This fortress, which looks like a heavily armed gas station preparing for a zombie invasion (without the gas pumps) is a stopping point for emails sent to many three-letter government agencies. It's far enough away from DC to survive a nuclear blast, but close enough to service all the relevant entities that depend on them. More beautiful, informative postcards from locations you may never have expected were so important over at: [Wired]

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/09/beerrobot/

The kegerator features an iPhone-like array of "apps," including a CO2 gauge, the "Tap Store" where different beers are selected, and a temperature gauge (the fridge is kept at 37 degrees for a perfect frosty brew). It actually looks like a project that's conceivably doable by a group of dedicated beer-lovers, even if they don't work for a tech magazine. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to scour the Craigslist free listings for refrigerators. [Wired]

I don't agree with everything in the issue—I will not accept Facebook friends I've never meet in real life, I think it's rude to text message in front of other people, and I will not, under any circumstances, pretend I don't hate Twitter—but it's definitely a fun and thought-provoking read. My favorite is this article on haggling over Craigslist, which has saved me hundreds of dollars over the years. [Wired]

As usual, this matrix is just the tip of the molehill—if you want to really get in deep with these colorful characters, here's where to look:

• NYT - David Pogue

• WSJ - Walt Mossberg

• USA Today - Ed Baig

• Wired - Steven Levy

• Cnet - Kent German

• Engadget - Josh Topolsky

• Ars Technica

• Laptop

• Crunchgear

• Gear Live

• Gizmodo - Jason Chen

And if we've missed your review, send it in: we'll add it to the list.

I just want to know, is Eriksson getting paid for his life rights? Because I'd hate to think he's making a dime after the shit he pulled.

The original article starts out with the famous crash which brought attention to Eriksson, eventually ending his ring of lies:

THE BUMP IN THE ROAD that ended Bo Stefan Eriksson's fantastic ride is practically invisible. From 10 feet away, all you can see is the ragged edge of a tar-seamed crack in an otherwise smooth sheet of pavement. Only the location is impressive - a sweet stretch of straightaway on California's Pacific Coast Highway near El Pescador state beach, just past the eucalyptus-shaded mansions of the Malibu hills. On that patch of broken asphalt, there's barely enough lip to stub a toe. Of course, when you hit it at close to 200 miles per hour, as police say Eriksson did in the predawn light last February 21, while behind the wheel of a 660-horsepower Ferrari Enzo, consequences magnify.

The Enzo has less than 6 inches of ground clearance, and at that speed, it took only a slight scrape under the front bumper to launch the vehicle. The airborne Ferrari landed in a skid that in a blink became a sidelong drift. Tires shredding, the car bounced over the shoulder onto a grassy slope wet with dew. All Eriksson could do was hold on as the slithering, swiveling Enzo again achieved liftoff, then slammed broadside into a wooden power pole.

Gizmondo's story, one of massive fraud, mob ties and wrecked Ferraris, would make a fine film, but being optioned is far from a guarantee that the movie will ever get made. I hope it does, if only so that some good can come of the whole debacle. And so that more people can confuse Gizmodo with Gizmondo. I love that!* [Hollywood Reporter via Robert Capps, editor of the story who looks like a supertrooper]

*Not really.

Found was my favorite part of Wired because of that. Concepts for gadgets of the future that were in the mind of everyone, right there, in a photo. How would a dream generator look? Space elevators? Contact lenses with built-in HUD? I wanted it all, even the bad stuff.

But then again, I've always wanted for the future to arrive as soon as possible. Like, I mean, why the hell is not Saturday yet? Head to Metafilter for the whole collection of Wired's Found. [Metafilter]

The issue itself was formed, I'd guess, from the time Chris Anderson, Wired editor, saw JJ Abrams speak at TED about his mystery box. I was happy to have been able to contribute a small idea used in the TEST section, executed by Chris Hardwick, on snake oil gadgets. I got this idea from my mom and some of lisa's relatives who use plenty of these new age devices, supposedly able to heal miraculously and transform the "vibrational energy" of water, and clean bad EM out of the air without stopping your Wi-fi or cellphone from working. I thought that this is the kind of technology the Dharma institute would have been testing in Lost, and so it became very clear to me that this is exactly the kind of thing that would fit in the magazine.

