Easter is when I think of brunch and special holiday baked goods. One of my favorite of these is Panettone, which is actually an Italian Christmas delight, but this is my blog so we’ll do it my way.

Any bread is a pain in the butt to make because of the kneading and the rising and the punching down, etc. Bread machines have eliminated all of that toil and, with a little bit of tweaking, you can coax out a beautiful Panettone.

One of the most troublesome high-tech news stories to linger in the media is the way that high-tech workers are treated in China. Foxconn, who employs a million workers in China building the iPhone and many other consumer electronic devices, has repeatedly come under file for creating working conditions that would be criminal in this country. Among the allegations are hiring children as young as 12 and paying them 70 cents per hour, enforcing 14-16 hour days hours in spartan and often dangerous conditions, and injuring or even crippling workers through non-existent safety practices and then simply firing them without paying for their medical treatment. The conditions are so bad that suicides are not infrequent (a problem that the company addressed by installing nets beneath the taller buildings). In case you haven’t been following the story, there’s good coverage in Business Insider.

Every time a new allegation emerges, iPhone users wag their fingers at Apple and threaten a boycott unless something is done. Apple responds by sending someone to investigate, and they return with stories of frank conversations with management, improving conditions and promises to do better. But the reality is that we, as citizens of the first world, cannot improve the working conditions in other countries, and shouldn’t. In the short run, our interference can only make the conditions worse.

Working conditions in China’s factories today are little different from the conditions during the early Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and the U.S. Then, eight year old children routinely worked 14-hour shifts for the equivalent of fifty cents in today’s money, although adult men might do considerably better, making $2.50/day (adjusted).

The conditions were dismal; poor light, unbreathable air, dangerous and heavy equipment with no safety features, and routine exposure to toxic chemicals. If you didn’t want to freeze, you brought in your own lump of coal for the furnace. Beatings and mistreatment were the norm for even the smallest offense, like being a minute late. Workers had absolutely no rights and were immediately fired for any infraction or injury. Unions were illegal and you could be arrested for inciting unrest if you tried to organize. Factories were sometimes fenced with barbed wire to “keep the young imps inside.”

Still, people flocked to the factories and stood in long lines for hours for the chance of employment. Why? Because these jobs, grim as they were, represented their best option. It was better to be a slave than to be a beggar or starve to death.

Child labor had never been a subject of controversy in a world dominated by agricultural and handcraft economies. Children always worked on family farms and boys as young as 10 were apprenticed to their crafts. As a result, improvement came slowly.

In 1833, the controversial Factory Act passed by British Parliament. Under this enlightened law, children 9-13 years of age were only allowed to work 8 hours a day and those 14-18 years of age could not work more than 12 hours. By 1899, about half the states had passed laws regulating child labor, but these were almost never enforced. In 1912, after a 9-year battle, activists in the U.S. forced the government to establish the Children’s Bureau to monitor child labor, but it wasn’t until 1938 and the Fair Labor Standards Act that the Federal government finally regulated the minimum ages of employment and hours of work for children.

These changes in working conditions could not have come about without the rise of an educated middle class, without the development of modern social and government institutions, and the improvements in the standard of living which were the benefits of industrialization itself. There is no short-circuit. Just as a child needs to grow through those awkward teenage years in order to develop the skills required to take on adult responsibility, a society needs to suffer the growing pains which lead to the development of institutions and an enlightened population.

Our outrage at the labor practices in China (or Nike paying teenagers $2.17/day to make sneakers in Jakarta) only serves to pressure companies to take those jobs elsewhere, removing the engine that was providing the possibility for economic and social growth. Higher salaries only fuel the type of rampant inflation that destroys local economies and breeds crime. For proof, we need look no farther than any modern tourist destination.

Fair trade programs, the darlings of the coffee, chocolate and handcraft industry, have fared poorly as well. While making American consumers feel good about buying foreign products, they have done little to help local farmers and may have even hurt them by creating an addiction to US markets and acting as a disincentive to the modernization and mechanization which could provide real and lasting benefit.

