As someone who spends a fair amount of time traveling the current "security threat" response has had me standing in pointless lines for people to sniff my shoes for explosives.

Almost nothing I see reassures me that I'm any safer flying - in fact, some of the things I see disturb me even more by their sheer hypocrisy - for instance watching an un-scanned, un-xrayed person with carry on luggage go in an exit gate at Seatac recently.

It seems I'm not alone... a recent piece on the NYTimes "The Airport Security Follies" pointed out some of the more obvious flaws and got a pretty positive reaction in the comments... but still politicians need to be seen to be doing something (so they go for obvious high profile stuff, rather than actually making a difference).

Six years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, airport security remains a theater of the absurd. The changes put in place following the September 11th catastrophe have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless.

The first variety have taken place almost entirely behind the scenes. Explosives scanning for checked luggage, for instance, was long overdue and is perhaps the most welcome addition. Unfortunately, at concourse checkpoints all across America, the madness of passenger screening continues in plain view. It began with pat-downs and the senseless confiscation of pointy objects. Then came the mandatory shoe removal, followed in the summer of 2006 by the prohibition of liquids and gels. We can only imagine what is next.

....

How we got to this point is an interesting study in reactionary politics, fear-mongering and a disconcerting willingness of the American public to accept almost anything in the name of “security.” Conned and frightened, our nation demands not actual security, but security spectacle. And although a reasonable percentage of passengers, along with most security experts, would concur such theater serves no useful purpose, there has been surprisingly little outrage. In that regard, maybe we’ve gotten exactly the system we deserve.

more....

When I moved from Australia to the US I discovered a not so small problem. Because me Xbox Gamertag was tied to a LiveID which had billing services (my, now expired, Gold account) in AU there seemed to be no way to access the US goodness without giving up my Gamertag and picking a new personal.

In the latest update a new dashboard option was added to change the assigned LiveID for a Gamertag which got me all excited as I thought this would help.

Wrong!

All it's done is tie the two LiveIDs to the same Gamertag in the billing page, and left me stuck in AU. At least it doesn't appear to have screwed up the existing US billing stuff for my new LiveID but it's not turned out to be quite as good as I hoped.

I logged a support request on the off-chance, but after trying on and off since getting to the US I'm not holding out much hope (after all, I had to clear my Space and sit with the name in limbo for 60 days just to swap that between LiveIDs and I still can't use my nickname in the Windows Live Gallery with the new LiveID - I just get told it's "in use")

Just in time for Christmas there's an update to the Xbox360 firmware. I know I spotted it way after the Delicate Genius but the same thing grabbed our attention... improved codec support.

We're using the Windows Home Server tucked away upstairs for most of our file storage now and so, using the Media Connect capabilities of WHS, this now lets us use the Xbox360 as almost a first class media citizen.

It's not quite perfect - we still have some content that the Media Center with it's variously sourced codec packs plays without a hiccup that the Xbox won't touch, and of course archived DVDs (gotta try and keep 'em scratch free somehow because there's no replacement warranty) which again Vista Media Center is fine with.

As I'm not much of a gamer the rest of the update didn't make me rush to get it, but having more reasons to have the Xbox in the living room as part of a real family entertainment solution is a great move. Here's hoping we get more media support in coming releases.

In an interesting twist on the commonly held view that OSX is much more secure ZDNet has actually done some testing and dispelled a lot of the rumors and replaced them with some cold hard facts.

X Extremely critical
H Highly critical
M Moderately critical
L Less critical

I guess it goes to show that a lot of the superiority OSX was able to claim in the past came from it's very low marketshare making it a less popular target for exploits, but as that share and awareness has grown it's become a juicier target. Like Flash (which has also been exposed recently as a cause for concern) I hope Apple step up to the plate and make a difference early in 2008.

It's interesting to see how the testing also confirms that Microsoft have done a good job in improving the security of Vista over WinXP - hopefully Service Pack 1 will continue this trend in the right direction.

It's the sort of article that ThinkSecret would have had as front-page news... if Apple had not litigated them to the wall.

There are lots of cool free applications available for Windows Mobile (and it's fairly simple to write your own using Visual Studio Express but sometimes you want the convenience and quality of a commercial app but it's nicer when they are free...

Handango is giving away one  high quality, fully-functioning mobile software application for FREE on Fridays! The free app is available from 12 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. CST on Friday only and must be downloaded during that time period. In addition, the promotion features other applications at a 25% discount throughout the week. Just visit www.handango.com/FreeAppFriday for details.

All you have to do is complete a short survey. Handango will then send you an email with a link so you can download your free app. They are calling the promotion, "Free App Friday."

Looks like I'm not the only Windows Home Server fan out there. Bill Gates has one as well - and I suspect he's got some more toys in his house as well

Video: Microsoft Home Server HP Comercial

There is much said about standards compliance and IE in it's history. On occasion I've had some frustrations getting things to work in IE only to find it fail in Firefox or Safari.

Well, the good news is that IE is moving forwards in that direction.

Dean has just posted the details on the IE teams blog.

Despite the fact my phone has a very average camera in it sometimes it's handy to be able to take a quick snap and share it with folks.

I can upload it to Spaces with the in-built functionality, but it doesn't make it easy to Twitter it or send it to Flickr.

Until, that is, I discovered a new (still in beta so be gentle) service called MobyPicture.

They do one thing, and they do it really well.

You take a snapshot on your camera phone and then send it either as an MMS message or as an attachment to an email and they recognize who it's being sent to and perform what magic you've asked them to do.

You can either just store it on their site. A good starting point because you can always reference it manually from a blog or point someone to your moblog but it doesn't end there.

By adding your Twitter credentials they can post a message pointing folks to the phone.

By giving your Flickr account they can upload the photo to Flickr with some pre-defined tags

In fact there's quite a list of places you can send to (and you can send to none, one or all if you so choose). As well as the ones above MobyPicture also supports:

• Distribution to Hyves
• Distribution to Tumblr
• Distribution to Blogger
• Distribution to Wordpress
• Distribution to Jaiku
• Distribution to Kyte.tv
• Distribution to Splashcast
• and more to come... (hopefully Facebook and Spaces)

Now all they need is a native Windows Mobile app (like TinyTwitter) that can grab the photo, let me rotate and crop if needed and then send it and I'll be really happy ;)

As a fairly frequent twitterer (and follower of more than a couple smart folks) I decided that even though it's only a few cents a Twit it all adds up after a while, so I've been using my unlimited data plan and Pocket IE on my iMate K-Jam (aka HTC Wizard / T-Mobile MDA) to access the mobile Twitter interface

A couple of days ago I saw a Tweet from FrankArr pointing me to TinyTwitter - a native application that runs on Windows Mobile (PocketPC/Professional or Smartphone formats), as well as any Java enabled device (including the Crackberry).

It's a perfect accompaniment to Twitter - it has all the goodness of the very lightweight mobile platform but opens up other API related stuff so you get pictures and the option to follow just one users posts in an uncluttered list etc.

When I set up a new phone this will be one of the first apps I stick on it.

Just over a week ago I registered a new domain (on the Friday night). On Sunday I put the holding site up there and on Monday the logs showed a visit from Googlebot. Well, it's now a full seven days since the holding site went up and we got our second spider hit... this time from Baidu in China - 你好!

It's interesting to see the uptake. I've deliberately not seeded any search engines, or linked to the site from my blog, in fact the only clue to its existence is fleeting messages on the Twitter public timeline.

It'll be interesting to see how it grows and what order the different spiders find me in.