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I try hard to avoid getting wrapped up in conspiracy theories and worst-case scenario thinking but the little I know about technology and human nature sometimes gets the better of me. It’s been even harder than usual to suppress my tinfoil hat tendencies the last few weeks as I stumbled on a few items that have kicked my paranoia muscles into involuntary spasms.It all started out when Pete, my long-time buddy and fellow-wingnut tech freak, sent me the following e-mail: Hi Lee:On Saturday's edition of NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me", the story was told of how a White Plains, NY woman had her laptop stolen and then recovered it. Somehow she monitored internet traffic until her IP address showed up as active, then logged on to her laptop remotely and used the built in camera to photograph the perps. She downloaded the photos and shared them with the police who recognized the perp and arrested the man. Sooo, do you think the NSA can remotely log on to computers and photograph their users? ...

Between the floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and $4/gallon gas, there’s so much doom and gloom in the air that the Indian River Silicon announcement that it is now formally open for business came as an especially welcome piece of good news last week. The newly-formed employee-owned wireless silicon design house, composed mostly of Conexant’s former RF team, was brought to life shortly after their parent company decided to get out of the wireless business late last year. In my November 2007 editorial, Brain Drain Pan, I lamented Conexant’s decision to disband its talented RF semiconductor design team, and worried that the talent pool that had taken decades to assemble would be scattered to the four winds within a few weeks.Happily, I called this one wrong.A brief conversation with Al Petrick, Indian River’s Senior Vice-President of Marketing (and one of its founders), revealed that the company was formed less than a month after Conexant laid off the team; and received their first contrac...

I have not extensively driven a hybrid since my experience in a Honda Civic in 2003 after which I wrote a guest Editorial for greentechZONE. I was impressed, from some points of view, but determined that it wasn’t the vehicle for me living, at the time, on a coastal stretch of US-101 where the major feature of a suitable vehicle needed to be its prowess at getting past RVs when even a medium shopping outing required 100 miles of round-trip driving. It was to me, as well, a good two-seater but not an adequate four-seater.A green environment is important to us all and I was a little saddened that Honda’s next move in hybrids was to add it to the Accord, not really as a matter of saving gas, but to increase the low-end torque from the power plant.We have a lot of Prius vehicles in our local taxi fleets and I have often ridden in them (have also passed one very stuck on a quite moderate slope in snow slush) but the only one that I had sat in as a driver – until last week – was a very early...

Do you remember the TV ad that depicted a man walking down a crowded street in Manhattan? As might be expected in the noonday rush, he bumped into another New Yorker, and excused himself, whereupon the crowd excitedly pointed at him. "Get him, get him!" the mob yelled. Shades of Donald Sutherland at the conclusion of the classic movie remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers.%IMG_left_full_490%In reality, New Yorkers are as courteous and friendly as people generally are everywhere, but the ill-mannered stereotype worked well in this tongue-and-cheek advertisement.Folks say common courtesy is a thing of the past. Perhaps so, but it's interesting that most people inexplicably go out of their way to hold doors open for strangers. On the other hand, I'm willing to bet that some of these same overly considerate door holders are the same people who eagerly flip the proverbial bird and hurl unrepeatable epithets at other automobile drivers. Respect is a function of time and place, I suppose.One of these place...

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated; and no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."  -- US Constitution, Fourth Amendment. What's happened to post-9/11 America, anyway? Have we lost our collective common sense?Hardly a day goes by without another legal travesty descending from the fools on the hill. This time the government is sidestepping the US Constitution, making search-and-seizure legitimate. The unconscionable thrust targets personal computers, and their private collections of notes, thoughts and ideas. Due to a decision by the 9th Circuit Court Of Appeals in California, border police can now legally search your laptop, regardless of search-and-seizure protections granted under the Fourth Amendment.Prior to this, some level of reasonable susp...

German manufacturer Mann-Hummel says it intends to be the first automotive parts supplier to offer all-plastic oil pans for cars. These parts are a third lighter than their steel or aluminum counterparts, so their lightness would ostensibly contribute to a vehicle’s fuel mileage, and thereby help reduce carbon emissions. Significantly, Mann-Hummel claims its injection-molded pans can also include integrated components such as lifetime no-change oil filters. The plastic sumps are also anticipated to be less costly than their metal predecessors. Now, I don't know about you, but I'm already surrounded by non-biodegradable plastic, and I'm not sure I want much more of it. Mann-Hummel plastic oil pans notwithstanding, our household already has its share of polyethylene bottles, Nylon toothbrushes, polypropylene food containers, polyurethane moldings, plastic bags, polycarbonate electronics enclosures, and those pesky plastic packaging peanuts that electrostatically stick to darned near everything in sight.Wh...

I know it is not always true of analog basestations but, surely, all digital modulation basestations use a GPS receiver to at least derive an input for the PLL circuits? But do they use the GPS signals for time-of-day indication? I have to ask because my cellular phone does not show the correct time. It is not as if is not power-cycled: it is usually turned on once a day (Monday through Friday during school term) so the power has been recycled over one hundred times this year, so far. (Anybody who doesn’t know my opinions about cell phones will think I am joking about my phone use. I am not.)I can find nothing in any blog on cellular phones about this problem, and don’t ask me to look in the product manual: I have no idea where it is, and I know nothing more about my phone beyond the base functionality of receiving and sending a call.So, maybe the carriers just use a regular old-fashioned digital clock to derive time-of-day? Maybe they do...but that kind of confuses my understanding about how you ...