Cyrus Farivar

Note: The following is a piece on cybersecurity that I wrote for the upcoming book: Secrets of 24: The Unauthorized Guide to the Political & Moral Issues Behind TV’s Most Riveting Drama. Unfortunately, the editors decided to cut the piece from the book, but have let me republish it here. Hed: Experts warn of serious cybersecurity threat to America Dek: Former Bush official calls administration’s current strategy ‘totally disorganized and ineffective’ by Cyrus Farivar While cybersecurity might not mean much…

Wow, Street has done it again: Daniel Hernandez: I’m leaving L.A. for a little bit, a year, maybe more, for Mexico City. I’m sealing a deal with editor Colin Robinson at Scribner to write a book about the underground, basically — youth and subcultures. I’m gonna do a lot of writing, a lot of reading, a lot of drinking and eating, and a lot of walking. My boots are my best friends. Participation does a body good. Gustavo Arellano says:…

Macworld: By Cyrus Farivar If you’re one of the million people who’ve purchased an iPhone since the end of June, you probably signed up with Apple’s exclusive carrier in the U.S., AT&T, when you activated your phone. That means your iPhone identifies itself to AT&T’s network using an AT&T SIM card, a smart card that’s located in a small tray between your iPhone’s sleep/wake button and its recessed headphone jack. But what if you’re planning a trip to Europe and…

On October 5, 2007, there are two fantastic discussions going on in New York for The New Yorker Festival. Fortunately I don’t have to choose between them as I can’t make it to either of them, but if you’re in the tri-state area, you definitely should go: Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk on Homeland Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay and educated in England. His novels include “The Moor’s Last Sigh,” “The Satanic Verses,” “Shame,” “Shalimar the Clown,” and “Midnight’s…

Booya! I finally got my iPhone yesterday and spent last night and this morning figuring out how to GSM unlock it — letting me use my T-Mobile SIM card with ease. How’d I do it? I’ll have a forthcoming article for Macworld explaining soon, but until then, you can read this guide and thank the good folks at ModMyiPhone.com. I followed their instructions — but after three failed tries, I installed AppTapp before doing the faux activation, and that seemed…

So I tried to go check out the LeRoy Grannis (Alan Wiig‘s grandfather) show at the M+B Sidebar at the Brentwood Country Mart today. However, despite the fact that the gallery claims it’s open Tuesday-Saturday 10-6, it wasn’t open today at all. I guess I’ll have to settle for the images online. Bummer. I’ll be back in Oaktown tomorrow eve.

Ok kids, I need your advice on this one. My big problem with the iPhone has been that it’s just been too friggin’ expensive for my budget. However, all of that has changed now with the price drop of the remainder of the 4GB iPhones that Apple is selling directly from their site. My brother works at Apple and can get a bit of a discount too. When it’s all said and done, I can get a 4GB iPhone, after…

Salon: But that was then. This is now. Which is the other reason I’m eating Taco Bell tonight: I want to sink my teeth into the culture clash between past and present — the whiter, more monocultural society we were, versus the hyphenated nation we’ve become. Taco Bell harks back to the Wonder Bread America of 1962, when the chain was founded on the assumption that real Mexican food was too slow, too spicy, too unpronounceably foreign, even in the…

Someone in the Bhutan government was searching on Yahoo for “tiny young japanese sex.com” and somehow came across my blog. The best part? I can’t figure out how they got here, as if you run that search, I don’t come up. But, thanks to this entry, I probably will now though. (Other fun with server logs.)

There’s a lot of famous scenes where soldiers go through boot camp, and get yelled at and drilled until it’s instilled. But how real is that, and what does it take to go from civvie to a Semper-Fi-spewin’ Marine? The LA Times follows three kids, including one Iranian-American, to find out: While still in high school, the friends had enlisted under the Marines’ buddy program, which guaranteed they would train in the same platoon throughout boot camp. In July, a…