I'm in conflict...
by
chrisseaton
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"national ID card" : bad Java : good
Re:I'm in conflict...
by
stuffman64
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
"national ID card" : bad
I agree that a national ID card is bad; we've been over it many times before. However, I am all for a national standard for driver's licences. I work at a fairly busy convience store at Penn State University, and oftentimes I have the privledge (if you can call it that) of selling cigarettes to help college students kill themselves faster. Since the town also has quite a large secondary school system, it is absolutely necessary to card everyone who buys cigarettes as not to sell to minors.
Checking licences is quick, but is not as convienient as you may think. Since many students are out of state, I see at least 7 different states' licences (and thier many variations) at each shift. Every state has a different layout, orientation, and material (for instance, New Jersey licences seem to be nothing more than laminated paper, while PA licences are thick plastic cards). Worse yet, no state ever puts the date of birth in the same spot. While this may not seem like a problem at first, it is quite time consuming to constantly scan cards for DOB, picture, and expiration (as you cannot sell cigarettes to someone with an expired license).
If everything was standardized, things would be much less time consuming. I know people become mighty frustrated when they have to hurry off to get drunk with their friends but need thier smokes right now. What would be so hard about having a standard layout? States could still embellish and add thier own features for security or other reasons, but to anyone who works with IDs all day, this would surely make life easier. The whole vertical layout for people under 21 is also a good idea, as it is really easy to tell if someone is of age by the orientation of the license, but it seems as this may be too easy to fake. Any ideas?
-- ---
At my sig, unleash hell.
Re:I'm in conflict...
by
nutshell42
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well, let's take a short look at my ID (German), it contains:
photograph
name
date and location of birth
nationality
date of expiry
signature
address
height
eye-color
the authority which validated it
and the date when it was printed
So, which thing exactly is so much worse about that than about your driver's license?
-- Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Re:I'm in conflict...
by
Daleks
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Java : good
Exception in thread "main" java.identity.IdentityNotFoundException:
I always thought the term smart card was a bit..Oh I don't know, unfounded? It has a digital signature, great, what happens when it's stolen? And used against the owner? I'd like to see a card that had an image of your retina so they could tell if it was you, the eye has so many patterns, its almost impossible to fake. Cosmetics can already make someone look like someone else, but they havent figured out to replicate the eye yet...
I did see Minority Report, that's very true...Identies will ALWAYS be stolen, if people are determined to do something, they will. I quote Jimmy Buffet "Keys and locks are destined to be busted." By making it harder for the average person (or con "artist") to do some illegal, they'll work that much harder..
Re:Well,
by
primus_sucks
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Personally I've had two identity theft incidents. One time someone in Japan (I'm in the US) used my credit/debit card number and cleaned out several thousand dollars from my bank account. Another incident, someone printed or obtained fake checks with my name on them. With the present system anyone with a laser printer can make checks and anyone who works at restaurant or gas station can collect credit card numbers. At least this system will hopefully make it harder. And hopefully if someone does steal your card or something you won't be held accountable for damages.
Java based???
by
Beetjebrak
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Does a smartcard actually run a Java VM? I've always been under the impression that smartcards contain only data, and that applications run on the machines you plug your card into. Java-based smartcards sound like marketing speak to me really.
-- Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Re:Java based???
by
c_oflynn
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There are many types of smartcards.
Some are the memory only type, where the card just has some sort of (normally secured) memory on it.
Then there are also the microcontroller cards. These cards have memory and a microcontroller built into them. You can write a program on it to do something, however you don't exactly have a lot of I/O lines or anything (just a communications link actually).
Most of the microcontroller smartcards have built-in encryption and decryption as well.
Java is pretty popular for programming smartcards, but they even have BASIC for smartcards.
The microcontroller only needs an external clock and power source, and will execute whatever program is on it.
Re:Java based???
by
Wesley+Felter
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yes, Java Cards run a crippled, stripped-down, bastardized Java VM. There are also traditional smart cards that only do crypto and data storage, and then there are fake smart cards that hold data but can't do any processing.
Re:Java based???
by
philfr
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Memory cards only contain data, some parts read-only, some parts read-write, and some parts write once. They have been used since a long time for prepaid public phone cards or access control.