Americans need to come to grips with the fact that we really do not know what is best for the whole world. The factory jobs at Foxconn, as dismal as they may seem to us, are far superior to slaving in a rice paddy all day and represent real opportunity for the Chinese people, especially the women. So go ahead and enjoy your iPhone and your other toys. You are providing real economic opportunity to developing countries who, like us, will one day enjoy a standard of living that prices them right out of the global labor market. It just won’t happen overnight.

Elsewhere on the Web

David Pogue, What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found

George Eastman with Thomas Edison

Kodak filed for bankruptcy this week. Everyone knew it was coming, but still it’s very sad.

Kodak was the Google of their day. Kodak always attracted the best and brightest engineers to their campus, funding research projects far afield from their core business (the first OLED screen is among Kodak’s patents, as is cyanoacrylate “crazy glue”). They shared the company’s profits with the employees, paying out regular dividend checks to workers, and had their own theater on campus where you could spend your lunch hour watching movies.

If there was one company most responsible for the electronic gadget revolution, for the proliferation of mobile, social, media sharing, it was Kodak. They put the first “point and shoot” cameras into our hands. (You may not know this, but the disposable camera actually pre-dated the replaceable film camera by a decade.) Kodak created the idea of capturing “the times of your life,”  and “the Kodak moment.” It was Kodak that made it possible to share pictures of the kids with far-away loved ones and kept families in touch through every war of the last hundred years.

Kodak invented the transparent film that made Edison’s motion picture camera possible. They created the film for Henri Becquerel ‘s X-rays, Eadward Muybridge’s motion studies of the galloping horse, Ansel Adam’s stunning pictures of Yosemite, the Lumiere Brothers’ movies, and the cameras we took to the moon.

Kodak was founded by George Eastman, a poor, self-educated, fatherless kid from upstate New York, who worked as a bank teller during the day. At night, he experimented in his mother’s kitchen, trying to perfect a way to produce photographic plates that could be used “out of the box” instead of needing to be prepared in the field before every shot. His vision, when he founded the company at the age of 30, was to “make the camera as easy to use as the pencil.”

Kodak has been one of the most innovative companies in the US for the last 100 years. They hold thousands of patents in imaging, reproduction, plastics, electronics and communications. Kodak actually invented the first digital camera and in 2005, Kodak was the number 1 digital camera in the U.S. The Bayer pattern (which enables your cell phone camera to see color) is a Kodak patent.

The problem is that Kodak has always made its money in film and chemicals; everything else was just a side business. But today, the film and chemicals business just isn’t what it used to be. In 2000, Americans bought almost a billion rolls of film per year. This year, they might buy a mere 20 million, plus 30 million single-use cameras.

It’s not just the declining market; Kodak has also had big problems with competition. Back when Kodak had a 90% market share, they did not believe that Americans would switch to Japanese film. That’s why in 1984 they let Fuji become the official film of the LA Olympics. Through aggressive marketing and price reduction, Fuji leverage that foothold to take 17% of the US market by 1997 and build a plant in this country. Kodak’s net earnings dropped from $1.29 billion in 1996 to just $5 million in 1997.

Squeezed on both volume and margin, they didn’t have a chance. Kodak had always been in the business of selling cheap cameras and expensive film. The economics of being a consumer electronic components manufacturer are totally different from that. Disruptive technologies are called “disruptive” for a reason.

After a century of innovation and economic opportunity, Kodak will be missed. George Eastman himself was one of the country’s biggest philanthropists, probably second only to Andrew Carnegie. He built the Rochester Institute of Technology, MIT’s second campus along the Charles River in Boston, and endowed two historically black colleges in the South, to name just a few of his projects.

We all owe this company, and it’s founder, a debt of gratitude. But, in this world everything has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it seems that Kodak’s end is in sight. I think George Eastman wouldn’t be disappointed, though. In 1932, at the age of 78 and suffering from a degenerative spinal disease, he took his own life leaving behind a note which read “To my friends, my work is done. Why wait?”

