If anyone knows about the ego and eccentricities of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, it’s company co-founder Steve Wozniak.

So there’s a certain poetic thrill about Woz agreeing to introduce author Dan Lyons — better known as Fake Steve Jobs — at Lyons’ upcoming book-signing at Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park. Will Woz spill any secrets about ol’ Jobso? We can only hope.

Woz is a frequent target of Lyons’ humor in his popular parody blog, “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs,” which purports to reveal the innermost thoughts of the Apple boss. (Read my recent interview with Fake Steve in which he discusses Al Gore, Larry Ellison, Carly Fiorina and his new book, “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody.”)

Just today, Fake Steve called Woz “a bitter old dude” who is “jealous of my success.” Alongside the entry ran the above photo of Woz in a goofy hat.

I say, hats off to Woz for having a sense of humor. You can meet the legend himself at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park.

(Photo of Steve Wozniak courtesy of The Unofficial Apple Weblog)

(Nov. 2 UPDATE: A coalition of consumer groups and legal scholars has formally asked the FCC to stop Comcast from interfering with file-sharing programs and pay fines for every affected subscriber, reports the Associated Press.) 

In my Sunday column, I criticized cable giant Comcast’s efforts to interrupt some file transfers made using peer-to-peer file-sharing technology. In my view, Comcast is discriminating against one particular technology, and that violates the principles of “net neutrality” that are important to the Internet’s future.

Comcast’s meddling with P2P appears to be just the tip of the iceberg, judging by reader comments on the column and an earlier blog post, e-mails sent directly to me and blog posts elsewhere on the Web.

Some people complain that Comcast is blocking direct file transfers between two people. Others say that online games are being slowed down. (In an interview with me last week, Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager for online services, steadfastly denied that the company interrrupts any traffic other than P2P transfers.)

Quite a few people say it’s not just Comcast that blocks or slow down certain Internet traffic — other access providers, such as AT&T and Earthlink, seem to be doing it, too.

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Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, has hit a new low in its already lousy customer service: it has now admitted that some Internet data transfers are more equal than others.

In a great expose published last week, Peter Svensson of the Associated Press found that Comcast is deliberately interfering with customers who are using peer-to-peer file-sharing programs like BitTorrent and Gnutella to exchange large files. Peer-to-peer programs establish direct connections between individual computers and are typically used to share video and audio files, both legal and illegal.

The AP found that when network traffic is high, Comcast breaks peer-to-peer connections by sending false messages to each computer:

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer—it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good-bye.”

Is this why people pay Comcast double or triple the price of competitors’ DSL offerings? So their activity will be interrupted whenever Comcast feels like it?

Comcast says such disconnect messages only slow down, not block, file transfers and are intended to protect the network from abuse by heavy file swappers. But testing by the AP and the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that the interference is more extensive than Comcast claims. Certain other programs, such as Lotus Notes, have also been hindered by Comcast.

I’m working on a column for the newspaper about the company’s behavior and what, if anything, we can do about it. If you’ve had any personal experiences with Comcast mysteriously interfering with large data transfers, I’d love to hear from you. (If you’d like to be interviewed, please e-mail me at vgoel@mercurynews.com with your contact information.)

After steering umpteen thousands of homeowners into overpriced, subprime mortgages they didn’t need, Countrywide Financial is finally beginning to clean up its act.

As I discuss in my Wednesday column, the nation’s largest mortgage lender, said it will cut the interest rates or renegotiate 82,000 subprime mortgages with a principal value of $16 billion. Although that’s less than 1 in 20 of the company’s delinquent loans, it will help a lot of homeowners with decent credit and good incomes keep their homes.

It’s smart business for Countrywide, which is in serious financial distress and needs to salvage as many loans as it can. It also earns the Calabasas, Calif., lender a few “halo points” to offset its diabolical business practices (check out this fabulous New York Times story to understand exactly how the Countrywide machine operated).

But it will take a whole lot more good deeds to offset all the damage Countrywide and its fellow subprime lenders wreaked on their customers. Let’s hope this is just the beginning of the industry’s contrition.

Google is gaga about space.

It’s not just the Lunar X Prize for the first and second private unmanned robots to land on the moon (click here for more on the contest).

As I lay out in my Sunday column, the Mountain View king of Internet search has more space-related projects than the solar system has planets, from putting up maps of Mars to scanning all of NASA’s photos and documents. It’s paying the U.S. space agency about $3 million a year to fund 15 researchers doing odd projects, like trying to turn algae in the South Bay into a sustainable energy source. The company has even hired a real spacewalker, former astronaut Ed Lu.

What does outer space have to do with Google’s core business? Not much, at least directly. Google doesn’t currently put ads on its space pages and products, so it gets no revenue from them.

But making, say, photos from the Apollo mission easily accessible does subtly reinforce Google’s brand, especially with impressionable young people. They will quickly learn, if they haven’t already, that they want to find information about anything, their first stop should be Google.

We’ve all had those moments with the cable company, or the phone company, or the power company, when their customer service is SO godawful that we wish we could do something with more impact than screaming into the phone.