I also love the theme because mystery is another aspect of Gizmodo that separates us from traditional tech journalism. We don't bury our ledes, but its very clear that Rumors—stories before facts— are indeed one of the most tantalizing and popular pieces of writing that we do. Because knowing is often not as powerful as longing or wishing for the unknown and unconfirmed.

With one listen, I was hooked. I was a 15-year-old suburban New Jersey nerd, racked with teenage lust but too timid to ask for a date. When I came across Bolero among the LPs in my parents' record collection, I put it on the turntable. It hit me like a neural thunderstorm, titanic and glorious, each cycle building to a climax and waiting but a beat before launching into the next.

I had no idea back then of Bolero's reputation as one of the most famous orchestral recordings in the world. When it was first performed at the Paris Opera in 1928, the 15-minute composition stunned the audience. Of the French composer, Maurice Ravel, a woman in attendance reportedly cried out, "He's mad … he's mad!" One critic wrote that Bolero "departs from a thousand years of tradition."

I sat in my living room alone, listening. Bolero starts simply enough, a single flute accompanied by a snare drum: da-da-da-dum, da-da-da-dum, dum-dum, da-da-da-dum. The same musical clause repeats 17 more times, each cycle adding instruments, growing louder and more insistent, until the entire orchestra roars in an overpowering finale of rhythm and sound. Musically, it was perfect for my ear. It had a structure that I could easily grasp and enough variation to hold my interest.

It took a lot to hold my interest; I was nearly deaf at the time. In 1964, my mother contracted rubella while pregnant with me. Hearing aids allowed me to understand speech well enough, but most music was lost on me. Boléro was one of the few pieces I actually enjoyed. A few years later, I bought the CD and played it so much it eventually grew pitted and scratched. It became my touchstone. Every time I tried out a new hearing aid, I'd check to see if Boléro sounded OK. If it didn't, the hearing aid went back.

And then, on July 7, 2001, at 10:30 am, I lost my ability to hear Boléro - and everything else. While I was waiting to pick up a rental car in Reno, I suddenly thought the battery in my hearing aid had died. I replaced it. No luck. I switched hearing aids. Nothing.

I got into my rental car and drove to the nearest emergency room. For reasons that are still unknown, my only functioning ear had suffered "sudden-onset deafness." I was reeling, trying to navigate in a world where the volume had been turned down to zero.

But there was a solution, a surgeon at Stanford Hospital told me a week later, speaking slowly so I could read his lips. I could have a computer surgically installed in my skull. A cochlear implant, as it is known, would trigger my auditory nerves with 16 electrodes that snaked inside my inner ear. It seemed drastic, and the $50,000 price tag was a dozen times more expensive than a high-end hearing aid. I went home and cried. Then I said yes.

It gets better. I recommend you read the rest.
[Wired, Photos: CT scan: Valley Radiology; Matt Hoyle]

Listening Test: It's music tech week at Gizmodo.

The backstory:

In February 2003, Notarbartolo was arrested for heading a ring of Italian thieves. They were accused of breaking into a vault two floors beneath the Antwerp Diamond Center and making off with at least $100 million worth of loose diamonds, gold, jewelry, and other spoils. The vault was thought to be impenetrable. It was protected by 10 layers of security, including infrared heat detectors, Doppler radar, a magnetic field, a seismic sensor, and a lock with 100 million possible combinations. The robbery was called the heist of the century, and even now the police can't explain exactly how it was done.

Josh's meeting with Notarbartolo:

Notarbartolo sits down across from me at one of the visiting room's two dozen small rectangular tables. He has an intimidating reputation. The Italian anti-Mafia police contend he is tied to the Sicilian mob, that his cousin was tapped to be the next the capo dei capi-the head of the entire organization. Notarbartolo intends to set the record straight. He puts his hands on the table. He has had six years to think about what he is about to say.

