…when they really are out to get you.

…keeping tabs on every Web site they visit, every keystroke they tap, every instant message they send–even the contents of the messages on their personal Hotmail or Gmail accounts.

Besides financial fraud, companies find less insidious but still costly forms of abuse such as employees spending long, production-sapping stretches on Facebook or YouTube.

To help avoid cases of worker fraud, companies are increasingly using monitoring and tracking software. “Employee fraud definitely increases in economic hard times,” says Frank McKenna, co-founder and chief fraud strategist of BasePoint Analytics, a firm that offers fraud consulting and software for banks, mortgage lenders, and credit-card companies.

Consider yourself warned.

It’s a fairly common convention in English to refer to very unlikely conditions and scenarios by comparing them to absurdly unlikely conditions or scenarios.  Most any native speaker of English knows what you mean when you refer to a “three dollar bill”, a “French war hero”, a “submarine with screen doors”, or a “DFL Listening Tour”.

Now, off and on over the years, I gotta admit – I thought I was clever, in fact – that one of my rhetorical flouishes in this area was “Icelandic Special Forces”.  The idea that pacific, reindeer-sweater-wearing Iceland would have a unit of snake-eating cloak and dagger operators seemed like…

…well, you know where this is leading, right?

…the banking industry is melting down, Afghanistan is getting out of control and the Administration is trying to throw troops at the problem…

…but it’s nice to know that Congress can tackle the important stuff.

The Dalai Lama follows me.

On Twitter, natch.

Let’s see if Pope Benedict starts tweeting sometime soon here.

UPDATE: Of course it was a hoax.

But my Zen state is so complete, it fazes me not in the least.

Social media, meet socially inept:

I was at a cocktail party tonight, and someone asked me, flirtatiously & with no preamble “so, how many you got followin’?”

I told him none since I started using the new restrainingorder.twitter.com app.

Among many heard on the endlessly-expanding nerdpickuplines discussion on Twitter…

…for the guy in the next cube over to bring the Samoas I ordered two weeks ago, it’s interesting to peruse the history of Girl Scout Cookies.

It’s informative – although I have yet to see where the connection to Samoa is…

A fun interactive map of Super-Bowl-related words popping up on Twitter during the Super Bowl.

Click the “Play” button to get the full time-lapse effect.

Love the way “Springsteen” explodes during the Halftime show – mainly east of the Mississippi…

…stories of disc jockeys who took immense creative revenge on stations that fired them were legion; some locked themselves into the studios and staged epic rants (that, often, improved their careers); others merely beat the crap out of their management (or tried).  Smart management started making sure they had security on hand after a few of these stories.

A lesson that IT management seems to be  slow to learn:

Rajendrasinh Babubahai Makwana, 35, of Virginia, concealed the Unix script on Fannie Mae’s main administrative server on October 24, the same day the Unix engineer was terminated, according to court documents made public Tuesday. His script was programmed to remain dormant for three months, when it would greet administrators with a login message that read “Server Graveyard” and systematically replace all data with zeros on every production, administrative, and backup server in the company.Makwana was arrested on January 7 and released on $100,000 bond.

The plot?  Well, it might have done Chloe O’Brien proud:

The allegations also lay out a cautionary tale about the risk of lax security practices at highly sensitive enterprises. Despite his dismissal on October 24, Makwana’s highly privileged computer access wasn’t terminated until late into the evening because of bureaucratic procedures in Fannie’s procurement department, according to court documents.

Shortly after Makwana was informed he was being fired, he logged in to Fannie’s main development server and embedded a series of malicious scripts inside a legitimate program. To conceal the malicious payload, he created a page worth of blank lines between the legitimate code and the malicious code.

“When the program ascertained it was January 31, 2009, it would copy the rest of the files from the ‘.soti’ file from the dsysadm01 server and run the .y.sh script,” a FBI special agent wrote in a sworn statement that referred to Fannie as ABC to protect its identity. “The .y.sh script would place a blocker on the monitoring system disabling any ABC engineers from receiving a monitoring alert for any problems on any machines in the entire ABC environment for 61 minutes.”

Makwana’s script would then disable logins to Fannie’s administrative and backup production servers; remove the root password appliance access; rewrite all data, including backup software, with zeros; and target any “high availability” software. It would then replicate itself to each of Fannie’s 4,000 servers.

Maybe he needs a government gig.

