Sorry, but quoting from the Daily Mail means nothing. It's a right wing tabloid with no expertise in reporting on technical matters. If they had managed to actually use their "fake card" to fool a real system, that would be different. If the experts had published their data in a peer-reviewed smartcard security journal, then it would be clear exactly whether the system had been broken. But "The Daily Mail says they broke the ID card system" is not hard evidence that they a) understood what the experts had done and b) reported it accurately.
I doubt there is a private key on the cards. The card data will be signed by a special server with a secure Hardware Security Module crypto device which makes reading the key impossible. The server will be kept in a physically secure room. Of course, it's possible that someone could gain access to this PC, discover a physical flaw, and extract the key. It is, however, highly unlikely.
Reminds me of this story. Every CA has to keep its private key private, and Thawte etc. have invested a lot of money in making sure that it stays this way. Don't just assume that it isn't possible.
Except the man who supposedly modified the data has previously denied that he can do it. It's not his fault that the technologically ignorant media (Daily Mail) chose to bash the Labour government by claiming that's what happened.
Unfortunately, a number of people have interpreted the Times story to mean that van Beek altered the data on a legitimate passport chip without it being detected. Englandâ(TM)s Home Office is among those who read it this way. The Office recently responded to the story by denying that anyone can change data on a passport chip without it being detected.
In fact, van Beek says he didn't change data on a passport chip.
So van Beek denies that he can actually change the data, and yet the Daily Mail say he can? Hmmm.
Also, the British government isn't in the business of biometric chip design - the card was actually designed by the Thales Group. Blame the government for the policy, but if there was a technology screw up, blame Thales.
In fact, the Daily Mail article says they used Jeroen van Beek's method of loading the card with data - however, the Wired article claims this is not actually what happens:
Unfortunately, a number of people have interpreted the Times story to mean that van Beek altered the data on a legitimate passport chip without it being detected. Englandâ(TM)s Home Office is among those who read it this way. The Office recently responded to the story by denying that anyone can change data on a passport chip without it being detected.
In fact, van Beek says he didnâ(TM)t change data on a passport chip.
The researcher used a mobile phone to clone the card, suggesting that the card itself uses the same GSM SIM card protocols for reading and writing the data area. Probably the data is held in a 'phonebook' style bit of memory. Now here's the thing - people have been able to backup and modify the data on GSM cards for years - but this is not the same thing as cloning a GSM card.
If this is anything like the digital passports, then there is a signature. You can generate a fake passport card with your own photo and ID, and you can even generate your own signing certificate, sign the card, then stick it into an automated machine and it will show your fake ID+photo. There's an Wired article detailing the process. However, you can not travel on one of these - the architecture allows every nation to have its own Certification Authority, but the passport readers have to be set up to accept it. There's no way to become your own CA, and then magically get your card accepted.
So, back to the story. It looks as though it's easy to update the data on this card. So what? Until they demonstrate that the data on the card can actually be used to do something nefarious (like authenticate yourself as another person to claim benefits) without setting off alarms the moment the card is plugged into the actual system, then what threat is this? How do we even know that the cloned card is a true copy - the Daily Mail isn't exactly known for its rigorous approach to science news.
I would argue that talking to people who are interested in the same things that you are is not the same thing as schmoozing. Schmoozing implies that the main aim of talking is to gain some benefit for yourself ie. you are faking your interest. If you are genuinely interested in the work that someone else is doing, then you don't need to fake an interest, and your conversation will be based around a common interest, rather than self interest.
I recommend reading this article: How to do what you love. There is a lot of truth in it. Getting your dream job is a matter of persistence, being willing to apply to companies, building contacts, and realising that you are unlikely to end up in your dream job straight away, it takes years of working towards the goal before it comes within reach:
I know lots of people who are not willing to relocate - this is a big problem, because their dream jobs generally aren't in the place they currently live. I know a handful of people who've actually been willing to relocate their entire lives for their career, whether it is moving across the country, or to another (off the top of my head, I have friends who relocated to Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Switzerland, Singapore, New York..). In every case, relocating brought them a slightly better job initially, and a hugely better job 5 years later. In contrast, I know a lot of people who graduated in their home cities, stayed there, and complain constantly about their jobs.
