Wait, a company that produces microprocessors also designed a compiler optimized to run best on that microprocessor? It's a conspiracy!
These changes -- they improved the performance of the compiled applications when run on the microprocessor it was designed for, correct? Even if they intentionally and "maliciously" modified their compiler so that other microprocessor designs performed more poorly, what does it matter? Shouldn't those other microprocessor companies be releasing compilers for their respective designs as well?
It's not anti-competitive for Intel to tell other microprocessor companies to shove off and build their own. They've got no right to the compiler -- however pervasive its use. At worst, the end-user will see products being released with binaries compiled specifically for their processor architecture (just like Linux does now for kernels and many packages). At worst, the companies will need to invest in designing a compiler (as Intel has done). And if it's cost prohibitive, then maybe they'll look to something that's easy to modify and adapt to their needs, like gcc and its related umbrella of tools.
There is no conspiracy: This is business. Business is inherently anti-competitive. If I'm competing with you, I want you out of the game, and just like in a video game, I will use combo attacks and drop-kick you right as you get up (repeatedly) to keep you from recovering until you throw the controller at me. That's just how the game is played. (See slashdot, we can avoid car analogies!)
...so you aren't really going to know for sure what it will do to your computer.
You're saying you don't know how to run a debugger in a VM session? or registry and file monitoring utilities? I get that analyzing machine code may be a bit of a lost art, but if you have the binary file you have everything you need to figure out what it does -- eventually. Someone will reverse-engineer it. In fact, I rather expect the authors knew this when they released it.
Okay, first, thanks for recognizing the problem. But there's no way to legislate such technical detail because volume is subjective, not objective. Do you measure the peaks? The frequency spread? What about people who have hearing problems? They have a different idea of what 'loud' is. The problem is something called "audio compression" -- which results in a higher apparent volume. TV shows use a wider dynamic range than commercials -- commercials can be heard even at very low volume levels because they occupy a very narrow frequency range.
Legislate commercials to have a lower volume level and they'll come up with other insidious ways of annoying you (ie, capturing your attention)... Like shaky-cam and that annoying slow-zoom rotating text crap. Seriously... Go to the heart of the problem: Make invasive advertising illegal and give multi-million dollar fines to anyone who distributes such content. Also... bring back Congress issuing Letters of Mark. I'll take one for the executives of Fox, kthx.
Yes, a mere 28 light years away. So all we need to do is get in the fastest spacecraft we've ever built and we can be there in just about 150,000 years.
Well, maybe not us, but bacteria could. Or... maybe bacteria came from there, and landed here. Betcha didn't think of that.
The truth is that the developing world would benefit from greater IP protection, as IP currently has functionally **no** protection in most of it.
The developing world would benefit more from spending all of their money developing infrastructure instead of licensing and importing it in exchange for their natural and human resources. Their economy is not like ours: The multiplication effect is such that for every dollar they invest in infrastructure, the return on investment would be three, even as much as five times. The multiplication effect is lower in developed countries because we are operating close to or at the production possibilities curve. Although it seems like only pennies on the dollar to license these technologies, for them it represents a major investment rather than part of the aggregate cost.
How interesting that you mention farming. The way copyright and patent law works now, it would be illegal for me to use irrigation and farming techniques any more modern than at least 1880 (150 years plus the life of the author). Think about that when people talk about the war on "piracy". It's not -- we're on the right side (by distributing this stuff for free and attacking their business model) but we're here for all the wrong reasons.
Hackers need to return to their roots: Deep down inside, we know that free access to technology is a liberating and empowering experience. We've become complacent -- certain that we'll crack whatever protection scheme they invent, and comfortable with the labeling of criminal and pirate. We think we're too hard to find, too decentralized, and it would be too expensive to take us out. That arrogance will kill this community and everything it stands for.