I recently became concerned that I might have sleep apnea, a sleep disorder characterized by abnormally low breathing or missed breaths during sleep. Although an individual with sleep apnea is often unaware of having difficulty breathing, even after they awaken, the condition can cause the daytime sleepiness and fatigue associated with any type of significant sleep disturbance.

My doctor prescribed an overnight stay in a sleep lab, which is just what you might imagine: you try and get a good night’s sleep in a hospital bed connected by a sheaf of cables to a stack of electronic equipment standing sentinel over you, monitoring your heart rate, blood oxygenation, and a host of other vital signs. In addition to measuring your vitals, this equipment keeps a log so that doctors can review what’s been happening.

This didn’t sound like much fun. Fortunately, the electronics revolution that has turned your cell phone into a computer/camera/navigation/videophone has dramatically reduced the size and cost of medical instruments as well. The monitor shown here fits over the end of your finger, is battery powered, logs up to 40 hours of data, and can be connected to a laptop via USB for data analysis, reporting, and battery recharging. It also sports a fully graphical display and built-in alarms if any of the patient values go too high or too low. But the best feature may be the cost. Instead of costing thousands like their rack-mounted counterparts, even the best of these devices can be had for well under $100.

As an experiment, I ordered one from Hong Kong, slipped it over my finger, and generated pages of data while I slept in my own bed. Next time I see my doctor, I’ll have the data she needs for a meaningful analysis at a fraction of the cost of a sleep study and with zero interruption of my life. Plus the data is more accurate because it reflects my behavior at home, sleeping in my own environment, instead of an institutional lab.

Inexpensive medical equipment like this will recast the very structure of medicine. Big medical institutions in this country aren’t likely to change how they do things right away because of the costs associated with organizational change. But emerging economies, remote settlements, and mobile care providers will be revolutionized. Mobile medical providers and rescue workers can carry one of these devices on a lanyard around their neck, providing valuable data at the point of care. Four of these devices plugged into an inexpensive laptop can turn a tent into a multi-patient ICU.

Perhaps the biggest revolution in health care will happen right in your own home. In the near future, every home medicine chest will contain devices like this, just as they carry thermometers today. When your child has an asthma attack or an allergic reaction to a bee sting, devices like these will provide an accurate, unemotional assessment of the patient’s status, making it easy for the doctor on the other end of the phone (or website) to decide if they need an ambulance, a clinic visit, or a couple of aspirins and a good night’s sleep.

This week I received one of those alarmist chain letters decrying the collapse of the American economy and using for argument “19 shocking statistics” like:

• #1 The United States has lost approximately 42,400 factories since 2001. About 75 percent of those factories employed over 500 people when they were still in operation.

• #2 Dell Inc., one of America’s largest manufacturers of computers, has announced plans to dramatically expand its operations in China with an investment of over $100 billion over the next decade.

• #4 In 2008, 1.2 billion cell phones were sold worldwide. So how many of them were manufactured inside the United States ? Zero.

• #10 Ford Motor Company recently announced the closure of a factory that produces the Ford Ranger in St. Paul , Minnesota . Approximately 750 good paying middle class jobs are going to be lost because making Ford Rangers in Minnesota does not fit in with Ford’s new “global” manufacturing strategy.

• #16 Printed circuit boards are used in tens of thousands of different products. Asia now produces 84 percent of them worldwide.

I’m sure you get the idea, so I’ll spare you the rest of the letter and the dramatic call to pass this on to everyone you know.

In reality, what we today call the industrial economy could have also been labeled the “post-agricultural” economy. Before America became a great industrial power, we were a great agricultural power. In fact, you could have decried (and many did) that the hollowing out of our agricultural sector (big cotton and tobacco, for example) would lead to the collapse of America as a regional power and the eventual inability of us to even feed ourselves.

It is perfectly clear that the agricultural road we were on, while a very successful course in its day, bypassed all of the technical and manufacturing achievements of which the author is so deservedly proud. In order to make those gains, we needed to leave the past behind. And here we are again, just a hundred or so years later, at a similar crossroads.

