When I started this gig in September, 1987 Ronald Reagan was President, there was no commercial Internet, Oprah had been on the air for less than a year, and a fairly powerful PC was an IBM PC AT running at 8 MHz. In September that will have been 25 years and I think 25 years is probably enough.

That’s 1300 consecutive weeks without a break. Honest to God, I haven’t missed a week since 1987. How many people can say that? With more than two million words in print, most of them still available online, it’s like having a time card the entire world can check. No cheating allowed.

I’m not saying exactly when the end will come, just that it will be this year sometime after September. And I have plenty to do between now and then including a couple TV projects, books, a surprise or two, as well as at least a couple hundred more columns.

Nor will I disappear completely even then.  But I’d like to make some changes in my life, like build a boat with my kids and maybe walk the Earth.

Besides, it’s better to quit while you’re ahead, if only barely.

If you watch the 60 Minutes segment this Sunday with Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’ biographer, on the eve of his book being published, you are likely to see up to three clips from my show Triumph of the Nerds. My 1995 interview with Steve for that series is famous for his trashing of Microsoft and has been played over and over on TV for the last 16 years. But that’s not the case with the interview from which that clip came… until now.

The interview we shot that day at NeXT headquarters in Redwood City ran about an hour but we used only 10 minutes in the TV series. It was our second try to meet with Steve, who had felt too ill (I thought too nervous) on our first visit. We were relieved to finally get him.

We planned to use more from the Jobs interview in my followup show Nerds 2.01: A Brief History of the Internet, but the master tapes for TOTN — all of them — were somehow lost while being shipped from London to Portland, Oregon for that second series. The Steve Jobs interview was gone forever.

Then two weeks ago TOTN director Paul Sen found a VHS copy of the Jobs interview stored in his UK garage. This is undoubtedly the only surviving copy of the best TV interview Steve Jobs ever gave yet nobody ever saw.

The tape is PAL-VHS, dubbed on professional equipment from a D1 master, but VHS is still VHS, which is to say crappy. Yet video technology has come a long way since 1995, so we’ve been throwing resolution enhancement voodoo at that tape, trying to get it ready for, well, something, we’re not sure what.

This coming week all the processing will be done, we’ll add a short opener and a few guiding voice annotations to what’s essentially an unedited interview — definitely not the sort of thing you’d normally see on TV.  It’s me coaxing Steve into a great performance.

This interview is a moment in time. NeXT was in trouble in 1995, though Steve would never admit it.  Apple, too, was at a low point. And none of us could know that NeXT would be sold to Apple within a year and Steve would be back minding the store in Cupertino shortly after that. No iMac, iPod, iPhone, or iPad were envisioned at that time, or if they were Steve wasn’t telling. But that younger Steve of 1995 was very much like the older Steve of 2005 or even 2011 — his devotion to design, to the user, and to bluntly speaking his mind shining through.

What we’ll do with the 64-minute video depends on how good it looks this week. Maybe we’ll put it up on the Net, maybe we’ll do something more. I’m open to your ideas.

It’s a piece of history, that’s for sure, and there couldn’t have been a better time to find it.

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Twenty years ago, when I was writing Accidental Empires, my book about the PC industry, I included near the beginning a little rant about how good engineers were incapable of lying, because their work relied on Terminal A being positive and not negative and if they lied about such things then nothing would ever work. That was before I learned much about data security, where apparently lying is part of the game. Well, based on recent events at RSA, Lockheed Martin, and other places, I think lying should not be part of the game.

Was there a break-in? Was data stolen? Was there an unencrypted database of SecureID seeds and serial numbers? All we can say at best is that we don’t really know. And in some quarters that is supposed to make us feel more secure because it means the bad guys are equally clueless. Except they aren’t, because they broke-in, they stole data, they knew what the data was good for while we — including SecureID customers it seems — are still mainly in the dark.

A lot of this is marketing — a combination of “we are invincible” and “be afraid, be very afraid.” But a lot of it is intended also to keep us locked-in to certain technologies. To this point most data security systems have been proprietary and secret. If an algorithm appears in public it escaped, was stolen, or reverse-engineered. Why should such architectural secrecy even be required if those 1024- or 2048-bit codes really would take a thousand years to crack? Isn’t the encryption, combined with a hard limit on login attempts, good enough?

Good question.

Alas, the answer is “no.” There are several reasons for this but the largest  by far is that the U.S. government does not want us to have really secure networks. The government is more interested in snooping in on the rest of the world’s insecure networks. The U.S. consumer can take the occasional security hit, our spy chiefs rationalize, if it means our government can snoop global traffic.

