If you walk along the BART tracks (Bay Area Rapid Transit, San Francisco’s version of mass transit electric-driven trains) you’ll see a big fence, covered with barbed wire, along with lots of signs that make it clear that if you cross the fence you’ll die. Why?

The electric rail.

It’s not lost on me that when I worked at Microsoft there were a few issues that people would tell me not to touch cause they’d cause trouble for me. How did that get communicated to me? “That’s an electric rail.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about that electric rail metaphor today and why I am giving HP such harsh treatment. Privacy is an electric rail.

Let me explain. Big companies rely on our private data to make money. Verizon knows where and when I use my cell phone so it can charge me. At Microsoft if you attended the PDC you had to put your name and address and credit card number into the system so we could charge you and get you your ticket. At health care organizations they know even more detailed private information. And so on and so forth. Big companies have a lot of our data locked up in their data centers.

So, why did I care that HP’s board of directors pushed the boundary of where private information could be used? Because private data must be held sacrosanct. Private data is an electric rail. Use it properly and it will power your business. Use it improperly and you should get fired. There’s no other way to put it. It should be that clear. It IS an electric rail.

This is why I’m giving HP’s board of directors such a hard time (and will continue to do so). They touched the electric rail. You just can’t do that without severe consequences.

Note: the electric rail doesn’t care if you have a reason to touch it. You touch it, you pay severe consequences. Why does that need to be true? So no other company thinks of touching it in the future.

Newsweek has this as its cover story in the September 18th issue: Scandal at HP: The Boss Who Spied On Her Board. A thorough look at the events that led up to where we are. I don’t see anything that makes me want to turn back, even a little bit, from my point that Dunn should be done. Day 5 will be known as “the emergency board meeting.” Boy, wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall in that one! Maybe the guy who leaks from board meetings could give me a call and tell me what happened.

A couple of days ago I said that Amazon might be the fearsome Microsoft killer we were expecting Google to be. But after reading the latest reviews of Amazon’s new Unboxed, I should take that back.

Which shows that it isn’t enough to be first. You also have to have the goods. It also shows that the first round of hype will get wiped out in days by a deeper look (yes, I’m sorry I hyped everyone up here).

Here’s the reviews that caught my eye:

Simon Phipps: “Unbox Unusable.”
Tom Merritt, on CNET: ”My Fight with Amazon Unbox.”
Uninnovate: “Amazon Spends Over a Year Developing Movie Download Service Then Shackles It With Absurd Restrictions.”

I LOVE the new Microsoft Max that just came out. I’ve been waiting for this for some time. The downside? It is slow on my Tablet PC. I bet it runs great on a faster desktop machine. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the news display in this thing. More later, I’m giving a talk to BlogCamp in India via Skype. Read more about that on Kiruba’s blog.

This is a fun way to give a talk to a conference. I’d rather be there, though, but I can see the audience in a Flickr tag feed for “BlogCamp” and a video feed (which I’m trying to get access to right now).

Yes, it’s midnight here, but what the heck?

UPDATE: bummer, the audio isn’t working great. Problem on their end. What’s funny is I can read blogs from the audience almost as fast as they are posted.

UPDATE 2: since my speech has been delayed a few minutes I am playing more with Max and reading other blog posts about it.

This is NOT a Web based aggregator. It’s built on top of the Windows Presentation Foundation which includes better fonts, better page layout capabilities, and more. It’s awesome, but needs more testing…

I agree with Ryan Stewart that it’s stunning, though. Shows what you can do if you have a new framework underneath you. Yeah, there are some problems (I’m trying to figure out how to import and export an OPML file, for instance), but, boy is this thing beautiful.

Don Park raises a good question of whether or not I (and other journalists and bloggers) are being fair to Patricia Dunn?

I’ll be happy to give Hewlett Packard or Patricia Dunn an entire blog post (take as many words as you want) to give her side, or HP’s side of this whole thing. I’d even be happy to take my video camera over and put the video up on YouTube or Google Video or Blip.TV and let anyone at HP say whatever they want unchallenged by me and I’ll put that up unedited.