It is absolutely true that we live in a post-industrial economy. This simply means that the source of wealth and power has shifted away from manufacturing and over to other parts of the value chain. The fact that people in the past have succeeded by manufacturing things doesn’t mean that’s how they will succeed in the future. There is no more reason to fear a post-industrial economy than there was to fear a post-agricultural economy.

Value, for many decades, was added in the growing of things; turning raw land and labor into things you could eat and wear. When we got very good at agriculture, we drove all of the value out of it. Value was then added in the manufacture of things. Today, value is added in the design of things, in intellectual property and in marketing. The most valuable assets in the world today are not factories, they are brands like Intel, CocaCola and Google.

The reason why printed circuit boards and integrated circuits are not manufactured in this country is that 1) there is no money in that part of the process, and 2) manufacturing those items generates a lot of dangerous wastes that we don’t want in our neighborhoods. But where are those industrial products invented, designed, and marketed? In the United States.

The fact that Ford figured out how to run their business more profitably by manufacturing in Malaysia rather than Minnesota is not an indication that they, or we, are failing. Ford is not in business to provide a particular type of job to a particular type of person. Ford is in business to provide a profitable return to its shareholders (Americans).

Google is a perfect example of what the future of this country looks like. Google is one of the most successful companies in the world. They provide lots of high-paying jobs, yet they produce nothing (which also means that they don’t pollute our air or water or use up any of our valuable natural resources.)

So no, we do not have to worry about closing a bunch of filthy, toxic, dangerous manufacturing plants producing 20th century goods using 19th century technologies. But change is often uncomfortable for people. If all you know is how to sew the soles onto shoes, you are going to be displaced by the closing of a shoe factory. But there will be plenty of jobs for your kids designing shoes and blogging about them.

By the way, Dell is closing thier US factory and moving to China because the Chinese will be the next wave of computer buyers. The money from those sales will be coming back to Dell shareholders.

But while a post-industrial economy is completely sustainable, spending more than you make is not. But these are completely separate issues, joined only in this author’s essay. We are running a trade deficit and a massive government deficit. That’s a bad thing, but it isn’t related to our economic system; it’s related to our desire to live beyond our means. Japan has created a similar problem for itself, and they are very much a manufacturing economy.

The deficit is a hidden tax on future earnings, since our debt will eventually need to be repaid plus the interest owed on it. It’s a future tax that we are handing down to the next generation in the form of reduced government services, higher taxes and inflation.

But that’s a story for another time.

Writing about all of my bad customer service experiences would be a full-time job, so I let most of them roll by with a shrug or a sad shake of the head. Yet every now and then, someone sets the bar so low, it’s remarkable. Take, for example, my experience with American Airlines yesterday. An opportunity dropped into their lap to turn a routine business problem into a positive customer experience, but it just wasn’t in their DNA. Instead, they turned the full force of the people, infrastructure and systems within their customer service group toward making the problem so much worse, I had to write about it.

The airlines handle a lot of baggage, carousel after carousel of it, all different shapes and sizes and constructions. When you carry that many of anything, especially under time pressure, you’re bound to drop a few. According to the most recent SITA statistics, 25 million pieces of luggage are “mishandled” every year. That’s about 3,000 bags per hour every day. It’s just like the lottery; the more often you play, the more likely you are to win. I understand that.

When I landed in SFO at 8:00 PM from Miami, my number was up. Of the five bags check by my party, one was a no-show. I waited until the carousel with the last few orphan bags slowly ground to a halt, then I walked over to the American Airlines baggage service counter and stood in line. When my turn came, I showed them my tags, answered a few questions, and waited while they wrestled an answer from their primitive terminal. Sorry, so answer. Perhaps it was placed on a later flight. Here’s an 800 number you can call after midnight. Nothing more to do here, I went home and hoped for the best. After all, almost 97% of bags are ultimately reunited with their owners. Plus, my flight had been a single leg (52% of all mishandles occur at connections.)

I don’t know what I expected to happen next. I paid American Airlines $30 to have a bag moved from MIA to SFO and they failed. I know if FedEx screwed up, they would contact me. In the afternoon, still not having heard from AA, I called the 800 number and was advised that yes, my bag had been put on a later flight and had arrived in San Francisco at 11:00 AM this morning. I could pick it up at any time.