We need to give the disadvantaged access to the collective's knowledge. That's always been our purpose. It's the guiding principle behind open source -- and piracy and breaking copy protection is just the cheap way to avoid having to reinvent the wheel. But we have to... Because otherwise we'll have to wait through three generations of humanity growing up to have access to what we do today. We need the old school hacker mindset more now than ever before -- and we need to understand the golden age is at its end. We're about to go toe to toe with Goliath -- a worldwide cooperative of corporations, governments, and private interests with trillions of dollars at their disposal, secret treaties, courts, and increasing levels of control over the media.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not someone crying wolf. This is out there, it's real, and it's happening now -- and we are acting like The Pirate Bay and torrents are a blow against these faceless powers. We still have people like Richard Stallman and his precious GPL, and we argue over and over again about the merits of a change in language. Typical geeks -- we focus on the details and fail to see the big picture. There are over five billion people living in complete poverty, and intellectual property is one of the barriers keeping them there.
Intellectual property is an invention of the rich countries to force the poor countries into an economic model that benefits them. Knowledge has always been power, and the developed countries of the world realize that by locking up their books and restricting the free trade of information and knowledge, they can effectively keep those countries enslaved -- producing real, material goods, in exchange for imaginary ones.
That, people, is the true objective of intellectual property. You people think they care about you making pirate copies of CDs and DVDs? How pathetically self-centered! The truth is much bigger than your hard drive contents.
Since your high school civics classes obviously forgot to include it in your course of study, please allow me to introduce you to the First Amendment
They also forgot the exceptions to the First Amendment, because constitutional law is complex and has no place in a high school classroom with children that still believe that there are no losers, everything is sunshine and kittens, and basic language skills consist of "hey dood wut up? u wana cut skool n go smoke sum pot?"
Times of War.The Supreme Court has upheld on numerous occasions restrictions to speech that center around the military, particularily during times of war. It's become a clear precident that the protections afforded by the First Amendment can (and are) overlooked during wartime. There's also the "Clear and present danger" restrictions, made famous by saying free speech doesn't apply to someone yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. The Supreme Court has stated that the states could punish people who's words "by their very nature, involve danger to the public peace and to the security of the state."
Obscenity/Sex If I say "Fuck you!" -- that's obscenity. If I say "Fuck the military," then it's a political statement. If I fuck you and record it, that's pornography. If I fuck you while dressed like Lady Liberty, and you're dressed like Justice, then it has "artistic merit" and is free speech. Unfortunately, like my analogies, the laws covering obscenity and sex are equally obtuse, poorly-worded, and occasionally humorous.
Slander and Libel. I say you're a child molester. You say "bullshit!" I can't prove it. I'm not protected because I made a false statement about your character, and you're not protected because you swore at me for doing so.... And the list goes on.
it should be against the idiots who posted the document and should have known better.
A government agency responsible for securing billions of dollars in assets and millions of lives yearly now knows the exact scope and nature of a serious breach of security that otherwise wouldn't have been noticed and could have been exploited by people who are a genuine threat to national security, as opposed to a bunch of average americans who get to feel special for about five minutes. Clearly, jailing the people who exposed this is the best route, as opposed to using a little-known fund that the DHS setup to reward private citizens who contribute to anti-terrorism objectives.
The people who exposed this are heroes, not criminals. They've exposed a major security vulnerability before anyone could be hurt. Unfortunately, the reputation the TSA and DHS has when private citizens come forward to report problems with their administration of policy, or the policies themselves, is atrocious. They only option they had was a wide and public distribution -- if it could have been contained, they'd vanish right along with the problem. Moving forward the best thing to do is;
1. Establish guidelines for reporting problems with administration of their policy
(in the private sector, we euphemistically refer to these as "training opportunities"). 2. Establish guidelines for reporting problems with operational security. 3. Modify existing damage control procedures to focus more on problem resolution than image protection. 4. ACCEPTING THAT SECURITY BREACHES WILL OCCUR, and have a reporting procedure and clear chain of command
(thus far, they've shown a remarkable lack of understanding of this key concept) 5. Stop over-reacting to perceived security breaches -- it desensitizes people and worsens response time should a truly serious situation occur.
