Category Archives: Security

Poetry, Security

Birthday Girl

Leave a comment

by The Roots

What is it we wanna do?
Now that I’m allowed to be alone with you
Birthday Girl its your birthday
Wherever you wanna go
Now you are old enough to go and see the R-rated show now
R-rated show

Yo, She said she was a magazine editor named Janine
Backstage in high heels and painted on jeans
Probably had the most devious eyes I’d ever seen
Told me she was twenty-two she was only seventeen
She had sumthin’ to hide she snuck in from outside
And got everybody gassed like the car I drive
With all that grown lady ass and my far out vibe
She said she came to see them roots boys fallout live
But listen,

What is it we wanna do?
Now that I’m allowed to be alone with you
Birthday Girl its your birthday
Wherever you wanna go
Now you are old enough to go and see the R-rated show now
R-rated show

You see them girls look good but they brains not ready
I talk to a woman, her mind is more steady
Probably something in the way they designed that’s more steady
I just let you recite cause the line so heavy
But I shoulda known better cause now I feel like America’s underbelly
R. Kelly gutter smut peddlers, internet predators, chat-room irregulars
This not my twist you trying to send me to the therapist, miss

What is it we wanna do?
Now that I’m allowed to be alone with you
Birthday Girl its your birthday
Wherever you wanna go
Now you are old enough to go and see the R-rated show now
R-rated show

Now she told me cheddar cheese grits
Two tomato fried fish
Cause she heard its my dish
Tryna be my sidekick
All the people all around thinking she was my chick
Saying DAMN the girl thick
But she aint no twenty-six
Looking at me like I’m up to sumthin’ on the funny tip
Like I ever been the one to honey jib
Its your birthday so let me know the gift you wanna get
In fact blow out the candles on the cake and make a wish for me

They can’t really seem to look away
So they tried asking her to stay
Fake I.D. you won’t get turned away
You look lovely tonight
Now you are old enough to buy a gun
So many better ways of having fun
Right now I can only think of one
You look lovely tonight.

What is it we wanna do?
Now that I’m allowed to be alone with you
Birthday Girl its your birthday
Wherever you wanna go
Now you are old enough to go and see the R-rated show now
R-rated show

Energy, Security

Hot-Rod Diesel from GM

Leave a comment

I certainly hope that the restructuring of GM will bring forward engine technology such as this awesome diesel V8:

These features give the new engine an unusually small, light, and narrow form factor for a diesel, with the ability to fit anywhere the current LS-series gasoline V-8 will go, according to GM sources. Potential applications mentioned so far include pickup trucks under 8,600 pounds GVW and the Hummer H2. While no passenger-car plans have been revealed so far, the new engine’s small footprint allows GM “the flexibility to introduce this engine in a wide variety of vehicle applications should there be future market demand,” according to GM statements. [And what a potential hot rod engine swap candidate! -Ed.

Nevermind the stupid Hummer box, which are being sold to the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company anyway, this is the sort of thing that should be dropped into aerodynamic new designs.

Energy, Sailing, Security

Plastiki: Waste as a Resource

Leave a comment

This could be a follow-up to my post about waste surveillance. Is the future really behind us? Bad joke, sorry. Seriously, though, the Plastiki project is an attempt to use some VERY low-tech recycling to make a boat:

David de Rothschild’s plan to sail across the Pacific Ocean, from San Francisco to Sydney in a 60-foot catamaran made of used two-liter plastic bottles, isn’t just an adventure. It’s a crusade. “Our philosophy of throwing everything away has to change,” says de Rothschild. “I want to use the Plastiki as a platform to help people think of waste as a resource.”

Rather than develop or innovate new ways of converting waste, however, the Plastiki seems like mostly an aesthetic and marketing-oriented project. It’s reality show drama more than real discovery or a leap in science and engineering, but nonetheless it carries a good message.

Security

Let Freedom Tweet

Leave a comment

Deutsche Welle reports how activists in Egypt are using Twitter to organize and break the grip of authorities.

Amr Ghrabei, one of the pioneers of the cyber dissident scene recalls another famous tweeting incident. At a demonstration in Cairo, the activist Malek Mustafa had been taken away in a police car.

“Thanks to Twitter, different groups of activists kept track of the path the car was taking,” Ghrabei said. From his home computer, the activist published the various Twitter messages on the homepage of the opposition movement Kifava.

“Because of that, they actually managed to surround the police car and finally had Malek released,” added Ghrabei.

Highly distributed communication is a friend of these activists, but every tool like this is double-edged. It will be interesting to see how authorities respond to the organized popular movements. A twitter like “arrested” is a fairly obvious and innocent example of a tweet, but what about cases like “let him have it“?

Wired covers the other side of this story in their Danger Room

“Recognizing that the Taliban tactic is to exaggerate, lie, and create situations that cause civilian casualties, I have attempted to counter that with speed, accuracy and transparency in our reporting,” Col. Greg Julian, the top spokesman for USFOR-A, tells Danger Room.

But the really interesting point is what kinds of information these tools relay. Earlier today, USFOR-A — which is separate from the NATO International Security Assistance Force — used its Twitter page to post a tally of enemy dead. According to the tweet, six militants responsible for attacks in the province were killed in an operation in Wardak Province.

The one-to-many nature of Tweets brings with it convenience such as speed, but is it accurate or trustworthy? Impersonation seems trivial, and there is danger that a trickle of vital facts today that seem like a new form of transparency could easily turn into a firehose of noise with little or no way to filter.