From our latest CIO Matters column on Marissa Mayer’s new role at Yaoo: “Being a female CEO at all is kind of like being a zebra in a rodeo, but being a woman in technology leadership is like being a unicorn.”

The Cybersecurity Bill is alive and well in Congress. New regulations proposed will promise tougher protection of privacy and also authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to set “mandatory standards for critical infrastructure.”

Get your tinfoil hats out: WiFi can be used to detect human presence in a room, even if that person isn’t carrying a WiFi device. Can you say “creepy”?

Note to businesses and politicians: Don’t buy your Twitter followers. People will and do notice.

“When I was your age, portable computers weighed 55 pounds and cost more than a car! You didn’t put them on your lap unless you wanted a broken femur.”

Oh Microsoft. Thanks for making women in technology feel even more objectified.

• Honda managed to hit a whopper of a successful corporate social media campaign with its Ferris Bueller revamp for the Super Bowl. Alas, Cameron is nowhere to be seen.

• With a $50 device bought off eBay, hackers can lift credit card info from the cards inside your wallet.

• Move over Seattle and Silicon Valley, the hot new tech cities include San Antonio; Greensboro, N.C.; and St. Louis.

• How serious is Apple about maintaining corporate secrets? Way serious. It creates fake projects for new engineers to work on until they can be trusted.

• Does your corporation have a corporate blog? The corporate blogging trend is on the decline, according to a recent study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Don’t worry, you can still get your blog fix right here.

• In an effort to become one of the top tech cities, should a local government sell stock to raise money for a broadband network? What the Green Bay Packers and rural England can teach the world about raising capital for technology improvements.

• Fresh Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson is wasting no time cleaning house. The Internet company has announced it is whacking 10 of its big mobile apps, like Yahoo Deals and Yahoo News.

• Twitter announced that it was going to allow country-specific censorship of Twitter posts last week. The proposed #TwitterBlackout on Saturday, however, really didn’t do anything (as one might have suspected).

These products used to be called services back in the day, when banks made enough money on their own investments that they didn’t have to wring every last nickel out of their customers in order to stay solvent.

But since when did banks ever really “get it?” Their latest foray into the real world is with Twitter. I’m not sure about you, but banking and health care are the two areas where customers should avoid communicating through Twitter. Data privacy and effective communication would be the first reasons to avoid it. As it turns out, a research firm recently looked at banks on Twitter and concluded that the social media platform is not a good tool for customer service.

One comment on the New York Times story summed it up best: “Or, perhaps banks just struggle to help customers. Scripted responses, failure to listen and trouble getting customers to the right people to help them are all standard when dealing with banks — face-to-face, phone, email, website — Twitter is just the newest arena for failure.”

• Before you stress too much about your big data analytics strategy, take heart: Bain says maybe big data is not so big.
• If you’re going to the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), swing by the Microsoft booth for old time’s sake. This show will be the industry giant’s last CES, leaving the IT world wondering if CES has become irrelevant.
• Looking to ditch the ubiquitous laptop messenger bag? Think about going Inspector Gadget with a technophile’s trench coat.
• Speaking of Redmond, fewer than 1% of U.S. Web browsers are using Internet Explorer 6.0 as the entire country leans toward the light. China, however, still sees one in four users still surfing the old beast. Just remember, gentle readers: Friends don’t let friends use the Exploder.
• Just about every blogger has decreed that 2012 will be the year of big data analytics, and just in time, we finally get a buh-bye to beta with the Hadoop 1.0 release.
• Not sure how to conceptualize all of your social media efforts? The Twitterize Yourself app from Visual.ly uses big data analytics to help you visualize your Twitter posts.
• Looking to avoid an Olympic-sized Twittergate, the London Olympic Games have banned its volunteers from discussing the games over social media platforms. Now that’s a buttoned-up social media policy!
• Customers of the so-called freemium model are more demanding than paying customers, according to developer Tyler Nichols, who found that his freemium-model customers were making him question whether his free service was even worth it.
• Attention Linux lovers! Linux 3.2 has been released, according to Sir Torvalds himself.

• Remember the calamity last March with the RSA breach? The Finnish security company figured out how the RSA breach went down, and it’s a lot less tricky than you would imagine.

• In case you hadn’t heard, Steve Jobs retired last week. We hope that he gets the well-deserved, restorative rest that he deserves. And then we hope that he gets a reality TV show, because we’ll miss the Steve Jobisms.

• Could Apple’s iPad and iPhone competitors take Jobs’ retirement as an opportunity to rally?  Sony and Nokia’s stock prices jumped right after the announcement, but time will tell.

