Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/215191929/tsas-nobid-dataleaki.html
The TSA's Traveler Redress Website was created by a no-bid crony contractor, leaked giant amount of personal information from hundreds of travellers (who had already been screwed over by the agency and were writing in for justice) and exposed them to identity theft. The House Oversight Committee concluded that the TSA totally, absolutely screwed up.They sure do a bang up job at stopping you from bringing water through the checkpoint though.
That's gotta count for something.
* TSA awarded the website contract without competition. TSA gave a small, Virginia-based contractor called Desyne Web Services a no-bid contract to design and operate the redress website. According to an internal TSA investigation, the "Statement of Work" for the contract was "written such that Desyne Web was the only vendor that could meet program requirements."Link (Thanks, Bill!)* The TSA official in charge of the project was a former employee of the contractor. The TSA official who was the "Technical Lead" on the website project and acted as the point of contact with the contractor had an apparent conflict of interest. He was a former employee of Desyne Web Services and regularly socialized with Desyne's owner.
* TSA did not detect the website's security weaknesses for months. The redress website was launched on October 6, 2006, and was not taken down until after February 13, 2007, when an internet blogger exposed the security vulnerabilities. During this period, TSA Administrator Hawley testified before Congress that the agency had assured "the privacy of users and the security of the system" before its launch. Thousands of individuals used the insecure website, including at least 247 travelers who submitted large amounts of personal information through an insecure webpage.
Update: If you want to read the world's greatest "TSA have lied and cheated and lied and cheated" rant, check out our Teresa's post in the comment thread on the five year old whom the TSA thinks is a terr'ist.
Just as the press was getting bored with talking about the problems with Facebook’s new advertising platform, 
Not sure how we missed this last month, but a new release of Gmail's Mobile App that works with Google Apps (For Your Domain) accounts is now available for your Java-enabled mobile phone. Just browse to 
Automated phone bots keep interrupting your dinner with their pre-recorded marketing messages? Play the U.S. Special Information Tone signal for "vacant circuit" when you pick up the phone. Our brother site Consumerist says a reader who kept getting automated debt collection calls added the tone to the beginning of his voicemail greeting: 
We're all way beyond figuring out how to do this, but certainly some of our readers can do much, much better. Send your most creative iPhone window shot to 
Monitoring service 
But the Peltier coolers that Nextreme is touting are tiny—so tiny, in fact, that they can be integrated into a chip's packaging and used to target specific "hot spots" on the chip for cooling. If Nextreme's technology works as advertised, it is to the traditional Peltier cooler what the integrated circuit is to the vacuum tube... 
Meet Aaron Broder, the 14-year-old reporter and member of the 
Sony announced 
T minus four days and counting. Steve Jobs' Macworld 2008 keynote is next Tuesday and at this point we only know one thing for sure: something big is coming from Apple. Maybe not one single iceberg-sized thing, but this year we believe the Boom Count™ is going to be so high that Apple had to take their new big irons out of the way to clear the launching pad. And if it wasn't enough, there's plenty of evidence that points out the magnitude and importance of next week's announcements:
The Hitachi CP-A100 ultra short throw projector here is rigged up to a touch-motion interface. Sitting at the edge of the table with a lens mounted about 15 inches from the screen, casting a 50" diagonal picture, in this case, a computer screen showing Google Earth. Tabletop applications are only the beginning—the XGA LCD-based projector casts a 120" screen from just three feet away. [
The Photosimile 5000 is a professional office photography machine that is able to take professional 3D images from physical products/people placed in its central chamber. The imager work by utilizing a camera running along a rail, which can take a number of user defined images that are then translated into one unified 3D photo. The device can only capture the uppermost half of the item in the central cage, as the camera rail does not run along the base; however, the item being captured is rotated in 360 degrees, meaning the resultant snapshot can be viewed from all angles. Check out the video to see it in action.
Want some perspective on that Panasonic 150-inch plasma display? Here it is with a human standing next to it, flanked by Panasonic's largest TV shown at past CESes, a 103-incher. So if you like your TVs as big as a queen-sized bed and capable of displaying an elephant in actual size, you may now begin your five-year wait for it to become available, if you can save your money fast enough. UPDATE: 
Maybe someone really would want an elephant in the living room. Well, now it's perhaps someday kinda almost possible, in the fantasy world of Panasonic's gigantic CES plasma displays!
Mitsubishi put together quite a spectacle to introduce its Laser TV last night at the Moon Nightclub at The Palms Hotel in Las Vegas, unveiling a 65-inch rear-projection set that uses a unique laser backlight. The result is some of the most vivid color we've ever seen on any TV, especially the primary colors of red, green and blue. The blacks were midnight-dark, too, and there was even a 3D version of the TV (goofy glasses required) that only made us slightly cross-eyed. Mits officials said to look for the TV to appear on the market "later this year" at an undisclosed price, and added that it will cost about the same as flat panel TVs of the same size. On the next page, let's explore how this laser backlight works and gawk at a slightly NSFW gallery. 