I know one guy who always wanted to work in Formula 1. He got an engineering degree, but there are tens of thousands of people with those who want to work in F1, and who have more experience. He then worked for a standard engineering company for a few years, whilst writing applications to any company involved in the automotive trade. He also travelled, met some guys who ran their own small teams, made contacts, offered to work for free during his summers, etc. Eventually he got taken on by a tier 1 automotive company, and from that point he managed to work his way from an engineer up to senior management within 8 years. Now, he still isn't doing what he wants to do, but he still has his goal, he has better contacts than he's ever had, and he has years of experience to call on. He isn't there yet, and may never get there, but at least he has maximised the probability that his goal will be achieved. How many of the rest of us can say that?
Fact remains that doing honest and hard work brings you NOTHING. You must be a quack, a liar and just basically leech everything out of the company that you possibly can.
Sounds like you're working for large corporations where that kind of behaviour can go unchecked. In a small company, you'd be thrown out very quickly.
It's even more frequent in socialist-minded Europe (Russia included), where more than half of population have higher education (because it's mostly free, especially in post-communist countries). Then everyone expects to get an "advanced" job and despises menial labour or "low-level" technical jobs (like say, a car technician).
This is not true, I don't know anyone who fills that description. For example, plumbers are often paid more than people with degrees - there were even stories a few years ago of people dropping out from Computer Science courses at prestigious universities like Cambridge and Oxford to work as plumbers and car mechanics.
US unemployment: 9.5% UK unemployment: 7.6%
It all results in high unemployment ("advanced" jobs are rare by definition) for European "aborigines", while uneducated (but willing to work everywhere) migrants fill the labour market gap.
How is this different from Mexican immigrants in the US? What is that statistic - one third of Californian jobs is filled by a (legal or illegal) Mexican immigrant, and the economy would collapse if they actually threw out all the illegals? Something like that... There is no European nation that has seen the tide of immigration that the US has - in fact, almost every US citizens is descended from immigrants!
As far as a paranoid North Korean is concerned, that was what assured destruction and kept the US from making the first strike. A nutty concern, of course, but let's face it, those North Koreans are a nutty bunch.
I don't think concerns over a nuclear first strike by the US are "nutty". The US has previously threatened Iran with a nuclear first strike, and I believe they've used very similar language and threats against North Korea. It might not be probable, especially so now that Obama has replaced Bush, but the concept of a US first strike is definitely possible (remember "No options are off the table." in response to the first strike nuke question?)
And the "Mutually Assured Destruction" of course doesn't apply to the United States - nobody is thinking that N.Korea is a direct military threat to the US (well, apart from some right wing radicals). The MAD concept is applied to N.Korea and S.Korea, not the US.
Gun ownership has been regulated in Britain for hundreds of years. Wikipedia has some info. The gun enthusiast site you quote misrepresents the level of gun ownership at the time - it was never commonplace for the average man to own a gun in Britain. Even during wartime, British citizens were not allowed to own guns - during the American war of independence there was a petition in the wake of John Paul Jones threatening the British mainland for British citizens to be allowed to own guns for self-defense, but nothing came of it. After the World Wars it was mandatory for returning soldiers to hand back their guns. Incidentally, the months following the end of WWII were when the highest murder rate ever in Britain was recorded - due, apparently, to many returning soldiers discovering that their wives had found new lovers and shooting either the wives or lovers, or both.
The teacher didn't fight back because he had been instructed, as the entire faculty had been, to not do so as the school would face a lawsuit if a teacher injured a student.
Probably this is a rule of the school rather than a national law. The teachers I know who graduated in the last ten years have been taught some "non-aggressive" self-defense - basically ways to restrain a person that won't seriously injure the person being restrained. They are not allowed to punch, kick bite etc. students. Remember that students are often under the age of adult legal responsibility - they have not matured and developed the self control that adults have (admittedly, some never will..). One teacher I know is a black belt and even he says that the last thing he would ever do is use some martial arts in the class room - because a child slapping you in the face is not a life threatening situation, and no reasonable person would believe that a teacher breaking a student's bones is justified.