Mona Shaw, a 75-year-old Comcast customer in Virginia, lived the fantasy. After the cable giant failed to properly install its “Triple Play” phone-modem-TV service in her home despite three appointments in one week, Shaw went down to her local Comcast office with her husband. The first time, the customer-disservice staff made her wait two hours on a bench to talk to a manager, then perkily informed her that the manager had gone home for the day.

After mulling the company’s outrageous behavior for a few days, the retired Air Force nurse returned to the office — with a claw hammer. She marched in and whacked a keyboard. She bashed a monitor. She smashed a phone. “After I hit the keyboard, I turned to this blonde who had been there the previous Friday, the one who told me to wait for the manager, and I said, ‘Now do I have your attention?’ ” recalled Shaw, who recounted the whole tale to the Washington Post.

The cops came to arrest her. The ambulance came to treat her heart palpitations. Eventually, a judge gave her a three-month suspended sentence for disorderly conduct, ordered her to pay $345 in fines and restitution and issued a year-long restraining order barring her from the Comcast office.

And Shaw switched to Verizon.

Since it was launched in the summer of 2006, “The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs” has fascinated Silicon Valley. Purportedly offering the innermost thoughts of the mercurial Apple chief executive, the Fake Steve Jobs blog is actually a viciously funny parody by Dan Lyons, a Forbes technology writer who lives in the Boston area.

Lyons has never met the real Jobs. But he was having so much fun pretending to be him that he spun the idea into a short novel, “Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, a Parody” which goes on sale Monday.

I caught up with Lyons — playing the character of Fake Steve Jobs — for a tongue-in-cheek interview Monday via instant message. In it, he tells us how he felt when Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize, why he’s buddies with Larry Ellison and what he thinks about Google’s gPhone.

Below is the entire interview, with links to relevant articles and blog posts. It’s been edited just a tad for clarity and taste (hey, this is a family blog). A shorter version appeared in my newspaper column Wednesday.

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Sadly, deception, sleight of hand and outright fraud sometimes happen in the business world.

Deception was business-as-usual at many dot-coms during the bubble. Software maker Network Associates, now known as McAfee, has been involved in more accounting scandals than I can count, and some participants have been convicted of crimes. The options backdating mess – which apologists dismiss as an uproar over accounting irregularities –  is also about deception. Fundamentally, companies reported false numbers to shareholders. (I previously wrote about options backdating in general and the Brocade backdating case in particular.)

In my Sunday column, I discuss how the aiders and abettors of fraud — lawyers, accountants, human-resources managers, consultants and the like — try to avoid responsibility by saying “I just helped” or “I was just following my boss’ orders.” That excuse might get them out of legal trouble, but it doesn’t absolve them of their bad behavior.

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Woo-hoo, the gPhones are coming!

HTC, a Taiwanese maker of mobile phone handsets, will ship 50,000 Google phones by the end of 2007, according to a UBS analyst report quoted by Eric Savitz of Barron’s in his Tech Trader blog.

(3 P.M. UPDATE: I missed this earlier, but Lehman Brothers said Tuesday that Google will launch a phone in February, probably made by HTC. “Lehman believes the phone could be marketed to consumers at a price lower than $100 or potentially might be free. It expects the Google phone will offer Wi-Fi capability and a large screen,” reports the blog This Week in Consumer Electronics.)

The UBS analyst, Benjamin Schacter, says the phones will only be available to developers (and, I’m sure, a few selected Friends of Google).

Schacter says it’s unclear whether Google will ever try to produce any hardware itself. Most recent reports, including one a few days ago from the New York Times, say that the “gPhone” is really a Linux-based operating system and suite of related applications for phones that is designed to compete with Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian and Apple’s iPhone software.

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In my Wednesday column, I explore the issues surrounding the FDA’s slow approval of drugs that prolong the life of people with fatal diseases, especially cancer.

Although the piece won’t appear on the Mercury News Web site for a few more hours, here’s an advance version, annotated with useful links for people who want to learn more about this complicated and emotional topic:

If you were dying of cancer and there were an experimental drug that could give you an extra six months to live, you’d want access to it.

You’d still want it even if it had awful side effects, like turning your skin green and making your fingernails fall off — which can happen to people taking Xcytrin, a drug from a Sunnyvale company that shows promise for treating brain lesions caused by the spread of lung cancer.

But is it the government’s responsibility to make it easier for you to get such life-prolonging therapies, even if they cost tens of thousands of dollars a year?

That’s the question the Food and Drug Administration, Congress and the courts are wrestling with as some drugmakers and patient-rights groups crusade for more flexible rules in evaluating new drugs for terminal diseases.

We all want the best medicine available for ourselves and our loved ones. Yet we don’t want to subsidize ineffectual treatments by paying higher hospital bills and insurance premiums. And we certainly don’t want the government rushing to approve drugs that aren’t safe.

The evidence suggests that when it comes to approving drugs for fatal diseases, especially cancer, regulators at the FDA are being too cautious.

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