This is National Security, remember, which means ethical and common sense rules are suspended without question.

RSA, Cisco, Microsoft and many other companies have allowed the U.S. government to breach their designs. Don’t blame the companies, though: if they didn’t play along in the U.S. they would go to jail. Build a really good 4096-bit AES key service and watch the Justice Department introduce themselves to you, too.

The feds are so comfortable in this ethically-challenged landscape in large part because they are also the largest single employer… on both sides. One in four U.S. hackers is an FBI informer, according to The Guardian. The FBI and Secret Service have used the threat of prison to create an army of informers among online criminals.

While security dudes tend to speak in terms of black or white hats, it seems to me that nearly all hats are in varying shades of gray.

Yet there is good news, too, because IPv6 and Open Source are beginning to close some of those security doors that have been improperly propped open. The Open Source community is building business models that may finally put some security in data security.

The U.S. government is a big supporter of IPv6, yet the National Security Agency isn’t.  Cisco best practices for three-letter agencies, I’m told, include disabling IPv6 services. From the government’s perspective, their need to “manage” (their term, not mine — I would have said “control”) is greater than their need to engineer clean solutions. IPv6 is messy because it violates many existing management models.

The key winners are going to be those companies that embrace IPv6 as a competitive advantage. IPv6-ready outfits in the U.S. include Google, AT&T, and Verizon. Yahoo and Comcast still have work to do. Apple has been ready for years.

Some readers will question why I appear to be promoting the undermining of U.S. intelligence interests. Why would I promote real data security if what we have now is working so well for our spy agencies?

I’m not a spy, for one thing, but if I was a spy and trying to keep my secrets secret I wouldn’t buy any of these products. I’d roll my own, which is what I think most governments have long done. So the really deep dark secrets were probably always out of reach, meaning most low-hanging fruit is simple commercial data like the 125+ million credit card numbers stolen so far this year from Sony, alone.

If the NSA needs my credit card information let them show me why. I think they don’t need it.

We’ve created a culture of self-perpetuating paranoia in military-industrial data security by building systems that are deliberately compromised then arguing that draconian measures are required to defend these holes we’ve made ourselves. This helps the unquestioned three-letter agencies maintain political power, doing little or nothing to increase national security, while at the same time compromising personal security for all of us.

There is no excuse for bad engineering.

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I was in Los Angeles last Friday for TV meetings and lost my iPhone 4. It was on my belt and suddenly it wasn’t. Then in one of those deja vu experiences I noticed that I was only steps from an Apple Store, so I went inside to trace my iPhone using the Where is my iPhone? app. But my iPhone was nowhere.

Understand it was fully-charged and I had been using it less than 10 minutes before. My phone was nowhere to be found.

Sadly the kids at the Apple Store knew far too well what had happened because they hear the story every day. My phone was most likely stolen straight from its clip on my belt by a professional iPhone 4 thief. The moment it was grabbed from my belt the thief handed it to an accomplice. Within a minute the phone was powered-off and untraceable. They didn’t want my data, just my iPhone.

An iPhone 4 can go for $300 in China. They replace the SIM card, spoof the MAC address or sell it for use on a network that doesn’t care. The street price in L. A. for my phone is $100. An industrious criminal can grab several phones per day.

My friend Bill, hearing my story, said it is even worse in New York where thieves will steal the iPhone 4 right out of your hand, running off into the inevitable crowd of pedestrians. That will teach us not to use our mobile smart phones when, well, mobile.

I have had a hand-held phone continuously since 1993 and while I have broken phones a variety of ways including dropping one in a toilet, this is the first phone I’ve had stolen in 18 years. It’s not that I felt naked without the phone, I felt violated.

So what do you do? Go back to the Apple Store and pay full price ($599) for a replacement iPhone 4 because AT&T didn’t offer insurance and you didn’t think to buy a policy from a third-party provider

Nope. I bought for a quarter that price an iPhone 3GS which nobody wants to steal.

It’s good enough for me.

Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is out with his autobiography and Vanity Fair has an excerpt available online. As the Nth richest man in the world, Allen isn’t doing this for the money.  Maybe it’s for posterity. Maybe to settle old grudges, and he certainly does that in Vanity Fair.

