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Two Oklahoma college students partnered with local restaurants to run parties and invite the public. Men paid a $5 cover charge, and women were let in free. Their little venture, which they dubbed Kegheadz, ran 22 parties in all. Some lost money, some cleared a few hundred dollars. It sounds typically collegiate. They didn’t bother with niceties if becoming a real business, filing forms with the government and paying taxes.

Then one day a tax bill arrived: $320,000. Where did that number come from? According to a report in the Oklahoman,

Tax officials got the wrong idea because of embellishments on the Kegheadz MySpace Web site that boasted things like “Over a billion served,” “Biggest party in the state,” and “Biggest party in the country,” Glover said.

The tax office is inferring head counts and percapita consumption from such statements, and calculating profits and taxes owed accordingly. The students are trying to explain that that was all baloney, and that they don’t even have enough money to hire a lawyer to defend themselves, much less pay that kind of money. The tax officials seem pretty humorless, but I suppose that is the way such officials have always been.

When you put it out on the Internet, anyone can see it. Even if you’re putting it out there to be intentionally outrageous, you may want to be careful what you say!

It would be interesting to know just how this came about. Are the tax authorities spending less time visiting businesses and going over their books, and more time just cruising the Web from the comfort and safety of their offices, looking for businesses, whether Internet businesses or not, that seem bigger than their corporate tax returns say they are?

Wikipedia is a marvel. In spite of the fact that anyone can edit it and all editing is pseudonymous, it works. For a lot of math theorems, for example, the resource is fantastic for quick lookup. If you’ve never used it, try it for whatever interests you and judge for yourself. If the entry is imperfect, just fix it. You can see the result instantly.

Wikipedia is very inclusive since anyone can start an entry. But there are standards for inclusion; if you try to make an entry for your dog, it will get deleted, unless your dog is famous for some reason.

So, storage being cheap, someone started Deletionpedia, an inventory of all the entries that have been deleted from Wikipedia. It’s kind of interesting, I guess.

And then someone created a Wikipedia page about it.

Which was deleted. Go figure. It was restored, and a debate is raging among Wikipedians about the right and justice of all this. The page is still up for now, but that link may die at any moment.

That’s the title of a short piece I wrote that appears in the Boston Herald this morning.

A teenage train enthusiast reports that he was exchanging text messages with the engineer of the train that crashed Friday, killing 25 people. The teenager, Nick Williams, responded to the engineer, Robert Sanchez, at 4:22 PM and received no response, about a minute before the train drove through a red light and crashed into a freight train.

A similar speculation, about cell phone use while driving, arose about the driver of a Boston MBTA train that crashed last summer, killing the conductor. But that theory was laid to rest by the evidence.

Evidence there will be in this case as well. A timestamped record of the engineer’s texting exists and has doubtless already been acquired by forensic investigators.

There is a nice review of Blown to Bits in the Asian Review of Books this morning.

Very positive reviews of the book have appeared recently on Slashdot and the Linux Gazette. The latter in particular really gets what the book is about.

Fewer and fewer people pay their bills by writing checks and putting them in the mail; the payments go electronically. The bills themselves arrive electronically if you want; that’s certainly the way your utility and credit card companies would prefer, given the price of postage. Your daughter in Omaha certainly doesn’t send you a postal letter, unless you are both quite mature; she sends you email, or texts you.

But postal mail still arrives. From your plumber, probably. Your real estate tax bill hasn’t gone electronic either. Official legal and business communications aren’t trusted to email, for very good reasons. Unless email is encrypted, it’s not secure, and it’s spoof-able.

Of course, paper mail demands postage and the slaughter of trees. But another problem, more serious sometimes, is that you may not be there to receive it. You could be at your summer place, or on a long business trip, or even on an extended stay in a hospital. And that creates a business opportunity.

As David Pogue reports in a terrific column in today’s New York Times, there are now services to turn your incoming postal mail into bits and deliver the bits to you electronically (not by insecure email, but through log-in to a secure web site). Bingo. One of the services,¬†earthclassmail.com, scans just the envelope first and asks you whether you want them to open the envelope and scan the contents. You can have the physical mail forwarded to you, recycled, or shredded.