Here they go again:

Want to perk up your next social gathering?How about putting a bathroom scale in your living room and inviting guests to weigh themselves, while the whole gang watches?

Ah, that Joe Bodell sure knows how to throw a party.

UPDATE:  I’m sorry, my bad.  That was actually in a Strib piece by Kim Palmer.  And there’s actually some history behind it.

Obama won’t give up his Blackberry!

This is news?

Why should he? He’s the Chief Executive. He’s the boss.

I’m all for Obanana keeping his smart phone.

He’s not just the first African American President. He’s the first President that won’t look stupid thumbing his old racketeering pals a message.

“Dude. Like this is so cool. Did you guys see my new ride?”

He needs to be kept abreast when he’s sunning his washboard abs.

“I want to be able to have voices, other than the people who are immediately working for me, be able to reach out and send me a message about what’s happening in America.”

For example, soon-to-be disappointed voices like Peggy Joseph.

Security issues.

“I think we’re going to be able to hang on to one of these. My working assumption, and this is not new, is that anything I write on an email could end up being on CNN,” he said.

Oops. What the President-Elect meant to say was:

“Anything that CNN writes for me to say…”

National Security?

“So I make sure to think before I press ‘send’,” he said.

Let’s hope as President he thinks before he presses any buttons.

Obama’s Blackberry can take the place of his teleprompter when he’s on the fly.

“If I’m doing something stupid, somebody (in Jail-JR) in Chicago can send me an e-mail and say, ‘What are you doing?’

That might happen a lot.

…who, like me, ignores the “safety instructions” before flights…

 US Airways flight attendant Alin Boswell concurred: “This is why we go through training and go through briefing. That 60 seconds you have to go over the emergency card can make all the difference.”

…thinking of paying just a tad more attention next time?

Maybe just a little.

I’ve always prided myself on my command of trivia.  I have yet to lose a battle of Trivial Pursuit, and I tend to do pretty well at Keegans’ various Trivia nights.

And yet sometimes I wonder – what useful bit of information, like my kids’ social security numbers or the start-times of today’s various meetings, or the name of the guest I booked for tomorrow’s NARN show – has been crowded out of my mind by less-useful factoids that still clutter my brain.

Like, say, the 1978-era lineup of the band Chicago – a band I never liked much, and actively detested after, oh, 1979, but was in 1978 made up of Lee Loughnane, Walter Parazaider, Danny Serafine, Laudir De Oliveira, James Pankow, Peter Cetera, Robert Lamm and Terry Kath?   And no, I did not  have to google that.  Sadly, no, not at all.

Or the original lineup of Generation X – Bob “Derwood” Andrews on guitar, Tony James (later of Sigue Sigue Sputnik) on bass, Mark Laff on drums and a young Billy Idol singing?  Don’t need it.  Not a bit.  And yet there it is, stuck like those cases of Mason jars on my fruit room shelves.

Maybe I need a brainema.

…at least be thanksful you didn’t take an unexpected dip.  A US Airways plane, disabled by a flock of birds, has apparently conducted a successful crash landing in the Hudson River.

According to [a reporter on the scene], survivors told her that about two minutes after takeoff, a loud “boom” was heard and the plane began descending. She reported seeing a flight attendant being taken away on a stretcher, though she said it appeared that was among the more serious injuries.

“It was just going down further and further and further and then all of a sudden it was gone,” a witness named Peter Chinchino told CBS 2. “I’m shaking, it was crazy. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. There was nothing wrong with the plane, it wasn’t wobbling, there was no smoke coming out of it!”

No deaths reported yet.

Those must be some amazing pilots; jets aren’t built to be specacularly-efficient gliders.

For those moments when you just have to know – was it a SIG, or an H and K?

Because this is the kind of brand marketing I could personally sink my teeth into.

Background for those of you outside the Twin Cities; we’re expecting a winter storm.  It’s actually the tail end of a blizzard that’s currently working over the Plains states).

So I was standing at the bus stop this morning.  I recalled “we’re expecting snow”, remembering the radar from the morning weather that showed a big front bearing down on the Twin Cities.

I looked around; no snow at all in my immediate proximity.

“Hmm”.

I looked down the street.  It seemed clear down as far as Snelling, maybe even Fairview (3/4 of a mile away) – but beyond that, down toward Prior, the snow was coming down heavily enough to make it hard to see past that street, about a mile away.  I could see the front of my bus, just ahead of the snow.

And I watched as the snow caught the bus, changing the headlights from sharp glints to diffused washes of light as I watched.