Of course, this is in a relatively safe country. In the United States, where many students own guns and could easily slaughter their classmates, things may be different.
A crapload of lawsuits against the schools happened.
Citation? A friend of mine is a teacher, he says a phone ringing in class is very common these days, some of the kids even do it deliberately to look cool. He is allowed to (and does) confiscate the phones. He usually returns it at the end of the lesson, or if it's a repeat offender or some kid being smart at the end of the day. No phone for a day = not cool. The kids quickly learn to turn them off.
Of course, it is possible that in some countries confiscating phones is actually not allowed...
The New Scientist article actually states in the second paragraph:
The total amount of solar energy reaching Earth can vary due to changes in the Sun's output, such as those associated with sunspots, or in Earth's orbit.
Maybe you should read more carefully next time, instead of jumping to outraged conclusions.
The global surface temperature is a part of the bigger picture - just because the oceans store the majority of heat, this does not imply that the global surface temperature is useless. As for the "Hockey Stick": Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong, quotes:
The conclusion that we are making the world warmer certainly does not depend on reconstructions of temperature prior to direct records.
And:
Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
The "Hockey Stick" was investigated by the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found:
the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.
Of course, if you believe that the US National Academy of Science is in on the conspiracy, then this is what you'd expect them to say!
oh, well if a socialist blog with a sciency sounding name sais its myth, then it must be..
New Scientist is one of the leading science publications in the popular press - it has a readership of almost a million people worldwide. It is very popular with academics and universities - most science departments around here have their own subscriptions and there's almost always a shared copy available for reading over coffee.
As the name suggests, New Scientist is a non-political publication that focuses on the latest developments and news in science. Bizarrely, the fact that it does focus on science, and is popular with academics and university researchers, probably make you think that it is even more "socialist".
I wonder why these discredited myths keep getting moderated up on Slashdot time and time again - it's almost as if there's a conspiracy to make skeptics look ill-informed.
What a funny world we live in where a gay guy raised by straight parents and with straight grandparents and who is not descended from anyone ever enslaved or oppressed, could be considered some oppressed minority. Or... maybe it is possible for an individual to have their own experiences distinct from those of their immediate ancestors, and thus experience oppression even though their parents didn't?
There is another possibility: a British citizen is surprised that Freedom of Information Act requests can be made by foreigners who pay no tax in the UK, and those requests will be considered as legitimate by the British authorities. I'm pretty sure that the US government wouldn't respect a FOI request from a British citizen...
What you propose sounds like a good idea hypothetically, but realistically, the various governments of the world fund the vast majority of post-graduate R&D. If the results of that R&D are released under the public domain, then there will be less value in taking that work further commercially. Example: Google - if Sergey Brin and Larry Page had been forced to release the search engine source code they developed as research students it would've most likely been picked up and integrated into Altavista (the most popular search engine at the time) and there would be no Google.
Having said that, I can also see a lot of benefits of forcing all research to be public domain. The ability to easily reproduce others work and "stand on the shoulders of giants" might create a very competitive free market of ideas.
Getting back to the subject at hand - it is possible that some of the temperature data was gathered by private companies rather than being funded through taxation. It is also possible that some countries may use the British model of for-profit companies partly funded through taxation (like Ordnance Survey), in which case the issue is more complex.
Journals that require you to freely license all data to reproduce an experiment are in the minority in the computing industry. Intel, Microsoft, etc. publish hundreds of papers every year without releasing their simulators or data. Their position is that you could reproduce their research by writing your own simulators, designing your own CPU, and collecting your own data etc. Of course, this is prohibitive for most people, and hence unlikely to be done. It's not a great situation since the exact results can't be reproduced, but on the other hand, corporations with valuable "intellectual property" are unlikely to publish in journals that require any of that property to be released publically.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but quoting from the Daily Mail means nothing. It's a right wing tabloid with no expertise in reporting on technical matters. If they had managed to actually use their "fake card" to fool a real system, that would be different. If the experts had published their data in a peer-reviewed smartcard security journal, then it would be clear exactly whether the system had been broken. But "The Daily Mail says they broke the ID card system" is not hard evidence that they a) understood what the experts had done and b) reported it accurately.