The part of that excerpt everyone will be talking about this week is Allen’s story of overhearing Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer plotting to recover Allen’s Microsoft shares or dilute him into insignificance, this at a time with Allen was dying of non-Hodgkins lymphoma.  It’s a great story, that’s for sure.  But if you are a longtime follower of this column or its predecessor you’ve read it before.

Tell your friends, “Oh that. Cringely covered it back in 2006.”

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Readers have been writing to me lately about my annual predictions column, a vestige of my days at PBS.  While I’m reluctant to do it, that annual exercise is apparently very popular.  And the quality of reader comments lately suggests we could get quite a good discussion going.  So I’m going to do it.  But, just like Dora the Explorer says, I need your help.  If you have any predictions to share for 2011, please send them to me by e-mail (bob@cringely.com) and I’ll include the better ones in that column, giving credit where credit is due so we can both take the heat when we’re wrong.

Remember it’s important to not only predict what will happen but why.  Understanding is our goal here and context is critical to that.

Switching gears, the death of Gilmore last week touched a lot of people — far too many for me to reply personally to each.  Thanks for your support.  We still have Roscoe, Gilmore’s brother, who is in good health. And Roscoe has lately been talking to me about adopting a pug.  We’ll see…

Here’s Gilmore and Fallon, my four year-old, taken less than a month ago.  Gilmore was Fallon’s best friend:

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Until leaving PBS at the end of 2008 I could claim I had been fired from every job I ever held, which isn’t nearly as bad as it sounds. Leaving PBS after 11 years broke that pattern, but not for long. Now I have been fired from Home-Account, my mortgage startup. How does one found a company and then get fired from it? That’s easy: you get in a fight with the CEO. At least that’s how I tend to do it.

These things happen all the time in startups where emotions nearly always run high and the CEO (not me)  wins. That’s the case here, so life goes on. And, as I discovered after every previous firing, life tends to get better. It sure did in this case, because I have segued into working with one of my heroes.

I’m blogging with my friend Jerry Goodman, who writes under the name Adam Smith. Maybe you know the guy. He had a weekly show on PBS for 14 years (we are both refugees) and before that wrote three monster best-sellers that defined modern financial journalism — The Money Game, Supermoney, and Paper Money. My book Accidental Empires deliberately copied Jerry’s writing style as he likes to remind me.

Jerry also co-founded Institutional Investor magazine, New York magazine, and was Tom Wolfe’s editor at Esquire.  I am not worthy.

Jerry and I are blogging for a financial publisher called Asset International that caters almost exclusively to institutional investors so you probably haven’t heard of them. AI is run by Jim Casella, who was many years ago my boss’s boss’s boss at InfoWorld. He fired me there, too. But like other people have — including Steve Jobs and Stewart Alsop — Jim has hired me back, so I must have some value, however fleeting.

I’m the junior partner in this venture which is titled Adam Smith’s Moneyworld after Jerry’s old show. He hangs with titans of finance and lives to write about it while I do my usual, which is to explain complex systems. If you like such things and wonder how the world of money really works, please check us out.

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission this week announced rules for bloggers who take money and various other forms of booty in exchange for reviewing products. Somehow I missed this business of selling one’s soul. But I think it is a good idea to take a moment and be straight with my readers about the limits of my journalistic ethics in this space.

I don’t take money for reviewing products because I don’t review products.  Never have, never will. So don’t send me any products, okay?

Publishers send me early copies of a few books per year, generally hoping I’ll either provide a quote for the book jacket or write a positive column about it.  I do accept such books but rarely write about them. If I give a quote it is never for money, mainly because I didn’t think anyone would pay. I was probably right about that.

I once sent a book of mine to Joe Bob Briggs only to have him give it away on his web site.  Tacky.

While it is true that I write for money, in the case of this page the only money comes from those ads you haven’t been clicking on.  I have no idea what those ads will be, by the way. They are served automatically by IDG Technet, which sends me each month a check that is pitifully smaller than I was led to believe it would be.

If you want to suggest a topic to me and accompany that suggestion with a gift or a check, it pretty much guarantees I won’t write about what you want me to. This is all part of my reverse psychology plan to get Microsoft to pay me $1 million to never write anything about them again.  So far that strategy is not working.

Bear Stearns (remember them?) once offered me money to participate in a conference call with their customers.  I had done such a call before for free to talk about my Google shipping container data center column but felt too much like a talking dog and didn’t want to do it again.  So they offered money.  I said “no.”  And of course Bear Stearns is now dead.  So be careful what you ask of me.