Literally – the front came in that sharply and identifiably.

That was cool.

Figuratively and literally.

Observations on having an Ipod for the first time in almost a year:

1. I had no idea this song was so amazingly cool.  It’s almost a shame Patti Scialfa has to put up with all that “Mrs. Springsteen” stuff; she does some really great music.
2. The last time I heard this song  was probably thirty years ago, on an AM radio in a car in North Dakota on KFYR, and remember it as a sappy teenypopper love song.  So I downloaded it a few weeks ago (I have no idea why).  And it’s…a sappy teenybopper love song with the most over-the-top production since Queen discovered the sixty-four-track tape recorder.  Hyperactive strings, a Hammond B3 poking its nose and occasionally soaring behind the mix, and enough big black background singers (borrowed from Andre Crouch) to take on the Mormon Tabernacle choir (and singing overlapping, interleaving parts with more layers than one of those Hardee’s triple-decker grease burgers), it’s not just glorious, not just sappy; it’s gloriously sappy.
3. Metallica is great workout music.

That’s a start.

The Navy commissioned the USS George HW Bush on Saturday:

It’s been nearly eight years since the paperwork was signed, and the George H.W. Bush is poised to become a warship.

The carrier, the 10th and last of the Nimitz class, will be commissioned this morning at Norfolk Naval Station.

Both Presidents Bush will be on hand, along with a host of military and political leaders and 18,000 other spectators.

As part of the ceremony, the ship will be “brought to life,” with all the crew thundering aboard to take their places on deck. They’re ready.

“Everybody likes a new ship,” said Petty Officer 1st Class Jason Luckenwitz, a damage controlman who has spent the past three years helping train the ship’s on-board firefighters. “It’s like buying a new car. Everybody’s ready to get under way.”

Odd to read that the ship will be the last of ten units of the Nimitz class of carriers.  I remember the American left phumphering about how un-needed the Nimitz herself was, 30 years ago – I recall an episode of All In The Family where Rob Reiner launched into a self-righteous tirade on the subject, courtesy of Norman Lear…

…after whom, I think, the Navy should name a garbage scow.

Kids and I are settling down for the season premiere of 24 in about a half hour.

I hope Joel Surnow learned some lessons from Day Six; if we wanted DC intrigue, we’d flip over to West Wing.

I know, I know; it’s not unlikely that this season could be worse than last season – which was not even a pathetic shadow of Days 1-3.

But I hasten to recall that the first six hours last season were not half bad. So there’s potential.

Fingers crossed. Nacho fixings staged and ready for irradiation. Pop stored in fridge, ready to deploy.

“National Talk Like A Pirate Day” – every September 19 – is fine and dandy and all.  But it’s kinda played out.

I think it’s time-ah to declare January 22 as “International Talk Like James Hetfield Day-ah!”

Or perhaps something drunk disspates with too much money do out on Minnetonka.

But it’s actually a bit of vid from the British Marine Special Boat Service, which are sort of like Brit SEALs.

All other national problems having been solved…

Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four.

So, in September, Mr. Kohl sent a letter to Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, inviting them to answer some basic questions about their text messaging costs and pricing.

I get unlimited text messaging for ten bucks a month. What an outrage.
Reportedly, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile sent the Senator text messages in response:

AT&T: ^URS

Sprint: 4Q

T-Mobile: ADAD. AFAHMASP. BIOIYA.

I think T-Mobile went a bit too far. …Germans.

…borrow someone else’s.

This March will be 33rd anniversary of playing guitar.  And sometimes it feels like there are no more frontiers.

Which is not to say I’ve conquered everything I want to on the instrument; merely that after attempting certain frontiers (being a convincing speed-metal player, copping Chet Atkins licks, getting Terry Kath’s solo for Chicago’s 25 or 6 to 4 down note for note), I’ve decided they just didn’t mean that much to me.

Other frontiers hover out there like Moby Dick; getting Nils Lofgren’s pick harmonics (without adopting fingerpicks), getting the alternate-string thumb bass line in Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lighting sounding like I’m not playing after a severe stroke, figuring out Brian May’s guitar tone, that kind of thing.

But it’s time to try something new.

I’ve never really tried to sit down and gnosh out anything on Television’s Marquee Moon.  Which makes me nekulturnii, I know; I’m being honest here.  It occurred to me that I’ve wanted to figure out Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s parts in Venus for a very long time.

So there’s a project for the long weekend.