Identity theft made easy, thanks to Bush administration

New 'secure' passports with Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chips are anything but, and can be hacked with cheap off-the-shelf gear. Experts warned this little bit of Security Theater was dangerous, and now Linux Insider reports on how leaky these passports are.

Even cheaper tech was used in Washington, Vermont, Michigan, New York, Texas and Arizona new 'enhanced' driver's licenses, which offer no protection at all. If you've got one of those new IDs, get a shielded wallet.

Woot-Off underway

http://twitter.com/wootoff tracks all the marvelous stuff that was sold already, but you have to go to Woot.com to buy, still.

DIY project reuses old televisions

Here's a DIY project which uses your old analog TV as a display for a Linux computer. That ultra-micro-computer, the YBox2, is a $75 kit that fits in an Altoids tin box and runs 'widgets'; those widgets show you one thing on the net that changes frequently you want to track (Weather, a particular Twitter feed) or do one job (alarm clock with atomic-clock accuracy).

SL-1 meltdown movie released

Zero to sixty gigawatts in four milliseconds = one nasty explosion. And, it happened only 644 miles away from River City, over in Arco, Idaho, in 1960.

That wasn't the first meltdown; that happened in California, 30 miles from LA, the year before.

And, it wasn't certainly wasn't the first atomic fatality; discounting acts of war, there was the Manhattan Project criticality accident in 1945, X-ray and radium fatalities, and other deaths unknowingly caused by natural radioactives (not to mention the growing body of evidence of a series of dirty bomb tests on concentration camp victims and POWs in Thuringia, or the recently revealed Japanese A-bomb project, near the uranium mines near Chosen in ten-Japanese-occupied North Korea, according to the History Channel.

The leading theory is the SL-1 explosion was caused by a fatal atomic love triangle; the jilted husband yanked out the control rod running the reactor less than 20", and in less than a second, his body was impaled on that control rod, pinned to the ceiling above the reactor, with the man who cuckolded him dying a fraction of a second later. They ain't talkin', so why it happened for sure, we don't know.

Now, you can see the federal video on the SL-1 incident, thanks to the FedFlix project.

ToxicRisk.Com

Here's a web page, ToxicRisk.com which shows major toxic material producers, cross-referenced to school locations, through a Google Maps mash-up. I've got it set for the 97267 zip code; enter your own in the box at lower left if you're not in Baja Milwaukie.

SMS history and analysis

An LA Times story on the invention of SMS nicely complements a NY Times explanation of how massively profitable SMS is for wireless carriers.

Windows reality

This blog post shows you what Vista is really thinking as it boots. Hilarious. Here's a snippet.

Starting up… I’m still tired as heck here, so don’t even think about keeping me up too long.

Hmm… you want me to work? Don’t think so. Let’s have some fun.

Wrong password.

Wrong password.

Wrong password. He, he. Just kidding. You typed the right one three times.

Phoning home to Redmond…

Feinstein Wants To Burden ISPs With DRM

The esteemed Senator Feinstein of California has been hornswoggled into cramming an incredible burden to ISPs into the latest economic recovery package. Click on the link to read about this incredible waste of resources, and for a connection to call key senators to tell them, No Way.

Is Sustainable Power Unsustainable?

Looks like the high-efficiency solar cells which forecasters have planned on require rare metals we'll run out of in about ten years. And, the best substitute expected, carbon nanofiber, is shown by two independent studies to pose a health risk similar to asbestos, as per a linked Seattle P-I story. Eek.

This only emphasizes the need for more basic research, not less, in energy generation of all kinds, such as these nuke-sized solar power fields (Link 1, Link2) which California's PG&E is studying. These sunpower fields use an array of tracking solar dishes powering Stirling engines which work with any concentrated heat source.



Gee, doesn't Oregon get a lot of constant sunshine east of the Cascades? Hmm... the 'golden triangle' of lower Malheur and Harney counties (see map, above, with marker at Baker City), including the hamlet of Fields, with its apex near Alvold Lake, gets at least 4.5 kilowatt-hours per square meter per hour, even in January, which is the 'worst-case month. Other months of the year, it gets more... and that's pretty darned close to the Big Island of Hawaii according to this DOE Map. When it's sunny, the wind blows less, so Stirling-engine-solar there these would be a good partner to Oregon's windmills, because when there's no wind and windmills don't turn, we now use carbon-emitting inefficient gas turbines to substitute for the wind turbines, because you can't quickly fire up a coal plant like Boardman or a nuke like Hanford's WPPSS #2.

Clean energy jobs for Oregon. Anyone interested?

DTV: Do You Want the Good News First?

The local rep for the LCCR for DTV issues passed on the news today that all Portland stations are postponing their transition from full-power analog to full-power digital until June. That's the good news, sort of, and is a full one-eighty-degree reversal from last week's news, confirming what an O-blogger said earlier today.

Less good news? Well,

• This will cost some TV stations more, for those TV stations who leased a temporary DTV transmitter, as they have to lease the temporary gear longer. TV stations are already hurtin' because advertising's down; this will hurt more.
  
• All stations will be paying more for power in the four months until the delayed cutover date, as DTV is more power-efficient.
• The companies who bought rights to the spectrum which cutover would release will probably demand a rebate from the feds, and the feds will probably give it to them;
• Their new services, which would deliver more digital services to sell, won't be generating revenue while Portland TV is still analog. And,
• Public safety radio operators who need the rest of that freed-up spectrum must delay their plans to increase police, fire and public safety radio system reliability.