Scene From Total Recall

It’s clear that the government would prefer if everybody goes through an excessive full body naked scan to board a flight. It’s also clear that government agencies are usurping unprecedented power, that they are removing our civil liberties, our privacy, our rights one by one. The Department of Homeland Security would prefer of everybody goes through the same invasive machine, they want to remove the option of a pat down, remove the option or going through a metal detector, or other means.

The future of security checkpoint screening is to have everybody walk in a single file in a tunnel as they are scan multiple times at multiple frequencies with multiple naked body scanners. An array of naked body scanners can be installed along a long passageway that can capture passengers biometric information such as, retinal scans, facial scans, posture, walking sample, body temperature, heart rate, tattoos scans through clothing, etc. Video and audio recording is just the tip of the iceberg of what police will monitor, screen, and scan in public places for in the near future.

So if man did not cause the last ice age, and the earth’s climate has changed over time since earth was formed, why are politicians, scientists, and generally really smart people up in arms about global warming and climate change? Money, marketing, and control.

People don’t realize this, but do you know you pay up to three times to recycle. In California, consumers pay five cents per bottle of water, beer, soda, etc. for the California Redemption Value (CRV), which functions as a recycling fee or recycling tax. If you buy a six pack, you pay an additional thirty cents as CRV. In most municipalities, you have to recycle and the garbage company gives you a bin for recycled waste. For a household of 4, it takes time to recycle on an average of at least 1 hours a week. I see this time as an opportunity loss, so if you earn $20/hour you’ve paid that amount with your time. The third form of payment to recycle, is what you pay the garbage company to come pick up your trash and recyclables. Even though you paid the CRV, you spent time to sort the recycles, and you paid to have the recycles picked up, the garbage companies get a bonus because they collect the CRV and sell whatever is they can to whoever is buying.

Vaccines are a huge business, with even a bigger potential. First, even though to create vaccine is relatively easy there is a state sponsored oligarchy of big pharmaceuticals that get FDA approval to create specific vaccines. Also, since vaccines are usually a preventive measure it is easy to suggest people to take them if marketed correctly.

The number one issue people have with conventional flu vaccines is that they are traditionally administered via an injection. But since the big H1N1 flu scare of 2009, vaccine makers have introduced oral and nasal vaccines. With the introduction of new administration methods drug maker have found new application for vaccines, such as cocaine vaccine and alzheimer ‘s vaccine.

Cocaine addiction is classified as a disease but not one caused by biological microbe organisms like the conventional flu. So you can deduce that the cocaine vaccine is not a vaccine but a market position for a new drug. Drug companies have learned that in the general population has been trained to vaccinate their children without question for any and every possible disease. So labeling a cocaine addiction drug as a vaccine helps the marketing push of the drug. Basically drug companies have co-opted the word vaccine for their pursuit of the bottom line.

Expect to see a whole new set of drugs labeled as vaccines to address anything from obesity, shopping addition, gambling habits, smart energy, and performance enhancement issues. There will be a vaccine to address just about any anti-social personality trait, habit, or behavior. There will be an Farmville addiction vaccine, a don’t do homework vaccine, a hangover vaccine, a body order vaccine, etc. People already spend billions in preventive medicine and health products, everything from energy drinks, to memory stimulants, muscle building supplements, vitamins, and more. There is a huge market if you can develop a ‘vaccine’ for these segments.

The big pharmaceuticals are marketing their drugs as vaccines because the general public has associated vaccines with preventative measure, they are constantly reminded how the polio and chicken pox vaccine has saved millions of children lives since it was first introduced. Drug companies are co-opting the word vaccine to invest in a new set of preventative drugs to address anti-social traits, habits, and behaviors in people from compulsive shopping to cocaine addition.

H1N1 Vaccine, by Roland

There are a lot of online services that can help you manage your phone line and number for your small business. At this point I would not use a fixed land line, but a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) service to provide all my telephony needs. The primary phone number I give personal friends and contacts to reach me is provided by Google Voice. For my small home business, I use Skype phone service. And there are other telephony services that can be useful for small business owners.

What I like about Google Voice is that your GVoice phone number can be forwarded to any other phone, or multiple phones. You customers call you at your GVoice phone number and Google forwards the call to your cell phone, store phone number, or any other number until someone answers it or it goes to voice mail. If the call goes to voice mail Google will transcribe the message and email you the text transcription.

I also use Skype and have a Skype Call-out account which provides me a phone number where my customers can reach me at from a cell phone or landline. In addition, Skype also has some great chat messaging, video conference, screen sharing, and collaboration option that make it an integral solution for my small business communication needs.

Yahoo! has the Yahoo! Voice phone service that fits somewhere between Google Voice and Skype. All of these services can be managed and used to call out and receive calls on your smart phone. The iPhone and Android app for Google Voice allows you to call out and receive calls. In the US, the iPhone app for Skype only allows you to call out when you are on a WiFi internet access.

The one feature I really wish either Google Voice, Skype, or Yahoo! Voice had was the ability to send and receive faxes. Fax support is a popular and commonly request feature in Google Voice that I think that Google will build support for it but there are other online telephony services that already include this feature.

Ring Central is a paid mobile business phone system that includes internet fax services. You don’t need a fax machine in your office to send and receive fax documents. Ring Central also provides a 1 800 toll free number. In addition to Ring Central, I would consider Grasshopper. Grasshopper is a virtual phone system designed for businesses and entrepreneurs. Grasshopper has toll free numbers, unlimited extension, call forwarding, voicemails transcriptions, and other feature suitable for small to mid-sized companies.