Call it the "I cried wolf too many times" story. Stories about the TSA used to make front page... now they're barely slow news day material.
The overarching objective here is to restore faith in the institution -- because the TSA has become the laughing stock of the media, and the flying public groans at the mention of it. Remember only a few years ago when the TSA was created how people said they'd willingly and happily stand in line for an hour and a half to get through the checkpoint, because they felt safer? Public opinion has dropped considerably since then -- now they're afraid they'll get the greased glove treatment if they so much as look at the equipment. When a flight attendant flips out over someone's request to have orange juice and then receives an official notice that they could be thrown in jail, charged with felonies, and be added to the no-fly list... There is a serious lack of understanding about both what security means, and the public's perception of it. And it's nobody's fault but the TSA's for allowing this to happen.
Dear My Government, It's Officers, Agents, And All Of That:
You do not own the internet. You do not control the internet. You screwed up by releasing sensitive information to the public through lawful channels, via a lawful request, that was not in any way fraudulent or deceiving. Man up to this, and figure out how to avoid the problem in the future like every other self-respecting government would -- instead of trying to throw your citizens to the wolves without a trial, or god only knows what else you're planning.
Sincerely,
A Whole Lot of Patriots
P.S. Those badges look like something out of a cereal box. Take this as an opportunity to make them actually look like something better than what you'd expect from a first year graphic design student. Or use psychic paper. Your choice.
It appears to be monochromatic and it also used nearest-approximation algorithms... Which means that the extra pieces are inserted as "random noise" once the general shapes are mapped out. Clever, but... low resolution.
reminds me of a comic i read, where some female security personnel would crank the metal detector sensitivity to 11 when a choice man showed up...
You think that's a joke? Portable breathalizers can be made to give false positives by chirping the radio while the suspect exhales. The TSA just makes the job of making an excuse a whole lot easier: Push the button. You don't need any reason beyond "seemed suspicious." Other kinds of security personnel need to manufacture a reason first.:\
Second more cynical guess: Xray machines are mostly useless and the TSA doesn't want the public to realize it's a bunch of voodoo?
The exact specifications and design limits of the machine is classified for a reason -- pictures of the operating parts give clues as to what those criterion might be. If you had photographs of the insides of the equipment you could infer the strength of the x-ray source and the resolution of the scanner, and from that you might figure out that, for example, #40 AWG wire wouldn't be visible if run it along a fiberglass housing. Or that the machine's stepper motors are only capable of moving the plates to a finite number of angles. Those are handy things to know if you wanted to get a prohibited item/device (or its components) past the scanner.
It should also be pointed out that these machines have a variety of image filters and enhancements that can be selected by the operator. The interactions between these standard operating modes and the device's limitations not being fully understood by the operator (because frankly, the training is not very technical) could be exploited.
Conclusion: It's not only a reasonable, but highly prudent, security measure.
A lack of fingerprints would be noticed. The mafia did this for awhile by burning their fingerprints off with a hot iron so as not to leave them behind at the crime scene. The FBI later discovered that as fingerprints are based on deeper layers of the skin than what's on the surface, even a person who had done thisstill left a distinctive mark that could be identified -- although it was more difficult.
It would be a lot easier to use a clear plastic covering (the "silly putty finger" school of thought) or skin grown in a petri dish over a composite material with a different imprint and then grafting it over your skin -- such temporary grafts survive a limited period of time before corroding. essentially, you make thin slits in existing tissue and then 'stitch' the graft in. Remember that the graft only has to survive for a day. Micro-perforations would make it a minimally-invasive procedure, with little scarring once the grafts have deteriorated.
To rely on other electronic systems for that reset is flawed and misses the essential nature of how people understand and use interpersonal identity.
Not everyone likes their friends, family, coworkers, or neighbors. Some people have jobs that are highly mobile. Some people prefer not having attachments to others. There are individuals that don't have a community identity of any kind. Should a person be denied access to those resources simply on the basis that they have no friends?