I doubt there is a private key on the cards. The card data will be signed by a special server with a secure Hardware Security Module crypto device which makes reading the key impossible. The server will be kept in a physically secure room. Of course, it's possible that someone could gain access to this PC, discover a physical flaw, and extract the key. It is, however, highly unlikely.
Reminds me of this story. Every CA has to keep its private key private, and Thawte etc. have invested a lot of money in making sure that it stays this way. Don't just assume that it isn't possible.
Except the man who supposedly modified the data has previously denied that he can do it. It's not his fault that the technologically ignorant media (Daily Mail) chose to bash the Labour government by claiming that's what happened.
Unfortunately, a number of people have interpreted the Times story to mean that van Beek altered the data on a legitimate passport chip without it being detected. Englandâ(TM)s Home Office is among those who read it this way. The Office recently responded to the story by denying that anyone can change data on a passport chip without it being detected.
In fact, van Beek says he didn't change data on a passport chip.
From a previous article on cloning e-passports: In fact, van Beek says he didn't change data on a passport chip.
So van Beek denies that he can actually change the data, and yet the Daily Mail say he can? Hmmm.
Also, the British government isn't in the business of biometric chip design - the card was actually designed by the Thales Group. Blame the government for the policy, but if there was a technology screw up, blame Thales.
In fact, the Daily Mail article says they used Jeroen van Beek's method of loading the card with data - however, the Wired article claims this is not actually what happens:
Unfortunately, a number of people have interpreted the Times story to mean that van Beek altered the data on a legitimate passport chip without it being detected. Englandâ(TM)s Home Office is among those who read it this way. The Office recently responded to the story by denying that anyone can change data on a passport chip without it being detected.
In fact, van Beek says he didnâ(TM)t change data on a passport chip.
The researcher used a mobile phone to clone the card, suggesting that the card itself uses the same GSM SIM card protocols for reading and writing the data area. Probably the data is held in a 'phonebook' style bit of memory. Now here's the thing - people have been able to backup and modify the data on GSM cards for years - but this is not the same thing as cloning a GSM card.
If this is anything like the digital passports, then there is a signature. You can generate a fake passport card with your own photo and ID, and you can even generate your own signing certificate, sign the card, then stick it into an automated machine and it will show your fake ID+photo. There's an Wired article detailing the process. However, you can not travel on one of these - the architecture allows every nation to have its own Certification Authority, but the passport readers have to be set up to accept it. There's no way to become your own CA, and then magically get your card accepted.
So, back to the story. It looks as though it's easy to update the data on this card. So what? Until they demonstrate that the data on the card can actually be used to do something nefarious (like authenticate yourself as another person to claim benefits) without setting off alarms the moment the card is plugged into the actual system, then what threat is this? How do we even know that the cloned card is a true copy - the Daily Mail isn't exactly known for its rigorous approach to science news.
I would argue that talking to people who are interested in the same things that you are is not the same thing as schmoozing. Schmoozing implies that the main aim of talking is to gain some benefit for yourself ie. you are faking your interest. If you are genuinely interested in the work that someone else is doing, then you don't need to fake an interest, and your conversation will be based around a common interest, rather than self interest.
I recommend reading this article: How to do what you love. There is a lot of truth in it. Getting your dream job is a matter of persistence, being willing to apply to companies, building contacts, and realising that you are unlikely to end up in your dream job straight away, it takes years of working towards the goal before it comes within reach:
Fact remains that doing honest and hard work brings you NOTHING. You must be a quack, a liar and just basically leech everything out of the company that you possibly can.
Sounds like you're working for large corporations where that kind of behaviour can go unchecked. In a small company, you'd be thrown out very quickly.