I won’t even link to David Kirkpatrick at Fortune Magazine, who called for her head.

Is my reaction over the top? Yeah! But like Russell Shaw says, it’s an American tradition!

Is this story boring yet? I really don’t care if I lose every single reader I have because I keep rambling on about this story. Patricia Dunn has got to go. The HP board has to realize this story is not going away.

Well, it shouldn’t. Where are we going to draw the line on privacy? At pretexting? Or when they stick a little recording device in my bedroom to see who I am talking with? Oh, not willing to put the line there? Well, how about just implant an RFID tag in my head along with a GPS and a little transmission device.

Hell, let’s just get rid of this privacy idea altogether, right? OK, I’m game. Patricia Dunn first please. If she does it, I’ll go along with this whole “get rid of privacy” game that seems to be how many employers want to play it (ever look into how deeply employers can look into your private life? It might scare you.)

HP should prepare itself for a raft of headlines like this one, HP Boosts Its Integrity, in InfoWorld.

Is that unfair? Sure! But we aren’t the ones who broke the law.

Anyway, to answer Don’s question: I don’t really care at this point. I’ve been reading very carefully trying to find a reason to take Patricia Dunn’s side. I’ve been talking with dozens of people behind the scenes. I can’t find one reason to take a different stance than I now am taking. That said, I’d be happy to learn tomorrow that we’re all mistaken and that we’re barking up the wrong tree and I’d be the first one to report I was wrong.

The facts in this case, though, don’t get better, they just get worse and that’s after the New York Times reported Patricia’s own words. Translation: I doubt she’ll take me up on my offer.

Update: Blog Herald goes further and asks “Will Social Software Mutate Blogosphere into Mob Rule?”

CNNMoney: “Are you lying … or incompetent?”

Like I said, this story isn’t going away and the reporters aren’t going to get nicer from here. They also aren’t going to let this story go away. Christopher Coulter predicts we’ll see six months of this. Well, if the whole board resigns, then this will go away in a week and we can all get on with life.

Oh, I tried to go to the beach and see if I could get away from the smell that was coming out of the HP board room. Nope, I couldn’t, it was such a strong smell that it did reach all the way across the Santa Cruz mountains. Oh, or maybe that was the rotting seaweed on the beach. I couldn’t really tell the difference. Sigh. I did Flickr a few photos, though, including some blog links I left in the sand.

Back out to have more fun. Hope you’re having a good weekend.

Tom Stitt, managing partner at Aperial Technology Ventures LLC came and visited me at the house for lunch (Patrick and I are going to the beach now). He has some interesting technologies cooking. I love seeing stuff like this when it’s still in the coding stage (he works with four developers in Russia who are super math whizzes).

One problem with stuff that’s simply cool technology is that it’s hard to productize. What do I mean? Well, he has one technology that analyzes motion in video. You put these colored tapes on your wrist, elbow, shoulder and bat and then you video yourself swinging a baseball bat (or fly fishing, or doing other things like throwing a basketball) and then feed that video into his system (he calls it “MyGameCoach”) then it tracks those tags in video and can even compare your swing to a professional and give you tips on how to make your swing better.

His team is preparing a prototype site so you can see this in action. It’s pretty cool.

And this is the rub. It’s cool, but how do you make money? Well, you could sell it to professional sports teams (he’s working with at least one). You could sell it to little leagues or baseball coaches, but that’s going to be pretty hard.

Another thing that those smart engineers are working on? Ways to clean up video. He showed me that they can take the average YouTube video and dramatically clean it up and make the compression work better. But YouTube doesn’t care, right?

Well, how much are they paying in bandwidth a month? I heard it’s about a million a month. If they could reduce that by 10%, while improving quality, that’d end up saving millions every year and give its users a better experience (videos could download quicker).

But he says getting anyone to invest money in improved codecs and other techniques to clean up the videos is like pulling teeth. Why is that?

Here’s another technology the smart kids in Russia are working on: a way to remove things from videos. He showed me a video that had a logo completely removed. You couldn’t tell. Do you believe what you see in videos? You shouldn’t. He showed me a video where a guy jumping was completely removed from the video using their technology.

These are cool technologies. I wonder when we’ll see them in real products or used on services like Blip.TV, Google Video, YouTube?

Digg River rules on my cell phone. Thank you Digg and thank you Dave Winer! Now I can get Digg while walking on the beach!

The HP story isn’t going away (note, that’s what happens when you spy on reporters, they get their fur up in a bunch). Some things happened yesterday, though. 1) She tried to shift blame elsewhere for using illegal methods. The New York Times gives her side of the story. 2) She called all the reporters who had been spied on and apologized. 3) HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd, sent a letter to employees which basically said its rules and ethics’ codes had been broken.

A few things. I doubt the board will vote her off. Why not? Well, because of she goes they know they’ll be kicked out too. This whole board doesn’t pass the smell test. I’m not even in Silicon Valley right now and I can smell the stench coming over the Santa Cruz mountains.

Second, why didn’t she call and apologize as soon as she realized the methods that had been used? Rule of PR, those who own the negative get to control it the most. By not going public with what she did FIRST she let Tom control all the PR. I don’t know who to believe, but I’ll believe the guy who brought this to the public light first far more than I’ll believe the person who didn’t bring it out.

It’s pretty clear that there were legal questions. After all, why would HP’s lawyers call an outside law firm and ask for advice on the legality of this? (That lawyer, one of Silicon Valley’s most powerful, is now saying he wasn’t presented with all of the evidence).

Rob Hyndman has a good recap of yesterday’s events.

So, here’s the bottom line. This thing doesn’t pass the smell test. Patricia, do the respectable thing, stand up and take responsibility. That’s what those of us who are in leadership positions have to do sometimes, even if it isn’t completely our fault.

But, even if she goes, this whole board smells. I guess they are gonna make the shareholders make the hard decisions. Unfortunately shareholders only care whether the company is making them money or not, not whether the board is ethical, nice, or doesn’t smell.

It’s a sad day for the industry. I’m gonna go out today with friends and family and head to the beach where I hope the breeze blows the smell back over the hill.

UPDATE: here’s why I say it smells. Even my seventh grader knows there’s something smelly about looking at people’s phone records. Patricia Dunn, when she was presented the evidence about the leaker, had to have seen that phone records were involved. Note that she didn’t stop and say “how did you get these?” She should have stopped the investigation at that point. Everyone who watches TV courtrooms knows that you aren’t allowed to use evidence that’s gained in illegal ways. And any chairperson who says that looking at phone records or other personal information isn’t illegal isn’t the kind of chair we should allow in a position of power. Also, anyone who doesn’t understand the HUGE difference between a lie detector test and a set of phone records SHOULD NOT BE IN A POSITION OF POWER IN A COMPANY THAT HAS POWER OVER OTHER PEOPLE’S PRIVACY. She might not be a criminal (I’ll leave that for the Attorney General to figure out) but she sure isn’t smart enough to be on a board of directors. Sorry, she’s gotta go. And same with this whole board.

Daniel McVicar, who is a real soap opera star (no, not a programmer who developed SOAP, but a guy who’s been on The Bold and the Beautiful for 20 years), came to PodTech’s offices to interview me. I had no idea just how big he was, but when I got back Irina fawned over me and said she was so jealous, saying she watched him everyday for years. Something fun for Friday afternoon.

A friend who works at Microsoft in Silicon Valley just told me about Code Camp, October 7 and 8th at Foothill College. Here’s a FAQ. Will you be there? This is good to see. Too many frothy events lately truth is the valley depends on coders. No code leads to nothing to froth up.

OK, this is going too far. Jim Minatel writes about a Web 2.0 conference that has real coding sessions. Jim and I have known each other quite a while (we worked in the programmer magazine/conference business together at Fawcette Technical Publications, and he was the editor on my book).

What’s next? Profits? Heheh.

My Silicon Valley education continues with a visit to the boardroom at Seagate today. Hey, my show needs hard drives. Big drives. So, seemed like I should go see one of the valley’s most famous disk drive manufacturers. Met with Julie Still, Vice President of Corporate Communications along with Brian Ziel, Senior Director, Gina Katz, Manager. Great group of folks and very passionate about disk drives! Anyway, what caught my eye was the headquarters’ address: 900 Disc Drive. Cute!

You rarely think about drives or storage media until they fail. Speaking of which I’m in the market for a 750GB drive. Which one is the best? Seagate’s at the top of my list. I like doing business with friendly people.

Anyway, on Monday I’m off to the SAP conference in Las Vegas to film stuff for my show (will only be there on Monday, John is sticking around for a few more days). Mark Finnern there writes about the day on his blog. Looking forward to meeting the SAP’ers, make sure to say hi if you’re there.

Thanks to Beet.tv’s Andy Plesser for the kind wishes on my show.

In the meantime, there’s another interview I did (with the guys who run the Microsoft Exchange team) at Microsoft that got published today over on Channel 9 (I did quite a few in the weeks before I quit that are still being processed and run).

The CEO of Facebook answers its customers with a great apology. Recent college student and Facebook customer Theresa Klein, over on the Blog Business Summit blog, says she approves.

Notice how different this is from how HP is handling things? Where’s the HP’s CEO’s blog?

Let’s check in with Google News. Nope, ethical problem still there.

John Furrier, my new boss, used to work at Hewlett Packard. Last night he was telling me how much he loved Hewlett Packard (he hates the new name, which was shortened to “HP”. Yeah, all the employees used to call it “HP” in the old days too, but that was a friendly shortening). He told me how he walked into the founder’s offices once (it wasn’t guarded or closed off separate from the employees) and walked up and said hi. It was an experience that he’ll never forget. He spent a bit telling me about “the Hewlett Packard way” and how it was such an important part of his upbringing as an entrepreneur.

He gave me a little bit of heck for dragging HP into this since it looks like it was just the chairwoman (although the rest of the board is sort of tainted because they didn’t walk out instantly when they found out what was going on). He stood up for the regular employees of HP. “Imagine you’re working in sales at HP, does this affect them?”

I’ve been thinking about that one all night. On one level, obviously no. But, on another? Yes. If your leaders are willing to break the law and spy on not just themselves but on outside parties, how comfortable will people be in dealing with Hewlett Packard?

Anyway, he told me that the Hewlett Packard way is important (the old way, the one before they changed their name, before they started doing this crud) and he wondered if there’s something we can do to bring the Hewlett Packard way back?

Yes. Get rid of Patricia Dunn. Then let’s work together to talk about the cool stuff those engineers are building so the salespeople can feel proud again.

If you let a cancer hang out in your body (the body here being a company) it just gets worse. It’s surgery time. Who has the knife?

Oh, I worked a summer at Hewlett Packard when I was in high school on an assembly line. I agree that the people there were awesome. Just wanted to make it clear that this isn’t about them. Just about one board member who thought that the ends justified the means. If she’s allowed to stay, though, she’ll spread her cancer throughout HP and stain the entire organization. So, it’s time for the good people of Hewlett Packard to stand up and do the right thing. Get rid of the stain on the Hewlett Packard way.

Back when I worked at Microsoft I was always looking at Google and asking myself “what if they shipped this” or “what if they shipped that?”

Well, I should have been worrying about Amazon instead. They’ve shipped a bunch of stuff that I expected Google to do first (like S3, and now Unbox).

What’s the Unbox video store? Dave Taylor answers the question. Oh, and a few other people on TechMeme too.

If I didn’t have such a busy day today, I’d go play too. Here’s a recap:

8 a.m., breakfast with Francine Hardaway and Buzz Bruggeman.
10 a.m. interview with Mike Cannon-Brookes, founder and CEO of Atlassian (cool software company in Australia) along with Jon Silvers. You can see Mike on this video (not mine).
1:30 p.m. interviewed Jonathan Schwartz. That went very well, can’t wait to show you the video (my show probably will start the week of the 18th).
3 p.m. meeting with Ryanne and Jay, who are editing and encoding my show. They just got engaged, by the way, congrats!
5 p.m. Buzz and I head to David Hornick’s VC firm for a little shindig (nice Vox blog, are all the cool kids going to get those now? I have one too, but it’s lame so far. I am trying to get Maryam to switch to Vox, though). Met lots of famous geeks and entrepreneurs including Rick Smolan, the guy who did the “Day in the Life” series of photo books and Heidi Roizen (former executive at Apple, among other places). She told me she updated her own Wikipedia entry to correct some factual errors. It’ll be interesting to see if that’ll get her in trouble. Oh, I also met Ross Mayfield, founder of Social Text, who, in jest, told me a good business tip: “Pornotube is the future.”
8 p.m. Interview Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail. He’s in India and is planning out a new city. Now THAT isn’t something you hear every day.
9:30 p.m. Buzz picks me up and we head to Valerie Cunningham’s birthday party where I meet up with a bunch of PodTech’ers, including my boss, John Furrier, who tells me about working at Hewlett Packard and how much he loved that company. Said “it was the best company in the world.”
11 p.m. head home.
Midnight. Read blogs, email (72 still to be answered just from yesterday) and write this blog post.

Well, hope you all get some sleep. But it looks like half the Internet is playing with Amazon stuff right now.

Um, I read this story in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal and see something that factually is incorrect.

Do you see it?

You’re right, Steve Jobs had absolutely nothing to do with the founding of Pixar (it was started long before Jobs got involved).

So, how did the Wall Street Journal’s reporters get that incorrect info? Is Steve Jobs fibbing a bit with reporters or did someone just not do their homework?

Damn, this story has what journalists call “legs.” It just keeps getting worse, now it’s apparent that Patricia Dunn had her goons break the privacy of reporters. I’m sure glad I’m not on HP’s PR team.

Look at the chart of HP on Google Finance. HP, if you want out of the valley of bad PR you MUST cut loose Patricia Dunn (and probably the whole board, truth be told).

Oh, someone pointed out that I had a picture of a newspaper on my blog today. Caught Scoble reading paper? Nope. They leave copies in the lobby (notice that they are unopened).

That said, you can read tomorrow’s headlines, tonight.

San Jose Mercury News is reporting that “charges are likely” in this mess.

I don’t read papers. I read what the rest of the world will see tomorrow tonight on my Tablet PC. Thank you very much to all the journalists who are keeping the heat turned up on Hewlett Packard. It should remain until HP announces that Patricia Dunn is gone.

My boss wanted to pay to go to the Web 2.0 conference and he can’t get a ticket. Loser!

Heck, I didn’t get one either. I guess I’ll have to buy mine on eBay.

I’m sure the board of directors at HP is hoping this one just blows over. Here’s a hint. It won’t. Until you get rid of Pat. A message MUST be sent that the ends do NOT justify the means.

David Berlind put it well when he asked “how steep will the cost of HP’s dysfunctional family be?”

This is worse than dysfunction. A message MUST be sent to people in power of big companies that privacy is something that they MUST NOT TRODDEN UPON.

Industry analysts are saying that the HP board will suffer little. Um, really? Did you read the front page of the important newspapers this morning?

They are right, usually bloggers and press bite and then release, moving onto the next big story of the day (new Apple stuff coming, for instance).

But, will this time be any different? When will Pat go? That’ll be the day I see that HP has gotten its ethics back in shape. Until then, be prepared. This story is NOT going away.

Certainly California’s Attorney General isn’t letting go. Look at this quote from SFGate: “In this case, clearly a crime has been committed,” he said in an interview. “The question is by whom. How far does the liability extend?”