Officer: "Well your honor, he hadn't committed any crimes but we noticed that he had no friends."
Judge: "Good enough for me! Anyone who has no friends is clearly a threat to society. Book 'em danno."
The problem isn't technology in this case, but rather bad assumptions made by the designers and users. What you're doing when you use a biometric scanner is (most often) taking a reading and converting that into a hash. And for any given hash, there will be at least one pattern that will resolve for that hash, possibly several or many. It's the same with DNA -- we can't sequence and compare a person's entire DNA, but we know certain parts of certain genes exhibit a high degree of variability, and so we sequence those and use them for comparison.
In this case, an assumption was made that fingerprints don't change on a person. Well, using lasers and surgical techniques, they can be changed, and therefore the system can be bypassed -- not because the technology is flawed, but the assumptions made about its use were. Now that this technique has been observed, we need to add another step to the identification process: Looking for scars on the fingers that suggest surgical techniques have been applied. The fingers should be carefully inspected before fingerprinting anyway -- to identify other forms of fraud as well.
Of course, there's still the human variable: Immigration necessarily requires hundreds to hundreds of thousands of personnel to administrate the rules. And the system is only as strong as the weakest link -- or the weakest person. There will always be people that can be bribed or manipulated -- or just plain lazy, and those weaknesses can be exploited. And truthfully, it'd probably be cheaper.
As long as the government walls off access to goods and services by attempting to uniquely identify people, there'll be a market for false identification. Is the price point their system has set too low?
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, a company that produces microprocessors also designed a compiler optimized to run best on that microprocessor? It's a conspiracy!
These changes -- they improved the performance of the compiled applications when run on the microprocessor it was designed for, correct? Even if they intentionally and "maliciously" modified their compiler so that other microprocessor designs performed more poorly, what does it matter? Shouldn't those other microprocessor companies be releasing compilers for their respective designs as well?
It's not anti-competitive for Intel to tell other microprocessor companies to shove off and build their own. They've got no right to the compiler -- however pervasive its use. At worst, the end-user will see products being released with binaries compiled specifically for their processor architecture (just like Linux does now for kernels and many packages). At worst, the companies will need to invest in designing a compiler (as Intel has done). And if it's cost prohibitive, then maybe they'll look to something that's easy to modify and adapt to their needs, like gcc and its related umbrella of tools.
There is no conspiracy: This is business. Business is inherently anti-competitive. If I'm competing with you, I want you out of the game, and just like in a video game, I will use combo attacks and drop-kick you right as you get up (repeatedly) to keep you from recovering until you throw the controller at me. That's just how the game is played. (See slashdot, we can avoid car analogies!)
...so you aren't really going to know for sure what it will do to your computer.
You're saying you don't know how to run a debugger in a VM session? or registry and file monitoring utilities? I get that analyzing machine code may be a bit of a lost art, but if you have the binary file you have everything you need to figure out what it does -- eventually. Someone will reverse-engineer it. In fact, I rather expect the authors knew this when they released it.
Okay, first, thanks for recognizing the problem. But there's no way to legislate such technical detail because volume is subjective, not objective. Do you measure the peaks? The frequency spread? What about people who have hearing problems? They have a different idea of what 'loud' is. The problem is something called "audio compression" -- which results in a higher apparent volume. TV shows use a wider dynamic range than commercials -- commercials can be heard even at very low volume levels because they occupy a very narrow frequency range.
Legislate commercials to have a lower volume level and they'll come up with other insidious ways of annoying you (ie, capturing your attention)... Like shaky-cam and that annoying slow-zoom rotating text crap. Seriously... Go to the heart of the problem: Make invasive advertising illegal and give multi-million dollar fines to anyone who distributes such content. Also... bring back Congress issuing Letters of Mark. I'll take one for the executives of Fox, kthx.
Bacteria are really tiny, you know, and dinosaurs were really big.
And you're the result of millions of years of evolution since then? I'm disappointed.
Yes, a mere 28 light years away. So all we need to do is get in the fastest spacecraft we've ever built and we can be there in just about 150,000 years.
Well, maybe not us, but bacteria could. Or... maybe bacteria came from there, and landed here. Betcha didn't think of that.
The truth is that the developing world would benefit from greater IP protection, as IP currently has functionally **no** protection in most of it.
The developing world would benefit more from spending all of their money developing infrastructure instead of licensing and importing it in exchange for their natural and human resources. Their economy is not like ours: The multiplication effect is such that for every dollar they invest in infrastructure, the return on investment would be three, even as much as five times. The multiplication effect is lower in developed countries because we are operating close to or at the production possibilities curve. Although it seems like only pennies on the dollar to license these technologies, for them it represents a major investment rather than part of the aggregate cost.
digital sharecropping. nuff sed.
How interesting that you mention farming. The way copyright and patent law works now, it would be illegal for me to use irrigation and farming techniques any more modern than at least 1880 (150 years plus the life of the author). Think about that when people talk about the war on "piracy". It's not -- we're on the right side (by distributing this stuff for free and attacking their business model) but we're here for all the wrong reasons.
Hackers need to return to their roots: Deep down inside, we know that free access to technology is a liberating and empowering experience. We've become complacent -- certain that we'll crack whatever protection scheme they invent, and comfortable with the labeling of criminal and pirate. We think we're too hard to find, too decentralized, and it would be too expensive to take us out. That arrogance will kill this community and everything it stands for.
We need to give the disadvantaged access to the collective's knowledge. That's always been our purpose. It's the guiding principle behind open source -- and piracy and breaking copy protection is just the cheap way to avoid having to reinvent the wheel. But we have to... Because otherwise we'll have to wait through three generations of humanity growing up to have access to what we do today. We need the old school hacker mindset more now than ever before -- and we need to understand the golden age is at its end. We're about to go toe to toe with Goliath -- a worldwide cooperative of corporations, governments, and private interests with trillions of dollars at their disposal, secret treaties, courts, and increasing levels of control over the media.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not someone crying wolf. This is out there, it's real, and it's happening now -- and we are acting like The Pirate Bay and torrents are a blow against these faceless powers. We still have people like Richard Stallman and his precious GPL, and we argue over and over again about the merits of a change in language. Typical geeks -- we focus on the details and fail to see the big picture. There are over five billion people living in complete poverty, and intellectual property is one of the barriers keeping them there.
Intellectual property is an invention of the rich countries to force the poor countries into an economic model that benefits them. Knowledge has always been power, and the developed countries of the world realize that by locking up their books and restricting the free trade of information and knowledge, they can effectively keep those countries enslaved -- producing real, material goods, in exchange for imaginary ones.
That, people, is the true objective of intellectual property. You people think they care about you making pirate copies of CDs and DVDs? How pathetically self-centered! The truth is much bigger than your hard drive contents.
Motion denied, you need to wait until I'm done.
Fine. You're substituted. :P
Overruled.
Interlocutory appeal. :P
I put on my robe and judge's wig.
You're in contempt of court. Justice and Liberty wanted alone time, you perv.
(You were supposed to get an "interesting".)
Blame the hanging chad. :)
Since your high school civics classes obviously forgot to include it in your course of study, please allow me to introduce you to the First Amendment
They also forgot the exceptions to the First Amendment, because constitutional law is complex and has no place in a high school classroom with children that still believe that there are no losers, everything is sunshine and kittens, and basic language skills consist of "hey dood wut up? u wana cut skool n go smoke sum pot?"
Times of War.The Supreme Court has upheld on numerous occasions restrictions to speech that center around the military, particularily during times of war. It's become a clear precident that the protections afforded by the First Amendment can (and are) overlooked during wartime. There's also the "Clear and present danger" restrictions, made famous by saying free speech doesn't apply to someone yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. The Supreme Court has stated that the states could punish people who's words "by their very nature, involve danger to the public peace and to the security of the state."
