The grueling reality of producing a weekly show wears down *casting pioneers

Absolute turmoil, if that is the correct word, erupted earlier this week when an extremely popular netcast (or podcast) failed to go live. This Week in Tech or TWiT as it's called by show host Leo Laporte is a weekly *cast about juicy tech news. What sets TWiT apart from the masses is that it also features several guests usually widely known tech commentators on every show. The problem is that coordinating the guests can be a bit difficult, but until now that had not been a problem.

However according to Laporte's official TWiT blog last week's episode wasn't recorded for this very reason. In a spur of the moment reaction he made the now infamous post that caused TWiT fans, otherwise known as the TWiT Army, to launch into a frenzy. Leo later posted reassurance that TWiT would continue though probably not as a weekly show.

The BBC recons that this time it's different. Yeah, we've heard those words before.

The BBC published a snippy little article today in the wake of a confirmed deal between Google and YouTube. The article speculates that though we may very well be experiencing a new Internet boom, however it stops short of predicting another Internet bust. Several reasons are cited and it's clear that the author is in a bit of denial.

The first claim is that this time Internet companies are real businesses. Evidence of this is in the sheer number of customer or viewers sites like YouTube and MySpace have. But nothing could be further from the truth. These people are not customers, they are users. They don't buy services from YouTube; they consume resources and pay nothing for it. Unless the nature of consumerism has changed in the past five years I'd say that these people were nary customers at all. Leeches is likely a better word.

Stability control may save lives, but it won't fix the problem.

In an effort to make driving safer, the NHTSA has suggested that stability control be a mandatory part of all new cars and trucks. They cite the reduction in single car accidents and rollovers based on 10 years worth of data. While I agree that stability control systems (SCS) are a great feature and can help folks avoid an accident, I stop short of calling for a mandatory requirement. The main drawback to SCS is the added complexity of the system that's required. The primary monitoring network this system are wheel speed sensors located on all four wheels, sometimes referred to as the ABS sensors. Wheel speed sensors monitor how fast each wheel is turning, and can thus figure out if one wheel is slipping, or locking up under hard braking.

When is it wrong to say you're someone else?

The ethical hacker, is there such a thing? I'd wager that we've all done something under false pretext, but was it really illegal? That's the dilemma in the wake of the Hewlett-Packard boardroom intrigue where one board member used data mining to root out an alleged news leak. According to the CNet article, Patricia Dunn somehow acquired the personal phone records of several board members in an attempt to identify the person who was leaking information about former CEO Carly Fiorina's troubled tenure.

Apparently the phone records were acquire by someone who called the phone company and presented false information and claimed to be one of the board members. The information was then emailed to an anonymous yahoo account. The technique is called "pretexting" and it's used by private investigators and fly-by-night Internet background check sites. To further confuse the issue, court rulings are not clear on whether or not pretexting is illegal when the information is not used for other illegal activities. It's also unclear about the status of phone records as compared to financial records.