From CNN:

BUTLER, Pennsylvania (AP) — The sport utility vehicle that rolls out of the Ibis Tek shop looks just like those driven by millions of soccer moms.

But with a flip of the switch, out of the sunroof pops weaponry ranging from a .50-caliber M2 machine gun to an MK-19 40 mm grenade launcher.

On the other hand, you have to buy your own gun, gas mileage sucks, and it’d set you back $500,000 even if you could buy one in the U.S. But if you need one, you can probably afford one.

From Mitch Wagner:

DOES THIS MEAN ALL JEWS ARE THEREFORE SUPERHEROS?. “A debate for the silly season.” Teresa notes that all superheros, unless specifically stated otherwise, can be assumed to be Jewish. “This is an insight of Paul Krassner’s. He explained once in an interview that when he was a kid, he figured all superheroes were Jewish, because where he was growing up, if your name ended in “-man”, you probably were: Feldman, Feinman, Superman, Lieberman, Aquaman, Zuckerman, Iceman, Bergman, Sandman, Goldman, Silberman, Hawkman, Wolfman, Batman, Spiderman, Schneiderman–how much more obvious can you get?”

Interesting insight, but you’re missing one even more profound. Every one of these Jewish superheros are deeply assimilated; they all have “secret identities” they put forward to the public. Spiderman? Peter Parker — not a hint of Yiddishkeit there. Superman? Clark Kent. And it never works the other way, does it? The goyishe superheros — The Flash, The Hulk, Green Lantern, Daredevil (who’s even a lawyer, fer chrissakes) — not a Cohen or Levin in those secret identities, are there?

After extending its “final” deadline no fewer than four times, Ziff Davis has gotten the requisite 95 percent (actually, it’s 95.1 percent, at last count, thank you very much) of its bondholders to agree to swap their bonds for cash and equity in the company. The result gives Ziff an extra $30 million in breathing room a year — no small matter, these days. With that $30 million, for instance, they could have afforded to keep Yahoo! Internet Life and Sm@rtPartner running, with enough extra to buy a couple of beers besides.

There’s a hint about what held up the deal for two weeks. In its most recent press release, Ziff says it will pay one (unnamed) bondholder $720,000 for the stock he’ll be getting in exchange for his bonds. In other words, someone’s had enough and wanted to cash out.

More on the security/authorization piece from earlier today, below.

Jon Udell is one of the smartest technology writers out there, though you may never have heard of him or read his stuff, because he works the techier side of the street, at Byte Magazine and now Infoworld. He wrote a fine piece yesterday about why business weblogs need better security:

… when commercial interests rub elbows in blogspace, this much transparency might be too much. The names of referring URLs, and the numbers attached to them, represent a kind of information leakage. www.internalgroove.net is not accessible to outsiders, of course. But its existence, and its level of interest in Ray’s blog experiment, are charted for all to see.

In other words, the very openness of the weblog infrastructure can argue against its use. We’ve got to be able to close the door.

A very good piece in Fast Company (and, hey — when’s the last time you heard anyone say that?) about what we at NetGuide used to call Revenge of the Empire. No one knew just when the free ride on the Net would end, but even in the earliest days, everyone knew there was going to be a tollbooth somewhere. We just didn’t know where it would be, when it would be erected, or who’d be getting the cash.

The thing is, I don’t mind paying for content one way or another. I read the NYTimes for free online, but I also have a paid sub to the print edition; if they wanted to impose some nominal charge for all of you who don’t buy the paper version of the paper, I doubt that I’d squawk. Bandwidth and servers ain’t free.

I hate the idea of being nickel and dimed, though, which makes me wonder about the various ways of paying for content.

Let’s get rid of one idea right away: micropayments. I hate micropayments. Administering a large-scale micropayment system — billing in increments of under $1 for nuggets of information — is expensive and unwieldy, and only Visa wins. Micropayments just aren’t worth the trouble, either from the user side or the vendor side. Hell, even the porn industry — the first to use any successful business model or technology — doesn’t use micropayments.

The porn industry uses a two-tier payment system. You can get a lot of low-bandwidth and low-quality content for free, if you let them throw a lot of intrusive ads at you. Or, you can get high-bandwidth and high-quality content if you pay. Oddly enough, that’s what broadcast news sites are starting to do: you can read CNN and ABCNews all you want, but if you want streaming content, that’ll cost a few bucks a month.

