’m not sure the production efficiencies are there yet, though new tech may change that. We have to figure out how to get E85 into pumps.

Go read the Woolsey-Schultz document, it’s an eye-opener if you’ve not been keeping up with the technology, and if you have been it will surely light a fire under your butt to trade in your gasoline-only auto for a Flexible Fuel Vehicle. FFVs are actually out on the road in increasing quantities, you might be surprised to learn some peeps own them and don’t even know. That’s right, biomass ethanol could power those cars and those in the pipeline, so to speak, if someone could figure out how to get more E85 to more filling stations.

Of course, there are more options beyond E85. Despite the fact here in NYC we pay I think around $0.18 / kwh the national average is about half that, off-peak charges elsewhere would be even less. Plug-in hybrids could be a solution, but probably not economic here in NYC. Seriously, electricity pricing is crazy in this town, I’m thinking of experimenting with solar panels to run some of the lighter weight equipment in my apartment. And it would be efficient for heating too as my Apple Powerbook is capable of warming my work area without any encouragement whatsoever, surely a feature The Steve spec’d in to not only ward off the chill but also discourage use of those darn inefficient fireplaces. But I digress. Seriously though, it may require a full-scale suburban roof to make the numbers work, I probably don’t have required surface area. I’ll look into it.

Catherine Rinaldi, general counsel and deputy executive director for MTA, conceded in a March letter to photographers that there is “no ban on photography in the Long Island Railroad or the Metro North Transit system.” The concession came after NYCLU attorneys wrote to MTA demanding that they explain why MTA officers were threatening photographers with arrest for taking pictures in public areas of the transit system.

About six months ago the MTA board rejected an MTA Public Affairs proposed law that would have made it illegal for anyone (except press photographers carrying New York City press cards) to take photographs within the MTA public transportation system. The Public Affairs office, led by Tom Kelly, claimed that photographers were “endangering themselves and the public,” and that some riders “didn’t want to be photographed in the public transit system” despite it being a public place. Public complaints on the proposed ban, along with a concerted effort by NPPA, NYPPA, and NYCLU to oppose the restriction, resulted in MTA withdrawing the proposal and standing down.

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation‘s website:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.

In December of 2005, the press revealed that the government had instituted a comprehensive and warrantless electronic surveillance program that ignored the careful safeguards set forth by Congress. This surveillance program, purportedly authorized by the President at least as early as 2001 and primarily undertaken by the NSA, intercepts and analyzes the communications of millions of ordinary Americans.

In the largest “fishing expedition” ever devised, the NSA uses powerful computers to “data-mine” the contents of these Internet and telephone communications for suspicious names, numbers, and words, and to analyze traffic data indicating who is calling and emailing whom in order to identify persons who may be “linked” to “suspicious activities,” suspected terrorists or other investigatory targets, whether directly or indirectly.

Wired Says:

Jon Lech Johansen, the 21-year-old Norwegian media hacker nicknamed DVD Jon, is moving to San Diego to work for maverick tech entrepreneur Michael Robertson in what can only be described as the most portentous team-up since Butch met Sundance.

More re Jon here.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has decoded the scheme with explanation of how the coding is implemented. Have a read, it’s pretty interesting from the perspective of how they decoded it to how the tracking information is encoded.

It would make a lot of sense for there to be a means of authenticating feds. For example, how does one determine the person who identified himself as an agent of a government is indeed as represented? When a vehicle with the markings of an ambulance or police vehicle races in, how does one determine it is not a terrorist trojan laden with explosives?

All of the RFID chatter focuses presently on the reverse situation, perhaps the riskier question is how do citizens determine they are dealing with a real fed? Should feds be chipped and all citizens be issued RFID readers?

Once the first victim handed me his ticket, the rest were cake. Tickets accumulated in my hand as my victims jabbered on about football games and SAT prep. I collected half a dozen and stopped. A good 5 minutes passed before they wafted over to the hallway, encountering another ticket stand (by then I could have sold the tickets to folks standing in line). Another 2 minutes passed as they tried to figure out which of them had the tickets! As it dawned on them that they had been phished, I returned their assets (and thankfully they didn’t kick mine).

Cowan’s points here and in his Doomsday Hackers and Evildoing Robots post are spot on, the solutions are mostly the responsibility of the system designers. When we tranferred the power to the automators, and I’m not just speaking to Internet user authentication, we increased the probability of accidents by orders of magnitude. I think it was Virilio who said that the invention of ships brought us ship wrecks and the invention of trains brough us train wrecks, in the case of systems the landscape is littered with all types of wrecks and will be for a good while to come. That’s not to say we shouldn’t educate the heck out everyone re social engineering.