Smart cards also contain a CPU, sometimes highly optimized for e.g. RSA encryption, and their data is available through a file system abstraction. Smart card suppliers call this an operating system... Multiple applications can run on these smart cards, which means you could theoretically have only one card for your ID card, your electronic purse and various loyalty cards (if your are not too worried about security/privacy issues in case of breaking into such a chip).
Memory cards are also called synchronous cards and smart cards asynchronous cards. That's because of the nature of the serial protocol they use to communicate with the device that reads them. Smart cards have a real UART embedded, and implement one of two protocols (T0 and T1) defined in ISO 7816, the second of which is fairly complex and allows to multiplex communication between multiple applications running in the card reader and their peer inside the smart card.
JavaCards embed a "JVM", but a very limited one: you can't just open a network connection or dynamically load a class. Sun specifies the precise subset of Java that corresponds to a JavaCard profile. But, yes, they run Java "cardplets"...
Please upgrade
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I am sorry sir. You can not get your prescription filled here. This Pharmacy is not Java enabled. Please wait until the next service pack release.
Thank you. Please come back soon.
Big Brother or Good Sense?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm very conflicted over the concept of a national ID system. One the one hand it could overcome many of the inadequacies of our state based identity system, like the ease of creating a viable fake. But combine a national ID system with a national database and I can just hear the Big Brother proponents rubbing their hands together in glee, as well as looking for an opportunity to persecute every illegal alien in the country. If the United States gives in to a national ID in the name of replacing an outdated system, must we at the same time provide the government with yet another tool to restrict our privacy?
It won't be long and we'll be saying "why in hell did we create an identity card?! Each person is their own identity. Cards can be stolen, altered. People cannot (undetectably).
Actually, I think you *do* get it - and unfortunately, many folks seem to be overlooking the obvious in their quest for a higher-tech and more convenient lifestyle.
There simply won't be any more guarantee that any of us are really who we claim to be, just because we hold a "smartcard" that identifies us as being a certain person.
In fact, most banks/lenders currently require 3 forms of I.D. to do such things as open a new checking account. That's because the closest thing to a guarantee of identity they have is forcing you to provide multiple proofs. Putting all the proverbial eggs in one basket, as a smartcard does, doesn't make much sense to me.
For you information: belgium allready has non-digital ID cards, which are obligatory to every citizen. You are even obligated to carry them around at any time and CAN be asked to show them to police if they have "reason" to suspect you of something.
"Jan Deprest, President of Fedict, the Federal ICT department" said in the article:
It will allow Belgian citizens to authenticate themselves in an easy and
completely secure electronic way whenever they access e-government applications.
[emphasis added]
Sounds like he's (she's?) been listening to a snake oil salesman at Sun. Last time I checked, nothing was completely secure, least of all smart cards...
What does java actuall add to an id card?
by
yintercept
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I am actually confused by the article. An "ID card" pretty much just carries data...not a full programming environment. Sounds more like business name branding.
The important part of an id card is the interface and how you access and change the information. Such an interface is first and foremost a hardware interface. Trying to say that the card belongs to computer language x doesn't make any sense.
As for functionality, would you as a business really want to record important information on a card that is easily lost, physically compromisable, and carried by a person? What businesses want is simply a verifiable id for customers. The simpler the id the better.
What's all this noise about antiquities? Try pumping an antiquity in your Surburban and see where it gets you.
Re:What does java actuall add to an id card?
by
philfr
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The ID cards are able to prove your identity. For this, they embed a private key, and calculate a signature themselves on data that is sent to them.
If they only gave this private key to the device that asked for it, they would be easy to duplicate.
Of course, you don't need Java for this, but you need a smart card with a CPU inside, and you need to develop the application that runs on that CPU.
The choice of a chipcard determines the SDK to be used for it. One of them is JavaCard...
Re:Can it be updated with GJC?
by
robslimo
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Say... by my reckoning and based on your sig, you oughta be posting AC. Freakin' troll. - - - - - - on a more serious note - - - - -
Having Read The Fine Article and a few earlier posts, I'd have to say:
(a) National ID's are bad (good) (b) Java is bad (good) (c) how the bloody hell is anyone going to make 'smart cards' smart enough to prevent [ID] theft?
If, after all these years, Hughes (DirecTV) and others have not been able to prevent signal theft using 'smart card' technology, how safe should we feel entrusting our personal identification to this tech?