"I may be a thief and a liar," he says in beguiling Italian-accented French. "But I am going to tell you a true story."

The Cops:

Peys and De Bruycker lead the Diamond Squad, the world's only specialized diamond police. Their beat: the labyrinthine Antwerp Diamond District. Eighty percent of the world's rough diamonds pass through this three-square-block area, which is under 24-hour police surveillance and monitored by 63 video cameras. About $3 billion worth of gem sales were reported here in 2003, but that's not counting a hidden world of handshake deals and off-ledger transactions. Business relationships follow the ancient family and religious traditions of the district's dominant Jewish and Indian dealers, known as diamantaires. In 2000, the Belgian government realized it would require a special type of cop to keep an eye on things and formed the squad. Peys and De Bruycker were the first hires.

De Bruycker called headquarters, asking for a nationwide alert: The Antwerp Diamond Center had been brazenly robbed. Then he dialed Securilink, the vault's alarm company.

"What is the status of the alarm?" he asked.

"Fully functional," the operator said, checking the signals coming in from the Diamond Center. "The vault is secure."

"Then how is it that the door is wide open and I'm standing inside the vault?" De Bruycker demanded, glancing at the devastation all around him.

The Safe:

The Door
1. Combination dial (0-99)
2. Keyed lock
3. Seismic sensor (built-in)
4. Locked steel grate
5. Magnetic sensor
6. External security camera

The Vault
7. Keypad for disarming sensors
8. Light sensor
9. Internal security camera
10. Heat/motion sensor (approximate location)

The story goes into the exact detail on how they got around all the various security measures. Amazingly, no one found the security breach til the weekend was over, but by then, the thieves were long gone. They would have made it, too, if not for one slip up on the side of the road. Read on. [The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist]

*Tip of the hat to the unsung heroes, Josh's editor, Mark Robinson, and all the designers, photographers and top editors and fact checkers on this one.

A member of the site had sent an emergency fund-raising appeal on Saturday to previous donors. But instead of hiding the email addresses, the sender accidentally put 58 addresses into the cc field, where they could be seen by all the recipients.

Someone then submitted the email to WikiLeaks with the comment "WikiLeaks leaks its own donors, aww irony. BCC next time kthx." (This person seems like an asshole).

In an effort to show its "complete impartiality," Wikileaks decided to post the email on their website. Good on them. Sure, it might make it hard to convince sources that they'll remain anonymous (if they're going to make amateur mistakes like revealing their own donors), but wouldn't sidestepping your own principles be even worse? [Wired]

Does this mean tech mags are the most likely type of magazine to survive the fact that people can get the same information online? Probably not, as PC Magazine just canceled their print edition. Maybe it's just that people still like reading Wired on the toilet? I know I do. Ashcraft's articles are the best muscle relaxant. [Gawker]

For future reference, you can basically display anything you want in Wired's image viewer, as you can see here. [Thanks Mona Nomura]

Update 2: Wired got back to us. The official story is that they're not being sued, it was just a misunderstanding by Chen. But Wired has pulled the video after reviewing Apple's complaint about it.

Update 1: Brian just tweeted that they're not being sued, but notably, Gadget Lab's video has still been taken down.

Brian actually loaned his personal MSI Wind Hackintosh for the Giz Gallery. It seems more likely that Apple is actually sending Wired a cease-and-desist rather than asking for money—telling them to pull the tutorial, which explicitly lays out step by step how to put OS X on a netbook, including trips to The Pirate Bay to get the software, diving into the notebook's guts and other grisly details in a fantastic, super-complete guide to Hackintoshing a netbook.

We'll update with more details as we get them, but be sure to check out this awesome guide to building a Hackintosh netbook in the meantime—which is now sure to be seen by more people than ever before. Way to go, Apple.