Pick it up? No, I don’t think so. I live over 30 miles from that airport; city miles. They lost it, they should deliver it. “I’m sorry,” the customer service voice said insincerely, “but you have only four hours from the time of arrival to file a lost baggage tracer. Since you did not do that, we can’t deliver it to you. If you like, I can have it shipped, but you’ll have to pay the fees.”

In a moment I went from “understanding — lost luggage is a fact of air travel” to “relieved — they found my bag (800,000 bags a year are never recovered)” to “furious – you guys screwed up and now you’re trying to make it be my problem.”

“Lost baggage tracer? What is that? What was all of that waiting in line at the AA Baggage Service Center, answering questions and showing them documents?”

“They should have told you that you have four hours to file a tracer,” continued my tormentor. “And, since there is no tracer on this bag, that’s all I can do for you. Your bag is here when you want to pick it up.”

Obviously, this wouldn’t do. I asked to speak to a supervisor.

I tell the story again to a new person, and again am told that I violated the four-hour rule. “This is the first I’ve heard about any of this. I thought they were filing a claim when I reported the bad missing at the airport.” I told him. “Does it make sense to you that I would wait in line at the Baggage Service Counter to report my missing bag, be told that I have only four hours in which to report it, otherwise they are relieved of their responsibilities and then… what? Refused? Changed my mind?”

“I can’t believe we are even having this conversation. This isn’t the old days, when you carried my bag for free. You charged money to carry that bag. It was supposed to be here at 8:00 PM last night and it didn’t get here until 11:00 this morning. You screwed up. You need to just man-up, admit it, and get it to me as quickly as you can.”

In reality, the people at the Baggage Service Center in San Francisco are geniuses. By not filling out a tracer, and not informing me of the process, they have not only saved their company a ton of money on baggage delivery fees, they have also made American’s lost baggage statistics look better. By law, these claims have to be tallied and reported to the Department of Transportation where they become a matter of public record.

How is American doing? They lose 4.3 bags per thousand passenger miles, the most of any national carrier. Their regional service, American Eagle, loses a whopping 9.19, the highest number reported by any airline. (To give credit where credit is due, AirTran loses only 1.97.)

I don’t know if the dim bulb of justice finally flickered on in this guy’s brain, or if I just wore him out, but he finally agreed to waive the “four-hour” rule and deliver my bag.

We call ourselves a “service economy.” I suppose that’s because everyone is so economical about dispensing customer service. But that’s really looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The mission of the customer service organization should be to build customer loyalty, not control costs.

When things are going well, it’s easy to be nice. It’s only when the going gets rough that you find out what a person, or a company, is made of. Customers who experience service problems that are dealt with appropriately by the company score far higher on loyalty measurements than customers who have never had a problem at all.

In the case of American Airlines, they wound up delivering my bag for free anyway, but first they invested a bunch of resources into pissing me off. It’s hard to see how they came out ahead.

Decades ago I fell terribly and hopelessly in love with a young woman named Elaine. Any stranger on the street could see that we were doomed. I lived on the West Coast, she lived on the East Coast. She was smart and sophisticated and worldly. I, on the other hand, was a caricature of the socially retarded programmer. But I was possessed and she was, at the very least, optimistic and the fact that it was spring didn’t help matters.

When I visited her in Massachusetts, she took me to breakfast at a local chain called Bickford’s and introduced me to their “Big Apple” Dutch apple pancake. I must have dragged her back there half a dozen times in the next week; it was so yummy! After I returned to work in California, she got a hold of the cook at Bickford’s and talked him out of the recipe for my favorite pancake so she could mail it to me. Perhaps the way to a man’s heart is though his stomach because I’ve made this recipe hundreds of times in the intervening years and every time I feel a flush of gratitude for that amazing woman and for her thoughtful gift.