"Ohh!," say some, "this is safer yet than the old methods of identifying us to our government. This is much safer than an easily forged picture ID."
But this technology *is* assumed to be 'safer'. It is assumed to be (and marketed as) 'secure'. That also means that our govn'ts may assume that it is *true*. If a transaction, waypoint in your vacation journey, or an arrest is logged in your 'Nat'l ID' account, it will be assumed to be true... because it's safe and secure technology, right? They may be much less likely to doubt any misinformation in you recored, so think again about DTV and how secure their system is. Please think.
Fundamental Flaws
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I was at an E-Gov day some months ago, where this was presented and discussed. (Vince Rijmen, of AES fame was there talking about how they solved the problems associated with e-voting). Some of the comments really scared me:
1) The keypairs on the card will be pre-generated when the citizen receives the card. IMHO a private key that has been in someone else's hands/machine is totally useless. This of course allows for involutary escrow..
2) The Belgian Federal Gov representative (Peter Strickx, ex-Sun, by total coincidence) plainly declared they do not want to have the necessary expertise in-house, but wants to outsource the whole thing (to Sun and ZETES, it now seems)
So this will put our identities (and the authentication/non-repudiation/existence of some very important personal documents) at the mercy of a couple of *private companies*, one of them American, no less, at a time when the US is governed by a madman, that gets away with secret military tribunals and illegal warmongering..
Some of the excuses, when I asked about this were that the.be gov already uses much outsourced security for its own communications!
I say this is unacceptable and an enormous security blunder. Verisign, a US company, could issue some revocations, and thereby completely stop the flow of information inside the.be gov!
Do I they want the US gov to be able to screw around with any.be citizen's identity? It would seem to be so..
Please forgive me for using AC for once, one would get paranoid for a low less...
Why do I need a Java card?
by
AndroidCat
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I mean, I've already got one of those Starbucks cards with $15 still on it!
-- One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Why is national id cards / numbers bad ?
by
Simon+Lyngshede
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Being Danish I was given a social security number when I was born, works just like a national id. My social security card work pretty much like an national id card, you sometimes need some sort of picture id in combination with the social security card.
The only thing I hate is that it doesn't include more "features". I what to use it as a credit card, drives license, access card to the university and so on. Having an all purpose id card would make my life a lot easier. Why is national id cards a bad idea? Are people afraid that the government will track them. Who really gives a fuck if it allows the government to track you with it? They could do that anyway if they really cared enough. I simply don't get it.
Please tell me why national ids are bad. Who are you people afraid of ? Im tired of hearing that national ids are bad, without being given a good reason. So fare I just heared "National id, bad" and it's every time Slashdot brings it up. Only once have I hear of misuse in Denmark and that was due of lack of security at the post office, not really something you can blame the system for.
Why is the gut reaction "bad"?
by
claes
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
In Sweden, id cards needs to conform to certain standards, that are set by the same authority that standardizes many other things (www.sis.se). I do not know the details of this, but I think it is good that it is under control of a government authority. There is nothing mandatory with carrying them around, or even having them. We don't call them national id cards either, but they are accepted as id-cards everywhere. In Sweden that is... since they don't have the nationality of the owner on them, they are no good for travelling within Schengen yet.
It all comes down in what ways you trust your government of course. In this regard I trust it. For example, the nationality thing was hotly debated, since the reason we don't have nationality is that it would be discriminating for non-swedish citizens to have their nationality on them. Or so it was argued. But the government had to change for public opinion because of this, being part of Schengen is not really good if you still need passport when travelling...
Re:From what I understand
by
nuclearmoose
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Here's the Sun Java Card site:
http://java.sun.com/products/javacard/
Lots of good info there, toolkit, spec, etc. The Java Card book from Sun Press is also pretty good.
Re:Good or bad?
by
Saib0t
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
but I'm not sure if making it a national ID card is the best idea.
As a belgian citizen, I can tell you that we already have a mandatory national ID card, so it's not much of a point.
My national ID card has this on it:
a picture
Name
Given Names
Sex
Date of Birth
Place of Birth
Signing authority
My signature
Address
ID Card Number (2 of them)
Spouse
Children names
It bears several things on it that make its counterfeiting difficult (like a nice color changing hologram-like shape of the country)
The government can easily use this against the people and the privacy concerns are enormous.