Obscenity/Sex If I say "Fuck you!" -- that's obscenity. If I say "Fuck the military," then it's a political statement. If I fuck you and record it, that's pornography. If I fuck you while dressed like Lady Liberty, and you're dressed like Justice, then it has "artistic merit" and is free speech. Unfortunately, like my analogies, the laws covering obscenity and sex are equally obtuse, poorly-worded, and occasionally humorous.
Slander and Libel. I say you're a child molester. You say "bullshit!" I can't prove it. I'm not protected because I made a false statement about your character, and you're not protected because you swore at me for doing so. ...
And the list goes on.
it should be against the idiots who posted the document and should have known better.
A government agency responsible for securing billions of dollars in assets and millions of lives yearly now knows the exact scope and nature of a serious breach of security that otherwise wouldn't have been noticed and could have been exploited by people who are a genuine threat to national security, as opposed to a bunch of average americans who get to feel special for about five minutes. Clearly, jailing the people who exposed this is the best route, as opposed to using a little-known fund that the DHS setup to reward private citizens who contribute to anti-terrorism objectives.
The people who exposed this are heroes, not criminals. They've exposed a major security vulnerability before anyone could be hurt. Unfortunately, the reputation the TSA and DHS has when private citizens come forward to report problems with their administration of policy, or the policies themselves, is atrocious. They only option they had was a wide and public distribution -- if it could have been contained, they'd vanish right along with the problem. Moving forward the best thing to do is;
1. Establish guidelines for reporting problems with administration of their policy
(in the private sector, we euphemistically refer to these as "training opportunities").
2. Establish guidelines for reporting problems with operational security.
3. Modify existing damage control procedures to focus more on problem resolution than image protection.
4. ACCEPTING THAT SECURITY BREACHES WILL OCCUR, and have a reporting procedure and clear chain of command
(thus far, they've shown a remarkable lack of understanding of this key concept)
5. Stop over-reacting to perceived security breaches -- it desensitizes people and worsens response time should a truly serious situation occur.
Call it the "I cried wolf too many times" story. Stories about the TSA used to make front page... now they're barely slow news day material.
The overarching objective here is to restore faith in the institution -- because the TSA has become the laughing stock of the media, and the flying public groans at the mention of it. Remember only a few years ago when the TSA was created how people said they'd willingly and happily stand in line for an hour and a half to get through the checkpoint, because they felt safer? Public opinion has dropped considerably since then -- now they're afraid they'll get the greased glove treatment if they so much as look at the equipment. When a flight attendant flips out over someone's request to have orange juice and then receives an official notice that they could be thrown in jail, charged with felonies, and be added to the no-fly list... There is a serious lack of understanding about both what security means, and the public's perception of it. And it's nobody's fault but the TSA's for allowing this to happen.
Dear My Government, It's Officers, Agents, And All Of That:
You do not own the internet. You do not control the internet. You screwed up by releasing sensitive information to the public through lawful channels, via a lawful request, that was not in any way fraudulent or deceiving. Man up to this, and figure out how to avoid the problem in the future like every other self-respecting government would -- instead of trying to throw your citizens to the wolves without a trial, or god only knows what else you're planning.
Sincerely,
A Whole Lot of Patriots
P.S. Those badges look like something out of a cereal box. Take this as an opportunity to make them actually look like something better than what you'd expect from a first year graphic design student. Or use psychic paper. Your choice.
And 300 pixels are worth 3.060575122 * 10^614 pictures
Most of which will resemble little more than random noise and have no value.
It appears to be monochromatic and it also used nearest-approximation algorithms... Which means that the extra pieces are inserted as "random noise" once the general shapes are mapped out. Clever, but... low resolution.
reminds me of a comic i read, where some female security personnel would crank the metal detector sensitivity to 11 when a choice man showed up...
You think that's a joke? Portable breathalizers can be made to give false positives by chirping the radio while the suspect exhales. The TSA just makes the job of making an excuse a whole lot easier: Push the button. You don't need any reason beyond "seemed suspicious." Other kinds of security personnel need to manufacture a reason first. :\
dude, you zipped a pdf....thats almost as bad as when my mom puts a jpg in a doc to email it.
