Infosecurity Europe demonstrates that in London, the weakest information security link can be found between the left and right ears. Guessing that it’s not any better in the US. Via Slashdot.

According to Bruce Schneier, TSA activities have included forcing airlines to turn over records to the FBI, and lying to Congress about its activities.

More accurately, this is according to the DHS review of TSA.

Just added some comments to Rik Panganiban’s post, “Uncivil Society“. Mine is modestly titled “Where’s the self-replicating productivity meme?”.

This is an open letter to Magic Hector of Colorado, and KaiTech of Missouri. I am writing to ask: exactly what is your business model?

I ask only because I note that you’re selling used copies of my book for one cent on Amazon.com.

This presents me with just a whole series of questions.

First, may I ask you just what your wholesale price was? Did you pay it with ha’pennies? Hungarian forints? Indonesian rupiahs? Saddam-era Iraqi dinar?

My theory is that you found my book in a rain-soaked ditch somewhere, or it was stolen off of a Reading Is Fundamental truck and made its way to you.

Second, I’m assuming that some portion of the purchase price must be paid to Amazon for brokering the transaction. How do you accomplish this? Speaking as an Internet consultant, do you realize how much money you can make by solving the problem of micropayments? You’ve blown right past this and gone straight into nanopayments.

Seriously, stop selling my book and call me. There are some crazy people out there that would pay whole dollars for this.

Third, I’m curious to know just how you arrived at that purchase price. Did you look over the contents and say, “Yeah, this is about worth an amount of money I wouldn’t bend over to pick up”? Did it collect dust on a shelf when you priced it at a nickel? Are you unable to count higher than one, and trying to avoid embarrassment?

I checked the weight of the book, and today’s spot markets for the price of recycled high-quality bulk white paper. You seem to believe that the addition of 70,649 carefully crafted, laboriously chosen words actually reduces the worth of the raw materials by 60%, even before considering the valuable binding glue and laminate.

Surely you live within walking distance of a landfill? Or a high-school Greenpeace volunteer with some spare change?

Finally, I just need to know, is this really the best way you have available to you to make money? The book is subtitled “Making Money While Keeping Your Freedom”, after all, so I feel qualified to comment on this. I’m considering the time it will take you to make that precious penny.

You had to list the book on Amazon. What exactly were you thinking at the moment you typed “$0.01” into the pricing web form? Were you drunk?

You must be working on huge volume, and you clearly can’t afford warehouses. So you have to retrieve the book from your shelving in the cave network of northern Pakistan, or some other very large godforsaken hole.

Then you have to package the book, slap on the stamps, print out the buyer’s address, and drop it in the mail. Not difficult, but time-consuming, especially since you’ve probably been on a very low-protein diet recently.

Maybe I’ll be that buyer. I don’t know anywhere else I can get a bubble-wrap envelope at that price.

For the sake of argument, let’s presume that your penny is pure, unadulterated profit. It’ll probably take you about 60-90 minutes of your time to make the sale. So we’re basically not measuring your value in dollars per hour, but in hours per dollar. More like workweeks per dollar. You could earn much more by learning Bengali and becoming a migrant Bangladeshi day laborer. Those guys average almost $35 a week.

On the bright side, if you do decide to stay in the US, and you’re single with no children, you can work for 829,425 hours this year and still qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit. And I truly hope you’re single with no children, for many, many reasons.

I’d like to thank you for your efforts to move my work as quickly as possible. It clearly was not meant to stay in your hands, as it was written for people with a functional prefrontal cortex. In gratitude, I’ll leave you with some advice as an expert on entrepreneurship.

Get a job.

Best regards,
Jeff Porten

You might have noticed that I’ve added a little bit of commercialism to the site with the Google ads over in the left sidebar. Call it an experiment.

I’m considering it highly likely that they will end up being a complete waste of bandwidth, but time will tell. Long story short, sometime last year a search engine at Microsoft went utterly meshuganah and decided that it absolutely had to check my site ten times a second to see if I had made any changes. Result: Redmond ran up $300 on my Internet connection charges. I’m still waiting to find out where I should send my invoice.

Even aside from Microsoft making my life extra miserable, the site costs money and I’m not above a little crass commercialism to cover expenses. I have higher hopes pulling in some bucks from software publishing than from shilling for Google, but every little bit counts. If it doesn’t work out after a few months, you can safely expect me to pull that spot and replace it with something more useful.

If you’re still checking in and you’re a carbon-based life form, you truly must be one of my favorite people. When I said I’d be updating the site in March, I neglected to mention which March I had in mind. So thanks for your patience.

On the other hand, if this is your first time here, the site has always looked like this.

Of course, you’ve noticed the spiffy new color scheme, inspired in part by my alma mater. No, it has nothing to do with red, white and blue. American or French versions.

A few words on the new sections of the site:

I’m going to be running two blogs here. Portentia is my space for essays, long-form blathering, and anything in general that takes me more than five minutes to write. The Jeff Wing Conspiracy is the more standard blog linking to interesting tidbits I find on the web and elsewhere.

Over in Software, I’ll be publishing various utilities and knick-knacks that I’ve written to make my life easier. Publications is a log of when I manage to get myself published by actual editors, while Photos is a vanity spot (as opposed to the rest of the site, right?) for things I thought were worth capturing in pixels. I am not a photographer. You have been warned.

Finally, I’m resurrecting two old sections. Friends of Jeff is the obligatory list of links to the sites of friends and colleagues. And Where’s Jeff? will tell you (or warn you) when I might be in your neck of the woods.

So The Aviator didn’t pick up the major Oscars it was hoping for. Can’t say as I’m that surprised. I finally caught it at the Uptown Theatre on Saturday night, and the only thing about it that was jaw-dropping was when Cate Blanchett opened her mouth. I didn’t know you could win an Oscar for channeling the dead.

Like another Leo DiCaprio movie that comes to mind, this film was heralded as the Second Coming of (the Passion of the) Christ, and turned out to be, well, long. Yes, you get a sense of epic scope in the opening scenes — but the rest of it just sort of fizzles in terms of making Hughes out to be a masterful character. Leo, next time, check out an Orson Welles flick you might recall, or heck, just cuddle up with Jeff Bridges for a bit.

Reuters: Lighters banned on US flights as of 4/14. Because they’re very dangerous:

Yo, Dorgan. How about a no explosives policy, then?