But the adult industry does something even more interesting than that: they pay bounties for traffic. Here again, it’s a two-tier system. They pay a much, much lower bounty for junk traffic that just looks at the low-bandwidth low-quality stuff. But they pay a higher bounty for traffic that converts into paid subscriptions. I don’t know of any legit sites that do that kind of referrer business, but it seems like a good idea.

There’s another wrinkle. It’s not uncommon for adult sites to carry links to content on other adult sites — syndicated content. If you pay on the originating site, you don’t have to pay on the syndicated site. This is a lot like what Real Networks is doing with its Gold Pass: one monthly fee for a full menu of content.

Real is in a good position to succeed with the streaming media syndication business because it controls the player and server software. But there’s no reason that there can’t be other syndicators, too. What about, for instance, a Publisher’s Clearing House kind of site, where you’d pick from a paid list of content providers and pay the syndicator once, letting the syndicator deal with payments to the providers. On the back end of the deal, the content provider could cut deals with the syndicator for better positioning on the subscription page and so forth. Not all content providers would get the same cut from the syndicator.

This seems to me to be a particularly good business for an ISP. When you’re paying your $30 to Earthlink, maybe you could pay an extra $5 or $10 for access a list of paid content sites. And Presto! You’ve built a cable TV business model.

There’s no question that paid content is the future of the online world. The question is only who will pay who for what and how.

When the Trade Center towers went down last year, they took with it a link between the city’s Municpal Credit Union and the ATM network it uses. The bank’s data apparently was safe, but there was no way to tell who had how much money in their account at any given time.

As a convenience to its 300,000 members, officers of the MCU made a good customer relations decision: Everyone was allowed pretty much unfettered access to cash. You know about how much you have in your accounts, they said. We trust you. Don’t go nuts.

Fifteen million dollars later…

Sixty-six people who withdrew $7,500 or more beyond what was in their accounts have been arrested and face felony charges of grand larceny, and 35 are being sought for arrest, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said yesterday. In all, he said, roughly 4,000 people are being investigated….

All 4,000 credit union members being investigated overdrew their accounts by at least $1,000, said Dan Castleman, the chief of investigations in the district attorney’s office. Those who were arrested did not take advantage of opportunities to pay the money back. If convicted, credit union members who overdrew their accounts could face up to seven years in prison….

Officials said that more than 540 Municipal Credit Union members made A.T.M. withdrawals that exceeded their account balances by at least $5,000 in the weeks after Sept. 11. More than 1,700 overdrew their accounts by at least $3,000, prosecutors said.

One man, an employee of the Housing Authority, never had an end-of-the-month balance that exceeded $130, prosecutors said. “Nevertheless, he made 53 A.T.M. withdrawals ranging from $20 to $300 each, and charged 101 Visa purchases using his M.C.U. A.T.M. card between September 19th and October 22nd,” according to Mr. Morgenthau’s press release. “The purchases were at stores including Foot Locker, Jimmy Jazz, Joy Joy Jewelry, Bronx BBQ, Hot Booz Liquor and the 216th Street motel.”…

The man’s account balance was a negative $10,378 by the end of October, prosecutors said.

It’s like I said a few weeks ago: this weblog thing is neat, but if it’s going to be a real business tool, some authorization/password tools have to be invented.

Casual readers won’t know this, but there are some pretty sophisticated technologies behind his weblog. For one thing, every item I write here is automatically sent to any other weblog reader who’s asked to be kept up to date. Those bloggers can then pick up and reprint (for lack of a better word) my items.

But what if I only want some of my items to be syndicated, or if I want some items to be syndicated to one group of people but not another? As one poster pointed out, it’s possible to use the web’s built-in authentication tools, but that’s god-awful hack. Finally, someone else is picking up the banner.

From Masukomi’s site:

A username and password scheme could be built into the url of the feed but that’s a really poor method. The most obvious solution is for RSS clients to start supporting two things: standard HTTP authentication and secure HTTP over SSL (https:// connections).

Until this happens RSS will not be able to evolve beyond the stage of a simple news distribution system… I know I don’t want to give everyone access to my e-mail, or confidential company info, but I do want to transmit via an RSS feed. I think that this is especially important for products like Radio that generate RSS feeds and want to get companies to use it as a knowledge management tool.