When you're expecting several tens of thousands of people to download it in a short time period -- every kilobyte helps.
Second more cynical guess: Xray machines are mostly useless and the TSA doesn't want the public to realize it's a bunch of voodoo?
The exact specifications and design limits of the machine is classified for a reason -- pictures of the operating parts give clues as to what those criterion might be. If you had photographs of the insides of the equipment you could infer the strength of the x-ray source and the resolution of the scanner, and from that you might figure out that, for example, #40 AWG wire wouldn't be visible if run it along a fiberglass housing. Or that the machine's stepper motors are only capable of moving the plates to a finite number of angles. Those are handy things to know if you wanted to get a prohibited item/device (or its components) past the scanner.
It should also be pointed out that these machines have a variety of image filters and enhancements that can be selected by the operator. The interactions between these standard operating modes and the device's limitations not being fully understood by the operator (because frankly, the training is not very technical) could be exploited.
Conclusion: It's not only a reasonable, but highly prudent, security measure.
A lack of fingerprints would be noticed. The mafia did this for awhile by burning their fingerprints off with a hot iron so as not to leave them behind at the crime scene. The FBI later discovered that as fingerprints are based on deeper layers of the skin than what's on the surface, even a person who had done thisstill left a distinctive mark that could be identified -- although it was more difficult.
It would be a lot easier to use a clear plastic covering (the "silly putty finger" school of thought) or skin grown in a petri dish over a composite material with a different imprint and then grafting it over your skin -- such temporary grafts survive a limited period of time before corroding. essentially, you make thin slits in existing tissue and then 'stitch' the graft in. Remember that the graft only has to survive for a day. Micro-perforations would make it a minimally-invasive procedure, with little scarring once the grafts have deteriorated.
To rely on other electronic systems for that reset is flawed and misses the essential nature of how people understand and use interpersonal identity.
Not everyone likes their friends, family, coworkers, or neighbors. Some people have jobs that are highly mobile. Some people prefer not having attachments to others. There are individuals that don't have a community identity of any kind. Should a person be denied access to those resources simply on the basis that they have no friends?
Officer: "Well your honor, he hadn't committed any crimes but we noticed that he had no friends."
Judge: "Good enough for me! Anyone who has no friends is clearly a threat to society. Book 'em danno."
Officer: "Uh, yes sir. Who's Danno?"
Judge: "Nevermind, son. It was before your time."
The problem isn't technology in this case, but rather bad assumptions made by the designers and users. What you're doing when you use a biometric scanner is (most often) taking a reading and converting that into a hash. And for any given hash, there will be at least one pattern that will resolve for that hash, possibly several or many. It's the same with DNA -- we can't sequence and compare a person's entire DNA, but we know certain parts of certain genes exhibit a high degree of variability, and so we sequence those and use them for comparison.
In this case, an assumption was made that fingerprints don't change on a person. Well, using lasers and surgical techniques, they can be changed, and therefore the system can be bypassed -- not because the technology is flawed, but the assumptions made about its use were. Now that this technique has been observed, we need to add another step to the identification process: Looking for scars on the fingers that suggest surgical techniques have been applied. The fingers should be carefully inspected before fingerprinting anyway -- to identify other forms of fraud as well.
Of course, there's still the human variable: Immigration necessarily requires hundreds to hundreds of thousands of personnel to administrate the rules. And the system is only as strong as the weakest link -- or the weakest person. There will always be people that can be bribed or manipulated -- or just plain lazy, and those weaknesses can be exploited. And truthfully, it'd probably be cheaper.
As long as the government walls off access to goods and services by attempting to uniquely identify people, there'll be a market for false identification. Is the price point their system has set too low?
I think you mean "Take off, hoser!"
Oh, this is just ducky...
Your Canadian accent makes it hard for me to understand you.
It's Minnesotan, not canadian. You know, as in "Minnesota nice". Now please go f*ck yourself.