It's even more frequent in socialist-minded Europe (Russia included), where more than half of population have higher education (because it's mostly free, especially in post-communist countries). Then everyone expects to get an "advanced" job and despises menial labour or "low-level" technical jobs (like say, a car technician).
This is not true, I don't know anyone who fills that description. For example, plumbers are often paid more than people with degrees - there were even stories a few years ago of people dropping out from Computer Science courses at prestigious universities like Cambridge and Oxford to work as plumbers and car mechanics.
US unemployment: 9.5%
UK unemployment: 7.6%
It all results in high unemployment ("advanced" jobs are rare by definition) for European "aborigines", while uneducated (but willing to work everywhere) migrants fill the labour market gap.
How is this different from Mexican immigrants in the US? What is that statistic - one third of Californian jobs is filled by a (legal or illegal) Mexican immigrant, and the economy would collapse if they actually threw out all the illegals? Something like that... There is no European nation that has seen the tide of immigration that the US has - in fact, almost every US citizens is descended from immigrants!
As far as a paranoid North Korean is concerned, that was what assured destruction and kept the US from making the first strike. A nutty concern, of course, but let's face it, those North Koreans are a nutty bunch.
I don't think concerns over a nuclear first strike by the US are "nutty". The US has previously threatened Iran with a nuclear first strike, and I believe they've used very similar language and threats against North Korea. It might not be probable, especially so now that Obama has replaced Bush, but the concept of a US first strike is definitely possible (remember "No options are off the table." in response to the first strike nuke question?)
And the "Mutually Assured Destruction" of course doesn't apply to the United States - nobody is thinking that N.Korea is a direct military threat to the US (well, apart from some right wing radicals). The MAD concept is applied to N.Korea and S.Korea, not the US.
Or Konqueror?
Bah.
Gun ownership has been regulated in Britain for hundreds of years. Wikipedia has some info. The gun enthusiast site you quote misrepresents the level of gun ownership at the time - it was never commonplace for the average man to own a gun in Britain. Even during wartime, British citizens were not allowed to own guns - during the American war of independence there was a petition in the wake of John Paul Jones threatening the British mainland for British citizens to be allowed to own guns for self-defense, but nothing came of it. After the World Wars it was mandatory for returning soldiers to hand back their guns. Incidentally, the months following the end of WWII were when the highest murder rate ever in Britain was recorded - due, apparently, to many returning soldiers discovering that their wives had found new lovers and shooting either the wives or lovers, or both.
The teacher didn't fight back because he had been instructed, as the entire faculty had been, to not do so as the school would face a lawsuit if a teacher injured a student.
Probably this is a rule of the school rather than a national law. The teachers I know who graduated in the last ten years have been taught some "non-aggressive" self-defense - basically ways to restrain a person that won't seriously injure the person being restrained. They are not allowed to punch, kick bite etc. students. Remember that students are often under the age of adult legal responsibility - they have not matured and developed the self control that adults have (admittedly, some never will..). One teacher I know is a black belt and even he says that the last thing he would ever do is use some martial arts in the class room - because a child slapping you in the face is not a life threatening situation, and no reasonable person would believe that a teacher breaking a student's bones is justified.
Of course, this is in a relatively safe country. In the United States, where many students own guns and could easily slaughter their classmates, things may be different.
A crapload of lawsuits against the schools happened.
Citation? A friend of mine is a teacher, he says a phone ringing in class is very common these days, some of the kids even do it deliberately to look cool. He is allowed to (and does) confiscate the phones. He usually returns it at the end of the lesson, or if it's a repeat offender or some kid being smart at the end of the day. No phone for a day = not cool. The kids quickly learn to turn them off.
Of course, it is possible that in some countries confiscating phones is actually not allowed...
The New Scientist article actually states in the second paragraph:
The total amount of solar energy reaching Earth can vary due to changes in the Sun's output, such as those associated with sunspots, or in Earth's orbit.
Maybe you should read more carefully next time, instead of jumping to outraged conclusions.
