It’s over folks. The age of civilian air travel is coming to an abrupt end. It’s time to mothball our jets, shut the airlines, and go back to trains and ocean liners as our primary means of long distance travel. The United States as a country simply cannot fly anymore.

Why? Because of terrorism you ask? No, not because of terrorism. It’s because we’ve become a nation of panicky pussies. That’s why.

To be sure, on Christmas day 2009, a terroristdid try – we think – to blow up a plane. Hiding a syringe with chemicals and incendiary devices in his underwear, he ignited his payload as the flight he was one prepared to land in Detroit. The only immediate casualties, fortunately, were his crotch and – we hope – his ability to procreate. In this case, Darwin may haveprevailed.

Shortly thereafter though, I realized that one other casualty resulted from this incident: our common sense. It started right away with Republicans and politicians in Washington. Rather than actually caring about the safety of the public and working towards learning from this experience to see how we can adapt reasonably and safely to this threat, if it IS a threat, they chose to pounce on this as a media stunt and politcal scare tactic. That’s right, because some silly Nigerian chose to roast his crotch on a flight, to them this clearly meant that Obama failed us.

So, while Washington was busy wrestling with that idea and preferring to focus on the potential political fallout of whether “the system” was working or not, the people who are allegedly tasked with protecting the public good and safety basically stopped focusing on protecting the public’s good and safety. Inevitably, this means “the system” that everyone was so busy arguing about has pretty much begun to break down all on its own anyway. That left the general public with the impression that they must now pretty much fend for themselves on the matter.

The result? Now we must get molested before we board an airplane, even though it probably won’t help the situation anyway. We now also have to deal with air travel being more erratic and unpredictable than before, ranging from the cut off of internet access and other in-flight amenities, to denying passengers the use of bathroom facilities. Because we all know that terrorists won’t possibly consider blowing up the plane if they will be denied those last couple minutes of facebook-time, or are unable to take a leak before the big moment, right?

Of course, none of these measures really add to the security of the flights. The hope, everyone agrees, is that maybe it’ll just help people feel a little safer, even though we’ve already told them, through the powers of twitter, cable TV news and the iReport, that these measures are fruitless and ineffective.

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Remember not too long ago, when there was a huge fervor over warrantless wiretapping? Back in the bad old days of the Bush Administration (and maybe even today), Verizon and AT&T willingly participated in permitting the NSA to monitor communications traffic on their networks, without the need for silly little things like, oh, search warrants and due process. And boy, everyone sure got all in a huff when they found out! Despite it being an extension of legislation hurriedly rushed into law to appease a panicky public, the citizenry refused (as they often do) to look at themselves in the mirror for being panicky petes, and instead the “Big Two” carriers mentioned above got the brunt of the public’s ire. Lawsuits were threatened and all kinds of punishments were dreamed up for the corporate actors in this conspiracy, all while the Bush administration pretty much got shrugged off by the general public for, well, doing what they always did.

Another company to get a pass was Sprint. You just didn’t hear about what their involvement might’ve been.

But it looks like now more than ever, surveillance is alive and well, and Sprint is making it incredibly easy for Law Enforcement to find out where any use of their network might be. So easy in fact, that Law Enforcement has tracked the wherabouts of Sprint users more than 8 million times in the past year alone!

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

Consider that Sprint has about 49.3 million customers. Even if you assume that some users were no doubt tracked more than once, that’s still a pretty astonishing number. Are there really millions of sleeping terrorists chatting and texting on Sprint phones? Or has the government continued to be way, way too willing to disregard the freedoms of its citizens in the name of homeland security, while Sprint passively sits by and allows it to happen?

Capitalizing on the reboot/sequel of Star Trek now in theaters, computer security company Sophos has launched Klingon Antivirus. Now, as if cryptic error messages weren’t enough for the uninitiated, you can have your computer warn you about latest virus threats in Klingon.

To be sure, this product is real, purports to scan and protect against virus threats just like Sophos’ more humanoid-compatible products, and will be supported with antivirus updates for 30 days. According to the release notes however, there are some caveats including this tidbit:

* (CL 43125.8) Klingon Anti-Virus is unable to remove Rogue Nanites from the central core. To remove establish negotiation using Android or system running OS X 10.6 and deposit on nearest uninhabited moon

Nice to know even in the age of interplanetary computer security, Macs still have an advantage.

Well, seeing as lately my blog is geeking-out over Ubuntu, I may as well add this posting to the list, and it’s a doozy.

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The contents of this article are probably bound to give certain people in the Ubuntu linux community lots and lots of butthurt.

Oh well. It sucks to be them.

Here it is, for anyone who needs it: How to enable the root user in Ubuntu Linux Distributions.

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