All these concerns are very legit in the USA, but from the people I have talked to, this is the "only" country where people are so afraid of being bigbrothered. I have a national ID card and I use it very seldom, and I really don't have the feeling that it is being used as a way to track my habbits down.
On the other hand, my bank uses that ID number in their files, so does my social security company (social security is built in into the belgian system, but you have to have a "company" paying your stuff), and if I could, I'd actually encourage all these government bodies who require identification at one point or another to create that database, and give access to information about me on a need basis.
The problem does not come from the traceability, these problem are a minor concern compared to the advantages.
The real problem comes from trusting your government. The belgian political landscape (if I may speak of it thus) consists in dozens of parties, with 5 or 6 big players. This ensures that the same person don't stay in power very long if they don't do a good job, and there ARE alternatives to what is in place at the moment, and it's always a coalition of several parties that is running the country. This is one of the reasons I trust my government (to a large extent).
Trust is the real problem...
--
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
Slashdot Mirror
"national ID card" : bad
Java : good
I hope the U.S. and A. uses C# for our National ID cards!
I always thought the term smart card was a bit..Oh I don't know, unfounded? It has a digital signature, great, what happens when it's stolen? And used against the owner? I'd like to see a card that had an image of your retina so they could tell if it was you, the eye has so many patterns, its almost impossible to fake. Cosmetics can already make someone look like someone else, but they havent figured out to replicate the eye yet...
Does a smartcard actually run a Java VM? I've always been under the impression that smartcards contain only data, and that applications run on the machines you plug your card into. Java-based smartcards sound like marketing speak to me really.
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
Thank you. Please come back soon.
I'm very conflicted over the concept of a national ID system. One the one hand it could overcome many of the inadequacies of our state based identity system, like the ease of creating a viable fake. But combine a national ID system with a national database and I can just hear the Big Brother proponents rubbing their hands together in glee, as well as looking for an opportunity to persecute every illegal alien in the country. If the United States gives in to a national ID in the name of replacing an outdated system, must we at the same time provide the government with yet another tool to restrict our privacy?
It won't be long and we'll be saying "why in hell did we create an identity card?! Each person is their own identity. Cards can be stolen, altered. People cannot (undetectably).
I guess I don't get it.
I use my Slashdot ID for all my identity needs.
Hmm.. maybe I shouldn't have said that.
For you information:
belgium allready has non-digital ID cards, which are obligatory to every citizen. You are even obligated to carry them around at any time and CAN be asked to show them to police if they have "reason" to suspect you of something.
You could have a look at mine, for example...
http://studwww.rug.ac.be/~bdejong/id.jpg
Sounds like he's (she's?) been listening to a snake oil salesman at Sun. Last time I checked, nothing was completely secure, least of all smart cards...
I am actually confused by the article. An "ID card" pretty much just carries data...not a full programming environment. Sounds more like business name branding.
The important part of an id card is the interface and how you access and change the information. Such an interface is first and foremost a hardware interface. Trying to say that the card belongs to computer language x doesn't make any sense.
As for functionality, would you as a business really want to record important information on a card that is easily lost, physically compromisable, and carried by a person? What businesses want is simply a verifiable id for customers. The simpler the id the better.
What's all this noise about antiquities? Try pumping an antiquity in your Surburban and see where it gets you.
Say... by my reckoning and based on your sig, you oughta be posting AC. Freakin' troll.
- - - - - - on a more serious note - - - - -
Having Read The Fine Article and a few earlier posts, I'd have to say:
(a) National ID's are bad (good)
(b) Java is bad (good)
(c) how the bloody hell is anyone going to make 'smart cards' smart enough to prevent [ID] theft?
If, after all these years, Hughes (DirecTV) and others have not been able to prevent signal theft using 'smart card' technology, how safe should we feel entrusting our personal identification to this tech?
"Ohh!," say some, "this is safer yet than the old methods of identifying us to our government. This is much safer than an easily forged picture ID."
But this technology *is* assumed to be 'safer'. It is assumed to be (and marketed as) 'secure'. That also means that our govn'ts may assume that it is *true*. If a transaction, waypoint in your vacation journey, or an arrest is logged in your 'Nat'l ID' account, it will be assumed to be true... because it's safe and secure technology, right? They may be much less likely to doubt any misinformation in you recored, so think again about DTV and how secure their system is. Please think.