I can’t support this more strongly. If weblogs are going to be a legit business tool, there simply needs to be better security for syndication feeds.

It’s been a particularly interesting weekend for the redevelopment of the Ground Zero site, with all relevant parties cautiously approaching a deal.

The WTC site is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is controlled by the governors of the two states. There’s never-ending tension within the PA over which state is getting more of its resources. Given that each state’s politics is Byzantine all by itself, it’s a miracle that the PA gets anything at all done.

I’m not certain who owned the WTC buildings themselves, but a guy named Larry Silverstein owned the lease for the towers. Silverstein has an insurance policy with Swiss Re, under which he’s to be paid $3.5 billion in the event of a terrorist attack on the towers. Silverstein says the September 11 attack was two events, so he’s owed $7 billion Swiss Re says it was one attack, and since the buildings weren’t new anyway, it was willing to pay $2.2 billion. So Silverstein is suing Swiss Re.

Silverstein is really the reason that the six rebuilding proposals look like they do. He’s got a contractual right to a 11 million square feet of office and retail space; if he doesn’t get it, someone — probably the Port Authority — owes him money. Hence the density of the site proposals.

Late last week, someone floated an interesting proposal. It turns out that the PA doesn’t own the land under LaGuardia and Kennedy airports; it only owns the facilities. The land belongs to New York City. This causes the occasional friction. How about trading Ground Zero for the land beneath the airports? That way, the Port Authority and its bureaucracy would be out of the way of an emotional rebuilding process.

The Port Authority liked the idea. It pays the city $3 million a year to rent the land, an amount that may increase to $60 million when the lease comes up in 13 years. Swiss Re, which saw some possible daylight in its suit with Silverstein (and who in their right mind would want that particular bag of cats to go to trial?) loved the idea, but pointed out that someone needed to talk to Silverstein — and that whoever it was should probably come equipped with a checkbook.

Today, Silverstein’s spokesman said he “has an open mind” about the proposal, but would like to hear something more formal and fleshed-out. Seems reasonable. It’s interesting, too, that the spokesman is Howard Rubenstein, who is the go-to guy for people who want to keep their names in — and, more important, out of — the newspapers. Check out his client list if you want to see where the power is in New York.

The estimable Glenn Fleishman complains about mass transit to the Javits Center. Sez I:

As a New Yorker who both drives and takes mass transit, I feel your pain about the Javits Center. Some comments:

Your fond reminiscences of taking the T to the Boston MacWorld are, well, mis-remembered. The World Trade Center is nowhere near a T stop, and Bayside is a long lemming-like walk from JFK. Maybe putting the show at least partly in Hynes (is that what it’s called?) is one answer, but it would still be a pain to get from a Green Line stop to a distant Red Line one.

OK, Javits. First of all, you’re dead right about transit access to it. For what it’s worth, there’s a plan on the board to extend the 7 train, which runs east-west from Queens to Times Square, to Javits. The Mayor likes the idea, but the funny thing about transit in New York City is that the Mayor has no say; the MTA is the Governor’s thing. Take into account that even underground, Manhattan is built incredibly densely, that there are Important Things in the way between 7th Ave and 42nd Street and 11th Ave and 36th Street, and that the bedrock that makes skyscrapers possible make digging a major pain — well, it’ll be a while.

But wait, there’s more. For the last eight years, Mayor Giuliani wanted a baseball stadium to the south of Javits. The Mayor controls the rail yards that are there. But the Governor, who controls Javits, wanted to extend Javits over the rail yards. Standoff. There’s some land to the *north* of Javits that was for sale, but some developer’s bought it. It’s not entirely clear what the next step is.

The latest thing is that the City wants to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. To do so, it would be nice to have a stadium south of Javits after all — and to extend the subway there, since this is envisioned as a Mass Transit Olympics. So it may happen. But not by next year.

Remember the froofraw about the Russian and Canadian ice dancing teams in the Salt Lake City Olympics. Now comes a story that the whole thing was masterminded by a Russian crime boss better known for drug dealing and illegal arms sales. Apparently, though, he also fixed Moscow beauty pageants as a sidelight.

And they say guys don’t like skating….