Ingredients:
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
1 large or 2 medium size apples
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Peel and slice thinly the apples. Set aside.
Mix sugar and cinnamon together. Set aside.
Put butter into cast iron skillet and place it in the oven to melt.
While it’s melting, mix flour, milk and eggs together to make a batter.
Pour batter into skillet over melted butter.
Arrange apples on top. Sprinkle with cinnamon and sugar mixture.
Bake 20 minutes. Serve immediately from cast iron skillet. Serves 2.

[Thank you Chuck for editing this.]

The moment you think you’ve lost your wallet, you get that panicky feeling. All of your cash, your ID, and your credit cards are suddenly gone. Your range of options is dramatically limited. You might be stranded somewhere, unable to get home or into the club where your friends are. You can’t buy food, lodging or transportation. It’s scary, frustrating, maddening, and the clean-up is a mess: you have to contact your bank, your credit card companies, your air travel and other loyalty card providers. You need a new driver’s license and perhaps social security card. What were all of those cards in your wallet? How do you reach all of those providers? Thank god you have your cell phone.

But given the choice between have my wallet or my cell phone stolen, I’d much rather lose the wallet.

My cell phone has all of the email conversations between me and my friends and my clients. There’s also a phone directory of everyone I know, a calendar with my birthday, their birthdays, and everywhere I am planning on being (or have been) for months. It would be easy to impersonate me on the phone, by email, and in all of the online communities in which I participate: email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. You could ruin my reputation, extort money, and victimize anyone I know.

There’s also confidential client data — presentations and meeting notes, recordings,and photos. All of that is in addition to the thief’s ability to access to my bank, financial institutions, PayPal, investment firm, and Mint.Com.

Cleaning up after having your wallet stolen is a cakewalk compared to the mess you’re in if your phone is compromised. Yet people are way more casual about leaving their phone laying around than their wallet.

Part of the reason for this is that the function of a wallet has remained relatively constant, while the function of a phone has dramatically increased in scope. Even though it’s a now a GPS navigation system, financial terminal, email client, Internet browser, hard drive, camera, media player and social media device, we still call it a “phone.” Our attitude about phones hasn’t kept up with the phone’s increasingly important role.  The truth is, if I had to eliminate one function of my phone, I would do without the part where you talk to people.

Even if you’ve been slow to realize how important your phone is, criminals have not. Antivirus firm McAfee reports that last quarter mobile device malware was up a whopping 46%, while other threats we down overall. The problem is only going to get worse as phone functionality increases. This year near-field communication chips are being added to phones which literally turn them into wallets, meaning you can lose your phone and wallet simultaneously.

Virus attacks on your desktop computer are becoming passe, with most users aware of the threat and using a range of very good free and low-cost AV tools. On your phone, you’ve had fewer options. But that’s changing as phone manufacturers and software developers recognize this threat.

The first line of defense is to use your phone’s built-in password security. Most people don’t turn this feature on because it’s a nuisance to enter a password every time you pick up your phone to use it. Unless your phone is stolen by the NSA, this feature does a great job of protecting information stored in your phone itself, although it does nothing about data or documents stored on your phone’s removable memory card.

To encrypt passwords and other sensitive data that you carry around with you, there are specialized applications like OISafe. Programs like WaveSecure can help you track a missing phone, backup up the data on it, and remote wipe the memory on command.

Those applications are great if you know that your phone has gone missing, but the far greater threat is malware which can steal the data off your phone while you’re using at it. While there hasn’t yet been a wide-reaching virus attach on mobile devices, it’s just a matter of time as tablets and phones replace laptops as people’s primary mobile device. This past year has seen Norton, McAfee, AVG and dozens of smaller companies release smartphone security applications, many of them not very good. (Lookout Mobile Security is a standout, featuring anti-virus, lost phone tracking, remote backup and remote wiping.) Expect to see an arms race on mobile devices play out in a way similar to the way it did on the desktop, only at an accelerated rate. (Hackers and AV companies have, after all, learned a lot from the desktop wars and will be applying it to the battle for mobile security.)

So, you’ve been warned. If you haven’t taken the time to set the lock code on your phone, do it now. And think about installing an anti-virus application and a remote-wipe function. It’s simple to do now, and impossible to do when you realize you really need it.

