So first up on the chopping block for today’s blog is the craziest security gaff I’ve heard of yet. The Italian government, in a conscious and intended effort, intentionally put clear on the internet for anyone to look at, the names, addresses, dates of birth, declared income, and tax paid of every citizen of Italy. Everyone.

Why? Because they wanted to increase transparency and reduce tax evasion.

Well, yeah, it doesn’t get much more transparent than that, does it? Of course there are these things called privacy laws…

Needless to say, the information was taken down in quick response once the privacy preserving folks got wind of it. But not before the government got a bit of pasta all over their face.

Next up is a couple of milestones for Pentadyne Energy Corp, a company making flying saucers … or perhaps more accurately, magnetically levitated composite-fibre flywheels spinning in vacuum bottles at 50,000 rpm. This magneto-mechanical system stores energy similar to a battery for use in a UPS, but without the failure rate that batteries have. The milestones? Pentadyne has now only officially shipped their 500th unit now, but also one of their first deals, NASA, has claimed to bang out 35,000 hours of operation on one of their units.

It’s a fascinating approach to storing energy, and certainly worthy of geekish techno-praise. Keep up the good work!

Okay, not really. That’d be a funny enough story. In this case however the man wasn’t actually so disgusted with his humanzee daughter that he vowed not only to never do it again, but to prevent any and all people from ever doing it again. No. In this case the man is just a religious zealot that’s pretty much against any and all genetic manipulation that involves human DNA, but especially weird stuff like animal-human hybrids and gays having babies.

Calum MacKellar, a trained biochemist and now Elder of the Church of Scotland and bioethics think tank operator (quite the scary thought mixing religion and science like that), is warning the UK government that the The Human Fertilisation and Embryo Bill isn’t enough. For example, while it specifically prohibits the placement of animal sperm into a woman, it does not prohibit the opposite, of Scotsmen shagging sheep … or in this case Brits boffing chimpanzees … for science. I did it for science!

I guess I can kind of see the point. It is an interesting loophole. So if you’re going to ban cross-species genetic tampering, perhaps you should actually ban all interspecies sperm spewing. At least when it involves human DNA. And especially when it involves chimps. Because if there’s one thing the world is really scared of, it’s a humanzee. For some reason.

So yes, ban it I say.

Still…

Making things illegal seems to not exactly stop these things from happening. It just makes us feel better that the government theoretically says no. And it most definitely doesn’t prevent someone from doing it in some other place where it is legal. And with something as hot of a topic as a humanzee, no doubt, someone, somewhere, is going to do it at some point. For science. So all laws like this really do is put a government up on their soapbox so that they can say, “Not in my back yard!” While this sad world still turns.

Which in itself raises an ethical question. Would you rather have a well cared for humanzee in a first-world country with ethics you trust, or would you like to roll those dice and hope the humanzee’s quality of life doesn’t come up snake-eyes? It makes one ponder. Is moral indignation a satisfactory defense for ethical shunning?

Ah well. Such is life. At least Calum MacKellar gets to feel better about himself. If only it was that easy for the rest of us.