• Profounder – Raise capital for a business or startup while building a community.
• Kickstarter – Used by creative types to raise money to fund art projects and new businesses.
• Crowdrise – Celebrity backed charity fund raising platform.
• Kiva – One of the first socially motivated micro-lending sites.

• Sheldon Adelson
• Carl Berg
• Stephen Bisciotti
• Leon Charney
• John Paul DeJoria
• Larry Ellison
• Alan Gerry
• Alec Gores
• Harold Hamm
• George Joseph
• Kirk Kerkorian
• Ken Langone
• Ralph Lauren
• Carl Lindner Jr.
• David Murdock
• Thomas Peterffy
• Howard Schultz
• Kenny Troutt
• Albert Ueltschi
• Oprah Winfrey

The Palin hack didn’t require any real skill. Instead, the hacker simply reset Palin’s password using her birthdate, ZIP code and information about where she met her spouse — the security question on her Yahoo account, which was answered (Wasilla High) by a simple Google search.

Recently, it was reported that President Obama’s Twitter account was hacked by guessing the security question related to password recovery systems. These type of ‘hacks’ require no computer science degree, computer security expertise, or black hat hacking skills. This is the sort of ‘hacking’ that an ex might find themselves doing on your Facebook account. I would not put a lot of blame on curious kids with a lot of time on their hands and an internet connections, I put the blame on enterprise software architects that impose stupid and weak security systems in place.

At first, security questions consisted of naming the town you where born, or the maiden name of your mother. Then the progressed to the name of your third grade teacher, then the last name of your fifth girlfriend, then to the where you where in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and they have gotten worse since then. Here are some security questions I found myself forced to answer.

• Who was your childhood hero?
• What is the first and last name of your first boyfriend or girlfriend?
• Which phone number do you remember most from your childhood?
• What was your favorite place to visit as a child?
• Who is your favorite actor, musician, or artist?
• What was the last name of your third grade teacher?

The problem now, with the current trend of security questions, is that even I don’t know the answers to them or that their answer might change over time. Trying to answer any of the the above security questions in five years from now and you might sounds like the following… “I liked both Spiderman and Wolverine, but I might have answered Superman. I liked Britney Spears then, but not as much as Miley Cyrus, but wasn’t Lady Futura big then.”

I think that security questions are not secure or practical. They are a annoyance for users and high light security flaws in computer systems.

Here is a list of security questions considered good and notice that they all suffer from the issues outline here, they are either easy to guess or easy to forget.

• What was your childhood nickname?
• In what city did you meet your spouse/significant other?
• What is the name of your favorite childhood friend?
• What street did you live on in third grade?
• What is your oldest sibling’s birthday month and year? (e.g., January 1900)
• What is the middle name of your youngest child?
• What is your oldest sibling’s middle name?
• What school did you attend for sixth grade?
• What was your childhood phone number including area code? (e.g., 000-000-0000)
• What is your oldest cousin’s first and last name?
• What was the name of your first stuffed animal?
• In what city or town did your mother and father meet?
• Where were you when you had your first kiss?
• What is the first name of the boy or girl that you first kissed?
• What was the last name of your third grade teacher?
• In what city does your nearest sibling live?
• What is your youngest brother’s birthday month and year? (e.g., January 1900)
• What is your maternal grandmother’s maiden name?
• In what city or town was your first job?
• What is the name of the place your wedding reception was held?
• What is the name of a college you applied to but didn’t attend?
• Where were you when you first heard about 9/11?

Another trend that I have noticed is that financial institutions and credit companies have a lot of private data on you and other perspective borrowers. So they don’t need to ask you such security questions, they can generate they own and match your answers to the years of paper trail and data fingerprints they have on you. If you call your bank in the near future, don’t be surprised if they ask you who you lose your virginity to.

Andrew Warner, the founder of the startup and entrepreneurship focused site Mixergy, changed his site so that content older than a week is only available to paid subscribers. There is nothing wrong with making a buck, and I am sure he will do okay, but by making a quick buck we actually short our users. Funny enough, Andrew has interviewed dozens of successful entrepreneurs that have made a successful business by providing free content to build a platform to spring board their business.

Leo Laporte has built a podcasting empire with shows like This Week in Tech, MacBreak Weekly, Security Now, FLOSS Weekly and many more. Leo podcasts are ad supported and he spent a lot of time in making sure the ads are relevant to his audience. Another example and another entrepreneur whom Andrew has interviewed is Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary started out by making video reviews of wines for his blog. The video reviews where free but they where also presented and sponsored by his real business Wine Library. Gary has now moved on to write a book Crush It! A similar story can be told of Seth Godin. Seth writes freely available essays on his blog and writes a large number of books based on his writing. Seth has also “spun off” several online business. It is important to make the mental distinction that the free blog, podcast, essays are distinct from the paid service, product, or business. You don’t monetize your community by slapping a price tag on them.

Newsday recently learned by putting up a pay wall to your content does not lead to immediate success. Newsday is a half a billion dollar business and recently made the move to make their content online accessible to paid subscribers for a $5/week subscription. It is reported that after three months Newsday was able to sign up a mere 35 subscribers. I know Andrew will fair better than Newsday, there are a lot of passionate startup founders and entrepreneurs, but the complete and utter failure of Newsday is worth nothing. Subscription model to web content is not an original idea. It is not a purple cow, it will not help you get viral, it introduces money to the equation and money has a different expectation.

• Put in the hours-when it counts.
• Empathize
• Defuse a bad situation
• Be a conduit
• Ask for help
• Connect the boss’s way
• Show initiative
• Be positive
• Make like mini-me
• Get your face time