Semi‘s gonna have a ball with this one.

There’s a new director of the Pentagon’s new Information Awareness Office, part of the DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. (It was DARPA’s organizational predecessor that gave the world the Internet. But I digress…) This new director is one John M. Poindexter.

Yes, that John Poindexter. Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor. The one who was convicted in the Iran-Contra affair. Remember? He sold weapons (illegally) to Iran, and used the cash to (also illegally) fund the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua. Ollie North’s buddy. It was in all the papers.

Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying documents. The convictions were overturned; Poindexter had been given immunity before Congress (after invoking his Fifth Amendment rights). His testimony, though public and nationally broadcast, was inadmissible, courts said.

So here he comes sliming his way back into public service, this time running an office that is supposed to:

create a new intelligence infrastructure to allow … agencies to share information and collaborate effectively, and new information technology aimed at exposing terrorists and their activities and support systems…. The key to fighting terrorism is information.  Elements of the solution include gathering a much broader array of data than we do currently, discovering information from elements of the data, creating models of hypotheses, and analyzing these models in a collaborative environment to determine the most probable current or future scenario.

To me, this sounds a lot like what the NSA is supposed to be doing. If you read the IOS’s page closely — and there’s no way to read it casually — it looks like IOS is developing ways to massage and pass around raw data that the NSA and the National Reconnaissance Office and all that crew develops.

Which is not a bad thing. And it’s surely a comedown for a past National Security Advisor to have an office that’s probably deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, far from corridors of power. And it speaks well of the man that he still wants to be in public service.

But still. John Poindexter should be in jail, not in the Pentagon. He waged a private war that was contrary to the policy of the government he swore to serve. He should not be pulling a government paycheck — much less with a high security clearance.

Here’s a ton of links about Poindexter and Iran-Contra. Thanks to bOing-bOing for the original link.

The S.F. Chronicle carries a story about the Postal Service’s trial of Segway scooters in Bagdhad on the Bay. The USPS bought 40 scooters at $9,000 per.

Scott Tucker, the Postal Service district manager for the San Francisco area, said the Segways would be used on five routes in the Pacific Heights and Steiner Street Station areas, some of the hilliest in the city.

The scooters are apparently sidewalk-legal in 24 states, California not among them. This, San Francisco being San Francisco, is causing some controversy.

Meow Mix cat food is apparently shopping around a TV program aimed at cats. Not cat lovers. Cats. CNN points out one of the flaws in the concept:

Lacking opposable thumbs, felines will have to rely on their owners to tune in to the half-hour show.

The other major flaw? It’s a stupid idea.

Reuters is reporting that scientists in England are on the verge of perfecting really thin-screen televisions:

Roll-up, flexible televisions, akin to the melting watches of Salvador Dali’s surreal landscapes, have become possible thanks to a glowing plastic compound perfected in the laboratories of Britain’s Cambridge Display Technology (CDT).

“You’re effectively printing televisions,” CDT Chief Executive David Fyfe told Reuters. “They can be printed onto thin plastic almost like paper.”

<snip>

“Realistically, you will see roll up displays around 2004 or 2005,” he added.

 

“Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.”

— Alan Turing

The Babysitter’s Network is a wonderful thing. We’ve known for about a week that this has been going on, because babysitters talk to each other.

An EDP (emotionally disturbed person) has been running around my neighborhood  for the last week or so, offering to relieve mothers/babysitters of their babies. In at least four cases, apparently, she did more than offer; she made physical attempts to take the kids.

 Last week, the cops took her off the street and had her remanded for psychiatric evaluation. She apparently was OK enough to be released from the hospital; she was arrested on Tuesday. Turns out she has a record of 10 arrests, five of them for child snatching in Manhattan between 1994 and 1997.

The NYTimes had only a brief on it (second item) and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle’s web site is a piece of crap. The Daily News had a good full story.

Why is it that when you tune in to a rerun of a show you saw only once during the previous season, they’re inevitably showing the exact episode you saw last time?

From the NYTimes:

OUTH HUNTINGTON, N.Y., July 17 ÷ It was the classic news story: man bites dog.

I was poking around the Fond du Lac Reporter for the Quad Graphics story, and found this:

Ricky R. Bridges, of 379 N. Peters Ave., Apt. G-8, was charged with operating a vehicle without the owner龝 consent after he allegedly stole an Old Dutch Potato Chip truck, and ate some of its contents.

<snip>

A witness said she saw the suspect stumble out of the truck, apparently intoxicated, clutching a bag of chips.

Bridges told police he was at the Walleye Weekend festival during the weekend, and doesn穰 recall stealing a potato chip truck, but he did find a key in his pocket when he woke up the next morning.

 

When Microsoft announced its “trustworthy computing” initiative, I foolishly thought it meant that the company would concentrate on shipping software that didn’t crash and that didn’t create critical security vunerablities for its clients. Turns out they had in mind something like Palladium.

Mitch Wagner has been doing a stellar job in unspooling what Microsoft has said about Palladium, what it hasn’t said, what it meant to say, and what it most assuredly didn’t mean to say. You need to read his stuff — which can get dense, because it’s a dense subject — if you want to understand how you may be forced to use your computer in five years.

Essentially, if I understand it correctly, Microsoft says that the best way to assure software quality is to control the entire computing ecosystem — hardware and software; server, client and network. Even the data.

There are a lot of obvious problems with that, and more that are more subtle than obvious. If you care, and you should, bookmark Mitch’s site; he’s on the hunt.