When the Trade Center towers went down last year, they took with it a link between the city’s Municpal Credit Union and the ATM network it uses. The bank’s data apparently was safe, but there was no way to tell who had how much money in their account at any given time.

As a convenience to its 300,000 members, officers of the MCU made a good customer relations decision: Everyone was allowed pretty much unfettered access to cash. You know about how much you have in your accounts, they said. We trust you. Don’t go nuts.

Fifteen million dollars later…

Sixty-six people who withdrew $7,500 or more beyond what was in their accounts have been arrested and face felony charges of grand larceny, and 35 are being sought for arrest, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said yesterday. In all, he said, roughly 4,000 people are being investigated….

All 4,000 credit union members being investigated overdrew their accounts by at least $1,000, said Dan Castleman, the chief of investigations in the district attorney’s office. Those who were arrested did not take advantage of opportunities to pay the money back. If convicted, credit union members who overdrew their accounts could face up to seven years in prison….

Officials said that more than 540 Municipal Credit Union members made A.T.M. withdrawals that exceeded their account balances by at least $5,000 in the weeks after Sept. 11. More than 1,700 overdrew their accounts by at least $3,000, prosecutors said.

One man, an employee of the Housing Authority, never had an end-of-the-month balance that exceeded $130, prosecutors said. “Nevertheless, he made 53 A.T.M. withdrawals ranging from $20 to $300 each, and charged 101 Visa purchases using his M.C.U. A.T.M. card between September 19th and October 22nd,” according to Mr. Morgenthau’s press release. “The purchases were at stores including Foot Locker, Jimmy Jazz, Joy Joy Jewelry, Bronx BBQ, Hot Booz Liquor and the 216th Street motel.”…

The man’s account balance was a negative $10,378 by the end of October, prosecutors said.

It’s like I said a few weeks ago: this weblog thing is neat, but if it’s going to be a real business tool, some authorization/password tools have to be invented.

Casual readers won’t know this, but there are some pretty sophisticated technologies behind his weblog. For one thing, every item I write here is automatically sent to any other weblog reader who’s asked to be kept up to date. Those bloggers can then pick up and reprint (for lack of a better word) my items.

But what if I only want some of my items to be syndicated, or if I want some items to be syndicated to one group of people but not another? As one poster pointed out, it’s possible to use the web’s built-in authentication tools, but that’s god-awful hack. Finally, someone else is picking up the banner.

From Masukomi’s site:

A username and password scheme could be built into the url of the feed but that’s a really poor method. The most obvious solution is for RSS clients to start supporting two things: standard HTTP authentication and secure HTTP over SSL (https:// connections).

Until this happens RSS will not be able to evolve beyond the stage of a simple news distribution system… I know I don’t want to give everyone access to my e-mail, or confidential company info, but I do want to transmit via an RSS feed. I think that this is especially important for products like Radio that generate RSS feeds and want to get companies to use it as a knowledge management tool.

I can’t support this more strongly. If weblogs are going to be a legit business tool, there simply needs to be better security for syndication feeds.

It’s been a particularly interesting weekend for the redevelopment of the Ground Zero site, with all relevant parties cautiously approaching a deal.

The WTC site is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which is controlled by the governors of the two states. There’s never-ending tension within the PA over which state is getting more of its resources. Given that each state’s politics is Byzantine all by itself, it’s a miracle that the PA gets anything at all done.

I’m not certain who owned the WTC buildings themselves, but a guy named Larry Silverstein owned the lease for the towers. Silverstein has an insurance policy with Swiss Re, under which he’s to be paid $3.5 billion in the event of a terrorist attack on the towers. Silverstein says the September 11 attack was two events, so he’s owed $7 billion Swiss Re says it was one attack, and since the buildings weren’t new anyway, it was willing to pay $2.2 billion. So Silverstein is suing Swiss Re.

Silverstein is really the reason that the six rebuilding proposals look like they do. He’s got a contractual right to a 11 million square feet of office and retail space; if he doesn’t get it, someone — probably the Port Authority — owes him money. Hence the density of the site proposals.

Late last week, someone floated an interesting proposal. It turns out that the PA doesn’t own the land under LaGuardia and Kennedy airports; it only owns the facilities. The land belongs to New York City. This causes the occasional friction. How about trading Ground Zero for the land beneath the airports? That way, the Port Authority and its bureaucracy would be out of the way of an emotional rebuilding process.

The Port Authority liked the idea. It pays the city $3 million a year to rent the land, an amount that may increase to $60 million when the lease comes up in 13 years. Swiss Re, which saw some possible daylight in its suit with Silverstein (and who in their right mind would want that particular bag of cats to go to trial?) loved the idea, but pointed out that someone needed to talk to Silverstein — and that whoever it was should probably come equipped with a checkbook.

Today, Silverstein’s spokesman said he “has an open mind” about the proposal, but would like to hear something more formal and fleshed-out. Seems reasonable. It’s interesting, too, that the spokesman is Howard Rubenstein, who is the go-to guy for people who want to keep their names in — and, more important, out of — the newspapers. Check out his client list if you want to see where the power is in New York.