At this time of year it’s easy to get caught up in the hubbub of friends and family, parties and presents, and forget the real reason for Christmas: we are primitive, superstitious Neanderthals.

For millennia any tribe with enough brains to recognize patterns in the night sky has held a festival at this time of year. The days keep getting shorter, the nights longer, and the snow deeper. If you don’t do something about it, daylight might disappear altogether, plunging us into eternal night. Of course, the logical thing to do is to go out into the forest, find one of the trees that has not turned brown and lost its leaves (an evergreen), and bring it into the house so it can be dressed up and worshiped.

The early Christian church, attempting win converts, had a problem with this holiday. Obviously a monotheistic sect couldn’t condone tree worship, but folks weren’t about to give up their Winter Solstice celebration.

A thousand years ago starvation was common in winter between January and April (the “famine months”). There was a very real possibility your community may not survive the winter. Most cattle, fattened during the summer, were slaughtered when the first snows covered the fields because they could not be fed during the winter. The wine and beer made during the fall harvest was ready to be drunk too, so it was a logical time for a feast. And, since it was the last one of the year (or perhaps the last one ever), it was a blow-out.

Around the year 350 an accommodation was made and the Catholics decided that the solstice was a good time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, notwithstanding all evidence that he was born in the spring. Although many people today will call you a heretic for suggesting that Christmas has nothing to do with Christ, the church itself recognized this fact during the 1600s, attempting to abolish Christmas altogether, calling it “a popish festival with no biblical justification”. Our early settlers, the Puritans (of Thanksgiving fame), were among this group. But today everyone seems to have settled down, happily mixing Druid tree worship, magical elves and Jesus Christ.

So as the joyous day approaches and we all join together to flaunt our religious piety, human decency and financial achievements, let’s spare a thought for the true meaning of Christmas. We’re afraid of the dark.

What is the world’s biggest secret? Perhaps you are thinking “the formula for Coca-Cola”, “who shot Kennedy”,” what happened to the Holy Grail”, or “the location of Atlantis”. All good guesses, but these are merely historical curiosities.

Right now, the biggest secret in the world is the encryption key that unlocks the Wikileaks “insurance” file. In case you haven’t been following the story closely, Wikileaks has only published a small fraction of the massive database of government and commercial secrets which were leaked to them. However, on July 30, in response to strong US government threats, Wikileaks released to the world a 1.4 GB “insurance” file.

The file is encrypted with AES256, the same encryption algorithm used by the government to protect it’s own “Top Secret” files. Although Wikileaks has not made any public statements about the contents of this file, its purpose seems clear: in case something happens to the site or to Julian Assange himself, they made a backup of their secrets and stored it in the one place where it can never be destroyed; everywhere. Speculation is that this information bomb contains the balance of the State Department cables, as well as commercial and military secrets ranging from BP to The Vatican.

Every spy organization in the world and a half-million hackers and computer science students are hard at work analyzing this file. But without the key, they have little chance of success. What does a 256-bit key look like? In hexadecimal, it might be: “496e2031363932203139206d656e20616e642074776f20776f6d656e20″. But such a key is unwieldly.

A binary key is difficult to store and transmit, and it looks like, well, an encryption key.  More than likely, the key hidden in plain sight; a common, publicly available reference (perhaps the first line of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible”).  To create a 256-bit key like the one above, you only need 29 characters, so “In 1692 19 men and two women ” would do nicely. Of course, you could also make it be much longer.

One thing is certain: someday we will know the answer. It is highly unlikely that several young people will all carry this secret to their graves, never succumbing to pressure, argument or temptation, and never making a mistake. And once we have the key, we will have everything because the file that it unlocks is readily available. (There are millions of copies of it around the world. You could easily get a copy for yourself.)

Cracking the code through “brute force” methods is far beyond the capabilities of the worlds fastest (and most secret) supercomputers. An entirely new generation of computers, based on quantum physics, may have a chance, but that type of innovation is decades away.

Until then, unless someone screws up or forces Julian Assange’s hand, the Wikileaks insurance file will remain one of the greatest mysteries of the modern world.