I write for other publications like the New York Times and they pay me, but so far that pay is not from vendors except in the case of Perforce Software, where I write a column for their company newsletter. But I’ve never written about Perforce here.  Until now that is. Does that mean the FTC will now arrest me specifically because of this disclosure? Sounds like a Star Trek episode.

Most of my income actually comes from giving speeches and participating in events like brainstorming sessions, many of which happen at companies I have written about.  Often I learn things at these events that are worth writing about, though strictly within the bounds of whatever non-disclosure agreement I’ve signed (violate NDA = wife takes kids and leaves).  So in this sense I do take money from companies I might write about.  But the companies never give me money specifically to write (except for Perforce, above) and they often don’t like at all what I end up writing. Screw ‘em.

The FTC rules say nothing about giving speeches or selling one-page screenplays for $2 million.  If they expand the rules in that direction, of course, I may yet be in trouble.

In that case there’s always pizza delivery.

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I have a mouse in my RV.  Or as many correspondents have told me I have MICE in my RV, because the concept of a solitary mouse is beyond their considerable experience.  This month my wife, three young sons and I (and of course the mice) are in California, mainly touring in our 1996 Winnebago.  We tour, we fix, then tour some more. The old Winnie was never built for 107-degree desert temperatures and neither was I.  So since we’re broken-down waiting (again) for the fixit man to come, I think this might be a good time to update my readers on a few old projects.

But first let me say that in an RV that has both Verizon and AT&T wireless data service, in California at least, Verizon is better — substantially better.  More bars in more places, indeed!

1) Whatever happened to NerdTV?  We made a season for PBS back in 2005-2006 then shot a second season in 2007 that was never aired because of pesky ownership issues and people still wanting to be paid.  The show itself has morphed a bit and will reappear with a new name and an exciting new weekly format this fall as a co-production with the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.  It will be available for streaming online and may appear in some form on television, too, possibly even with PBS.  Look for an announcement on this soon.  And if your big-to-bigger company wants to sponsor the first season (36 shows!) let’s talk. But I’ll warn you this is a professional production that isn’t cheap to make and we’d prefer a single sponsor.  Still, as the old shows continue to show, the content ought to be timeless.

2) And what happened to Bob’s disk drive project with its stainless steel foil platters?  The idea, remember, was to dramatically reduce the rotating mass with several attendant advantages: 1) lower cost; 2) dramatically lower power; 3) higher performance, and; 4) greater shock resistance.  An iPod with this new type of drive ought to easily run 3-4 times longer on the same battery.  A data center could see storage-related power consumption decrease by up to 85 percent.

Yeah, but what happened?

It took time to develop the stainless steel foil, itself.  Most of the other parts come straight from any disk drive maker’s parts bin but the foil required lots and lots of R&D which was done primarily for nothing — no money — which means it took longer than we would have liked.  But that work is now pretty much complete, the foil is indeed smoother-than-smooth, and a pilot production plant is being built in Japan thanks to the recent entry of a Silicon Valley investor whose name you would recognize.  Look for licensed products to appear starting in 2010.  Interestingly improvements in flash drive technology haven’t particularly hurt the market opportunity, either, since the foil is WAY cheaper and video applications are driving mobile storage requirements up faster than flash prices are coming down.

3) Finally, whatever happened to my plan to land rovers on the Moon?  Am I ambitious or what?

The Moon project, which was originally intended to vie for the $20 million Google Lunar X-Prize, has been moving forward slowly but quietly.  It’s a little harder to do, you see, when there isn’t a $20 million payday at the end, but it became quickly clear to us that there is unlikely to be any winner of that Google prize in the five years ending in 2012 as the contest is currently structured.

Team Cringely, on the other hand, still expects to reach the Moon by 2011 and will by fall have a number of announcements on that front including major technical alliances, major corporate sponsorships, and a global TV deal.  And this is no stunt: we’re working with NASA’s Goddard Space Center to answer a long list of important scientific questions until we use-up our 24th and last rover.

So it’s a busy summer, but mainly we’re wondering now if the 107-degree heat will drive out those mice?

I recently participated in a conference for financial bloggers at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, MO.  Kauffman, if you haven’t heard of it, is dedicated to the promotion of entrepreneurism and supports more economic research than any other foundation.  It is a fabulous place and I really enjoyed the conference.  For some reason they felt inclined to interview me, too.  There are plenty more interviews to be seen at the Kauffman web site (interviews with really smart people, too, not just folks like me): Kauffman Conversations