The estimable Glenn Fleishman complains about mass transit to the Javits Center. Sez I:

As a New Yorker who both drives and takes mass transit, I feel your pain about the Javits Center. Some comments:

Your fond reminiscences of taking the T to the Boston MacWorld are, well, mis-remembered. The World Trade Center is nowhere near a T stop, and Bayside is a long lemming-like walk from JFK. Maybe putting the show at least partly in Hynes (is that what it’s called?) is one answer, but it would still be a pain to get from a Green Line stop to a distant Red Line one.

OK, Javits. First of all, you’re dead right about transit access to it. For what it’s worth, there’s a plan on the board to extend the 7 train, which runs east-west from Queens to Times Square, to Javits. The Mayor likes the idea, but the funny thing about transit in New York City is that the Mayor has no say; the MTA is the Governor’s thing. Take into account that even underground, Manhattan is built incredibly densely, that there are Important Things in the way between 7th Ave and 42nd Street and 11th Ave and 36th Street, and that the bedrock that makes skyscrapers possible make digging a major pain — well, it’ll be a while.

But wait, there’s more. For the last eight years, Mayor Giuliani wanted a baseball stadium to the south of Javits. The Mayor controls the rail yards that are there. But the Governor, who controls Javits, wanted to extend Javits over the rail yards. Standoff. There’s some land to the *north* of Javits that was for sale, but some developer’s bought it. It’s not entirely clear what the next step is.

The latest thing is that the City wants to host the 2012 Summer Olympics. To do so, it would be nice to have a stadium south of Javits after all — and to extend the subway there, since this is envisioned as a Mass Transit Olympics. So it may happen. But not by next year.

Remember the froofraw about the Russian and Canadian ice dancing teams in the Salt Lake City Olympics. Now comes a story that the whole thing was masterminded by a Russian crime boss better known for drug dealing and illegal arms sales. Apparently, though, he also fixed Moscow beauty pageants as a sidelight.

And they say guys don’t like skating….

Remember how, last month, word came out that PriceWaterhouseCoopers was going to rename its consulting branch Monday? I think this is a good thing, but IBM has spared us all a lot of fun; it’s buying the division for $3.5 billion.

In the process, it’s dumping the name Monday, which was supposed to take effect next month.

“Too bad – it could have been called ‘Big Blue Monday,’ ” Bill Carlino, editor of Accounting Today, told the New York Post.

Ah, well. Now we’ll have to find something else to make fun of. Fortunately, it’s a big world.

Angela Gunn points out this amusing and odd piece from the WAPost:

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone 淼 Losing your job, quitting school, going broke and moving back home with your mother after living abroad for years would be tough on anyone.

It’s even tougher when you’re a former military dictator who once had the power to execute opponents at will.

Not a lot of jobs in the Times under “Dictator,” last I checked. (Why yes, I do check. Why do you ask?)

A columnist with the Cornell Daily Sun had trouble with his local Kinkos when he tried to get them to photocopy some of his published work.They demurred on copyright grounds:

I was miffed by his self-important anal-retentiveness. “I wrote that article, look, my picture is on the top,” I said. He told me that didn’t matter, that corporate Kinko’s was overburdened with copyright lawsuits, and consequently he wasn’t about to run my copy job.

OK, so he wrote the article. I bet it’s a nice picture, too. Doesn’t mean he owns the copyright. In fact, the bottom of the very web page that carries the diatribe carries the following legend:

But I suspect his refusal to print my writing samples sprouted from seeds buried deeper in the human ego. It was an exercise in power. He totally had the power of refusing to copy my articles. And he didn’t.

Jane’s Defense Weekly is not a publication noted for its levity, so it’s probably true that Boeing is now experimenting with anti-gravity propulsion.

The Boeing drive to develop a collaborative relationship with the scientist in question, Dr Evgeny Podkletnov, has its own internal project name: ÎGRASPâ ÷ Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion.

A GRASP briefing document obtained by JDW sets out what Boeing believes to be at stake. “If gravity modification is real,” it says, “it will alter the entire aerospace business.”

Ya think?

The Russian government is apparently not facilitiating contact with Podkletnov, for what should be obvious reasons. There’s more:

The GRASP paper focuses on Podkletnovâs claims that his high-power experiments, using a device called an Îimpulse gravity generatorâ, are capable of producing a beam of Îgravity-likeâ energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g on any object ÷ enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed.

Podkletnov maintains that a laboratory installation in Russia has already demonstrated the 4in (10cm) wide beamâs ability to repel objects a kilometre away and that it exhibits negligible power loss at distances of up to 200km.

The possibilities of weaponization are left as an exercise for the student. However,

The paper points out that Podkletnov is strongly anti-military and will only provide assistance if the research is carried out in the Îwhite worldâ of open development.

Nat Polish dug out this scientific abstract for a paper presented earlier this month regarding superconducting antigrav .

Think they’re not watching? Think again. From the Village Voice:

As John Ashcroft’s Citizens Corps spy program prepares for its debut next month, it seems scores of American companies have already become willing snitches. A few months ago, the Privacy Council surveyed executives from 22 companies in the travel industryot just airlines but hotels, car rental services, and travel agenciesnd found that 64 percent of respondents had turned over information to investigators and 59 percent had lowered their resistance to such demands.