Of course, you have to give your correspondents your earthclassmail address, which can be a P.O. box, or a nice office address in New York or San Francisco. (That costs a little more money, but not nearly as much as a nice office would cost in New York or San Fran.)

These services (the competing service is¬†paperlesspobox.com) fill a special niche. Depending on the price, I might consider using one of them myself, so I don’t miss anything important while I’m away on vacation. But the niche seems to be a momentary fracture caused by the digital explosion — in five years, I’d guess, business and even personal correspondence practices will have evolved in some way that will make these services irrelevant. Right now we’re at a sort of wrinkle in time, where the physical world has not fully evolved into its parallel bits universe.

The Boston area public transportation system, known as the MBTA or the “T,” got some bad publicity¬†recently¬†for hauling several MIT students into court because they were planning to explain publicly the security ¬†deficiencies of the T’s fare card system. (See my previous blog posts here, here, and here.) Last week,the T finally admitted that the students were right: the security of the fare card system was poor.

In a gesture to use the latest in communication technologies to improve riders’ experience, the T announced that it is working on a new system that will announce the arrival time of the next train¬†on video screens, and maybe even text-message that information to riders’ cell phones. The WCVB report explains, “The MBTA is currently seeking bids for the multimillion-dollar project, which is still several years away from implementation.”

Running any public transportation system is hard work. The systems are antiques, funding is variable, unions can retard progress. So any modernization should be celebrated.

BUT: When I heard this story it reminded me of something. I checked my old email and found this exchange from October 1998 — ten years ago — with David Malan, who was at the time a senior in Harvard College:

David to me:

I thought I’d show¬†you something I finished writing this weekend. ¬†‚Ķ¬† it’s a shuttle-schedule-type program ‚Ķ¬†it’s been used by 150+ students already! ¬†:)

That is, it enabled Harvard students to track the shuttle buses that run around campus so they could decide whether it was faster to walk than to wait. Me to David:

It is neat! Congratulations for your enlightened application of technology in the service of the citizenry.

David went on to get his PhD at Harvard and is now on our faculty, teaching our very popular introductory computer science course. If the T wants to hire someone who is reliable and skilled, and a decade ago did something on a smaller scale that is very much like what they are planning, I’d highly recommend him! And I’ll bet he’d charge fewer multis of millions than the T will wind up paying.

Here is a 1998 Crimson story about Shuttleboy. To be fair, it wasn’t really the same thing as what the T wants now; couldn’t have been, in those days before ubiquitous cell phones and global positioning systems. But text messaging was added to the Harvard system a year ago, and as you can see by looking here, it also now has GPS and shows you where the shuttles are on a Google map.

This problem just isn’t hard enough for the big play the the T is giving it.

A reminder that Ken and I will be teaching “Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion” (with a guest appearance by Hal) in the Harvard Extension School this fall. You can take it in person or as a distance course, and by distance either live or on tape delay. Class meets once a week, 5:30-7:30 Mondays, starting September 15. Here is the catalog information and here is the preliminary¬†course syllabus. Open enrollment — all are welcome!

September 22 is One Web Day. I’ll quote from the web site to explain it:

OneWebDay is an Earth Day for the internet. The idea behind OneWebDay is to focus attention on a key internet value (this year, online participation in democracy), focus attention on local internet concerns (connectivity, censorship, individual skills), and create a global constituency that cares about protecting and defending the internet.  So, think of OneWebDay as an environmental movement for the Internet ecosystem. It’s a platform for people to educate and activate others about issues that are important for the Internet’s future.

Lots more information on the site, and suggestions of things to think about and to do.

Now here’s a curious example of web-enabled science that would have been impossible a decade ago. A group of German scientists has discovered that cows tend to orient themselves toward the North or South pole. So do other animals. They figured this out by looking at hundreds of herds in Google Earth images. No explanation offered of how or why they do it.

Nor is there any mention in the summary of whether the cows opted in to this study or even were given a chance to opt out.