• With Web 2.0 and the shrinking globe comes a new paradigm for how we do business — so why are we still managing with the same principles that our parents used in the Mad Men age? Jon Husband suggests that the way we lead must evolve along with technology.

• Linux turned 20 last week! It’s almost old enough to order a beer legally! Man, do we feel old now.

• Did your offices rattle and roll last week? Several earthquakes hit the U.S. on Tuesday. This cool visual representation of the earthquake Tweets really demonstrates that our first instinct after a disaster is to broadcast it to the social media networks.

• This little multiple encryption tool is so tiny that it’s adorable! Even your great aunt could manage this pocket-sized safety measure.

• One of the hackers behind the notorious group Anonymous has been charged by the authorities. The 22-year-old Brit was allegedly involved with WikiLeaks and instigating denial-of-service attacks on a host of Internet companies, including MasterCard, Visa and PayPal.

• Did you ever wonder what your life would be like if you moved to the IT version of the Emerald City? Check out this infographic from Focus for the brutal truth on salaries versus cost of living in the Silicon Valley.

• We’ve wondered aloud why there aren’t more women in IT, but the tide may be turning, thanks in part to the social network revolution and the urgings of Google Vice President Marissa Mayer.

• While the news of the U.S. debt ceiling was everywhere last week, President Obama urged Twitter users to tweet to members of Congress to urge them for a bipartisan compromise. White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer confirmed that emails and Tweets did indeed influence the course of this weekend’s events.

• Is the government tracking our physical location via our Androids and iPhones? The possibility was discussed at a confirmation hearing in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last Tuesday.  Forget RFID-proof wallets, it might be time for aluminum foil pants to be back in style.

• Hope you wrote that new iPhone 5 release date on your calendar in pencil rather than ink, as sources say that you’ll have to wait until October for the new iPhone 5 release rather than September, as was first rumored.

• Moving to Gmail: Want to stand out in a crowd of your midmarket peers? Pack your bags (top one off with a “Gmail or bust” bumper sticker) and wear an “I heart Lotus Notes Microsoft Exchange GoogleMail” t-shirt — ’cause you’re moving to Gmail!

  A survey of 53 firms by Forrester Research Inc. showed that 36 are considering or have considered a change in their email delivery. And one Gartner analyst said that the interest in Gmail has been growing since mid-2007, with more and more people pondering the pros and cons. Our own Linda Tucci interviewed one CIO earlier in the year who moved from Lotus Notes to Gmail and estimated saving about $500,000 in capital and operating costs over five years, and another $400,000 in labor. So bring some scissors — because you’ll also be cutting costs.

• Twitter Fail Whale: Going as the Twitter blue bird is so cliché. When Twitter experiences an outage, users see the “fail whale” error message — an illustration of red birds lifting a whale from the ocean along with the text “Too many tweets! Please wait a moment and try again.” Tie a few red, helium-filled balloons to your body and display the error message across your chest.

  Stand as the constant reminder of the potential trouble brewing behind that wide-eyed blue bird. Pose the question, “Is using Twitter always right for the enterprise, or is it a risk to a business?” And keep a list of the threats posed by Twitter, including data leakage, inappropriate content and lack of IT control. Make a splash in the office!

• Disaster recovery zombie: Zombies are in, disaster recovery is dead. Take advantage of this opportunity to put a unique spin on an oldie but goodie. Auto failover, redundant data and more emphasis on business continuity are moving CIOs away from the need to recover data (restoring thousands of servers leaves room for mistakes, mishaps and corrupted data) and on to the importance of continuous operations — made more accessible via virtualization.

  Go for the zombie makeup, the telltale strut and then cover yourself in disaster recovery plans (Post-Its may make a revival here).

• Lean thinking in IT: Doing more with less, reducing waste and focusing on customer satisfaction is what Lean IT is all about — so keep this one simple. Wear a plain outfit you made yourself from recycled materials (props for going green), lean wherever you can and offer tidbits of advice such as:
  – Don’t take maintenance agreements as set in stone. You can’t get discounts without asking.
  – Avoid using a single source. You’ll see more innovation by using multiple vendors.
  – Collaborate. Communication is key to compress cycle times.

  Buddy up with colleagues wearing Six Sigma black belt and ITIL v3 framework costumes for a real party – the A+(service) Team!

As for what my costume will be this year, I’m still deciding (and looking for suggestions!) Have any great ideas? Let me know via email, @kcaretta on Twitter or post a comment below.