The global surface temperature is a part of the bigger picture - just because the oceans store the majority of heat, this does not imply that the global surface temperature is useless. As for the "Hockey Stick": Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong, quotes:
The conclusion that we are making the world warmer certainly does not depend on reconstructions of temperature prior to direct records.
And:
Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
The "Hockey Stick" was investigated by the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found:
the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.
Of course, if you believe that the US National Academy of Science is in on the conspiracy, then this is what you'd expect them to say!
oh, well if a socialist blog with a sciency sounding name sais its myth, then it must be..
New Scientist is one of the leading science publications in the popular press - it has a readership of almost a million people worldwide. It is very popular with academics and universities - most science departments around here have their own subscriptions and there's almost always a shared copy available for reading over coffee.
As the name suggests, New Scientist is a non-political publication that focuses on the latest developments and news in science. Bizarrely, the fact that it does focus on science, and is popular with academics and university researchers, probably make you think that it is even more "socialist".
people like you keep providing links to 'discredit' them that are complete BS.
Ah, yes, It's all a big conspiracy! And New Scientist is in on it!
In fact, if you had read beyond the first few paragraphs you would have answered your own question:
As a result, the planet is gaining as much heat from the sun as usual but losing less heat every year as greenhouse gas levels rise...
How do we know? Because the oceans are getting warmer.
and:
Since the 1960s, over 90% of the excess heat due to higher greenhouse gas levels has gone into the oceans, and just 3% into warming the atmosphere
Climate myths: The cooling after 1940 shows CO2 does not cause warming
Climate myths: The lower atmosphere is cooling, not warming
Climate myths: Global warming stopped in 1998
I'm surprised you didn't mention Mars and Pluto.
I wonder why these discredited myths keep getting moderated up on Slashdot time and time again - it's almost as if there's a conspiracy to make skeptics look ill-informed.
Climate myths: It's all a conspiracy
Climate myths: Global warming is down to the Sun, not humans
Climate myths: Mars and Pluto are warming too
Why do these discredited myths get moderated up on Slashdot again and again? Seriously.
i figure Obama isn't black, as black suggests being a descendant of slaves.
It does? When did this global enslavement of black people occur?
What a funny world we live in where a gay guy raised by straight parents and with straight grandparents and who is not descended from anyone ever enslaved or oppressed, could be considered some oppressed minority. Or... maybe it is possible for an individual to have their own experiences distinct from those of their immediate ancestors, and thus experience oppression even though their parents didn't?
There is another possibility: a British citizen is surprised that Freedom of Information Act requests can be made by foreigners who pay no tax in the UK, and those requests will be considered as legitimate by the British authorities. I'm pretty sure that the US government wouldn't respect a FOI request from a British citizen...
What you propose sounds like a good idea hypothetically, but realistically, the various governments of the world fund the vast majority of post-graduate R&D. If the results of that R&D are released under the public domain, then there will be less value in taking that work further commercially. Example: Google - if Sergey Brin and Larry Page had been forced to release the search engine source code they developed as research students it would've most likely been picked up and integrated into Altavista (the most popular search engine at the time) and there would be no Google.
Having said that, I can also see a lot of benefits of forcing all research to be public domain. The ability to easily reproduce others work and "stand on the shoulders of giants" might create a very competitive free market of ideas.
Getting back to the subject at hand - it is possible that some of the temperature data was gathered by private companies rather than being funded through taxation. It is also possible that some countries may use the British model of for-profit companies partly funded through taxation (like Ordnance Survey), in which case the issue is more complex.
Journals that require you to freely license all data to reproduce an experiment are in the minority in the computing industry. Intel, Microsoft, etc. publish hundreds of papers every year without releasing their simulators or data. Their position is that you could reproduce their research by writing your own simulators, designing your own CPU, and collecting your own data etc. Of course, this is prohibitive for most people, and hence unlikely to be done. It's not a great situation since the exact results can't be reproduced, but on the other hand, corporations with valuable "intellectual property" are unlikely to publish in journals that require any of that property to be released publically.