Live from Austin!

Chicago Sun-Times:

Tiny plastic bags used to sell small quantities of heroin, crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs would be banned in Chicago, under a crackdown advanced Tuesday by a City Council committee.

Ald. Robert Fioretti (2nd) persuaded the Health Committee to ban possession of “self-sealing plastic bags under two inches in either height or width,” after picking up 15 of the bags on a recent Sunday afternoon stroll through a West Side park.

Last time I went to Chicago, I took several such bags. One had spare batteries in. Another had the change from my pockets while I was going through airport security.

Last year:

Investigators handed 26 items, including clothes, phones and cameras, to transit workers, “explaining that they had found the lost articles on a train or bus.”

But, the report states, “Three months or more after these items were placed in the system, we recovered only three from the Lost Property Unit at 34th Street. The whereabouts of the other 23 articles is unknown.”

Last year:

The report said that the transit agency’s lost property unit received more than 8,000 items each year and that only about 18 percent wound up back in the hands of their owners. Most unclaimed items were eventually auctioned off, the report said.

This year:

While riding in the New York subway, Carlos Alayo found a wallet sitting on an empty bench. In a hurry to get to a meeting, Alayo picked up the wallet and said he was going to check it for ID later. Before he knew it he was being frisked by police.

It turns out the wallet was planted by New York City police as part of “Operation Lucky Bag,” a decoy operation involving planted wallets and undercover officers watching how bystanders react.

I can imagine the conversation:

“This is a public relations disaster. Now that people know that practically nothing they hand to officials ever gets returned to its rightful owner, they’ll stop handing stuff in and we’ll lose the auction profits.”

“I’ve got it: we’ll start a sting operation to make people scared to return anything to its rightful owner!”

From CQ Politics:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

OK, I confess: I have purchased and eaten falafels on several occasions. I’ll come quietly.

Metasploit on the iPhone:

Every process runs as root. MobileSafari, MobileMail, even the Calculator, all run with full root privileges. Any security flaw in any iPhone application can lead to a complete system compromise.

I really thought Apple had better software developers than that. I guess that explains Steve Jobs’ comments about it being impossible to provide a 3rd party SDK safely.

Yeah, if you made the incredibly dumb decision to have no security whatsoever in your mobile OS, then it’s impossible to support 3rd party applications safely.

More to the point, as soon as someone finds a security hole in Safari or Mail, that’s it—they will be able to pwn the entire system. I’d place bets that someone will find such a bug, sooner or later; and then we’ll see iPhone viruses and trojans spreading by e-mail or web.

Apparently speaking a foreign language in an airport is now deemed suspicious, and grounds for questioning you and making you miss your plane.

US air marshals in Vegas have revealed that they have a quota: they have to report at least one suspicious person a month.

Nintendo have officially announced the name of their next generation console: Wii. Pronounced ‘wee’. I kid you not.

Congratulations, Nintendo. You’re up against stiff competition, and we weren’t sure you could pull it off; but with a branding decision like this, urine the running for sure. The guy who came up with this name must be a real whiz. How did you think of it? It’s a bit of a riddle, for sure.

No doubt there will be a shower of solid gold hit software—a veritable golden shower of games. You’ll be flush with cash in no time. I can see you being number one in the industry, oh yeah.

I hope you keep the multiple color options, I’m sure kids will love asking each other “What color is your Wii?”. I think the porcelain white looks good myself.