I was at an E-Gov day some months ago, where this was presented and discussed. (Vince Rijmen, of AES fame was there talking about how they solved the problems associated with e-voting). Some of the comments really scared me:
.be gov already uses much outsourced security for its own communications!
.be gov!
.be citizen's identity? It would seem to be so..
1) The keypairs on the card will be pre-generated when the citizen receives the card. IMHO a private key that has been in someone else's hands/machine is totally useless. This of course allows for involutary escrow..
2) The Belgian Federal Gov representative (Peter Strickx, ex-Sun, by total coincidence) plainly declared they do not want to have the necessary expertise in-house, but wants to outsource the whole thing (to Sun and ZETES, it now seems)
So this will put our identities (and the authentication/non-repudiation/existence of some very important personal documents) at the mercy of a couple of *private companies*, one of them American, no less, at a time when the US is governed by a madman, that gets away with secret military tribunals and illegal warmongering..
Some of the excuses, when I asked about this were that the
I say this is unacceptable and an enormous security blunder. Verisign, a US company, could issue some revocations, and thereby completely stop the flow of information inside the
Do I they want the US gov to be able to screw around with any
Please forgive me for using AC for once, one would get paranoid for a low less...
I mean, I've already got one of those Starbucks cards with $15 still on it!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Being Danish I was given a social security number when I was born, works just like a national id. My social security card work pretty much like an national id card, you sometimes need some sort of picture id in combination with the social security card.
The only thing I hate is that it doesn't include more "features". I what to use it as a credit card, drives license, access card to the university and so on. Having an all purpose id card would make my life a lot easier. Why is national id cards a bad idea? Are people afraid that the government will track them. Who really gives a fuck if it allows the government to track you with it? They could do that anyway if they really cared enough. I simply don't get it.
Please tell me why national ids are bad. Who are you people afraid of ? Im tired of hearing that national ids are bad, without being given a good reason. So fare I just heared "National id, bad" and it's every time Slashdot brings it up. Only once have I hear of misuse in Denmark and that was due of lack of security at the post office, not really something you can blame the system for.
In Sweden, id cards needs to conform to certain standards, that are set by the same authority that standardizes many other things (www.sis.se). I do not know the details of this, but I think it is good that it is under control of a government authority. There is nothing mandatory with carrying them around, or even having them. We don't call them national id cards either, but they are accepted as id-cards everywhere. In Sweden that is... since they don't have the nationality of the owner on them, they are no good for travelling within Schengen yet.
It all comes down in what ways you trust your government of course. In this regard I trust it. For example, the nationality thing was hotly debated, since the reason we don't have nationality is that it would be discriminating for non-swedish citizens to have their nationality on them. Or so it was argued. But the government had to change for public opinion because of this, being part of Schengen is not really good if you still need passport when travelling...
Here's the Sun Java Card site:
http://java.sun.com/products/javacard/
Lots of good info there, toolkit, spec, etc. The Java Card book from Sun Press is also pretty good.
My national ID card has this on it:
a picture
Name
Given Names
Sex
Date of Birth
Place of Birth
Signing authority
My signature
Address
ID Card Number (2 of them)
Spouse
Children names
It bears several things on it that make its counterfeiting difficult (like a nice color changing hologram-like shape of the country)
All these concerns are very legit in the USA, but from the people I have talked to, this is the "only" country where people are so afraid of being bigbrothered. I have a national ID card and I use it very seldom, and I really don't have the feeling that it is being used as a way to track my habbits down. On the other hand, my bank uses that ID number in their files, so does my social security company (social security is built in into the belgian system, but you have to have a "company" paying your stuff), and if I could, I'd actually encourage all these government bodies who require identification at one point or another to create that database, and give access to information about me on a need basis.The problem does not come from the traceability, these problem are a minor concern compared to the advantages.
The real problem comes from trusting your government. The belgian political landscape (if I may speak of it thus) consists in dozens of parties, with 5 or 6 big players. This ensures that the same person don't stay in power very long if they don't do a good job, and there ARE alternatives to what is in place at the moment, and it's always a coalition of several parties that is running the country. This is one of the reasons I trust my government (to a large extent).
Trust is the real problem...
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence