That's the killer (pun intended) feature a mobileme enabled iPhone needs to have!
If done properly, it would be an impressive theft deterent. I dream of the day I can just log in and click on "Remotely disable iPhone".
I use the Exchange client on the iphone for work email. In order to be a "corporate approved" device, it has to support a number of Exchange policies, one of which is it must support being remotely wiped. If my iphone goes missing, I tell the security team and they remotely wipe my email, contacts, and who knows what else. There's even a box I can check on Outlook Web Access to remotely wipe it myself.
Essentially, they're doing the hard technical part of the thief's job. They're restoring the phone to "like new" condition for resale on eBay!
But on the comparison to air traffic, do you really think it will board in 10 minutes?
That's the real question, and my tea leaves aren't giving out any hints. So far, we haven't had any such nonsense on rail travel, but that might only be because rail travel isn't common. We certainly don't have it on bus travel, but buses never carry more than about 50 passengers at a time.
And if we turn these ideas sideways, consider what would happen if we built a high speed rail network today (spending $x giga-bucks) and people actually start using it because it's better/faster/more convenient than planes. Now, if an outbreak of common sense happens (doubtful, but hear me out) and we end the stupid security nonsense at airports, suddenly planes might become appealing again and all the high-speed rail infrastructure would be abandoned for lack of riders!
I think there's a sweet spot for high speed rail, and it's somewhere around 300-400 miles to a destination that has decent public transit.
It takes me about three hours to fly to Chicago from Minneapolis (100 minutes dicking around at the terminals, and 80 minutes on the plane) and costs about $150 for the cheapest round trip. I have to go through scanners, TSA friskers, check bags, hike a concourse or two, origami myself into a tiny seat next to a farting stranger, listen to safety nonsense, wait for departure on the tarmac, hide my headphones until the pre-programmed flight attendant passes, shut off my phone and computer, listen to a captive baby screech for about an hour, and I can still get routed around a thunderstorm and set down in Gary, Indiana.
Buses make the journey in seven hours for about $60 for the round trip; I can use my cell phone and their free wi-fi the whole way, and I can check all the luggage I want for free without waiting at a carousel at the end of the trip. But babies are still a problem, and seven hours is just a little too long.
Driving is maybe six hours, there is no(!) possibility of a crying baby, and I have my car when I get there. I can stop at whatever restaurant I want on the way. But I don't have the opportunity to read, work or nap during the trip, and it costs me about $350 in vehicle wear and tear, and fuel.
If I could board a high speed train in 10 minutes, and get there in about three hours or so, I'd choose rail 10 out of 10 times, assuming the rail price is less than double the cost of the plane tickets. Coach class on a train compares favorably with comfort over business class on a crappy airplane. And I really like first class on a train:-)
Sure, I wouldn't want to sit on a train for fourteen hours if I could fly it (with delays) in six hours, so there wouldn't be much value in a high speed Minneapolis to New York run. But when you're looking at distances less than about 400 miles, high speed rail has a lot of appeal.
Easy solution: Nudist trains. I would love to travel without worrying about all that crap, and get to do so comfortably. Nudist airlines would be pretty cool too.
Apparently you've never seen me nude. The railroads might save a bit on uneaten meals, but they'd spend a lot more on mops and janitors.
Your argument amounts to, "at some time in the future, things will get bad. Why not just make it bad now and get it over with?" Do you see why this thinking is not popular?
The argument I have for making it "artificially bad" right now is to preserve the remaining crude oil to ration it out for non-fuel purposes, like plastics, or reserving it for strategic fuel purposes.
Consider the case of Halon. We used to use Halon in all kinds of fire suppression systems, from computer rooms to hospitals. But Halon damages the environment, so the world agreed to stop making it. The replacements don't have all the same characteristics -- either they are more toxic to humans, or leave a damaging residue, or take up more volume to provide the same amount of protection. It turns out that Halon is still the ideal fire retardant for submarines where there's no possible escape for the contained humans, but since it's not made any more, they have to buy existing Halon for their subs. Current reserves will get the Navy through many decades to come, but they wouldn't have a single cc left if we had kept filling commercial tanks with the remaining Halon. The price for real Halon is now so high that the installation of a brand-new alternative system is essentially free just for trading in your existing Halon tanks. (Just imagine trading in your old car with a full tank of gas even-up for a new electric car!)
Fossil oil will be in the same situation as Halon at some point in the future. If we stopped burning the stuff today, we'd have centuries worth of supplies for the non-fuel uses of petroleum. Or maybe crude oil is exactly the right fuel for certain farming or construction or rural Alaskan needs, but the rest of us city dwellers can get by with electric vehicles. By jacking the "road fuel use" price today (by taxing at the pump) we shift transportation's demand to alternative fuels quicker, before we run out of fossil oil completely.
Given that nothing factual in your post is correct, the only thing I can assume is that you're the troll, and that I'm feeding you. Congrats on a well-played hand of stupidity!
Right - is any of that a browser bug or is that merely people failing at phishing detection?
The two are pretty much the same these days. Half the populace can't tell the difference between the internet and their browser, and those people will never understand security attacks like phishing or malicious redirection. But some of them at least can be taught that a warning box is a scary thing that you should click "no" on.
Yes, because static, unchanging, unchangeable pages provide such a useful, engaging wealth of information, and provide an effective direct line to commerce.
Bemoaning 15 year old decisions embraced by the rest of the world is f'ing useless. Here's the key piece of information your ego refuses to acknowledge: it doesn't matter what you thought 15 years ago. Without you, HTML evolved anyway; browsers have evolved, consumers have evolved, and content providers have evolved. So get over your whiny self and start dealing with reality.
"iFrame"? Seriously? Of all the possible choices of camelCasing you could have picked from, "iFrame" is the only one that describes an Apple video format for the iPhone.
When referencing the inline frame HTML element, it's a lot clearer to use "iframe", "IFRAME", or even "IFrame".
OK, consider if he were to behave like that in a bank. In a bank, he could hold money hostage, and cost the bank a fortune. So most banks implement separation of duties policies to prevent stuff like this, and their procedures would prevent a megalomaniac from rising to this position in the first place.
So we know there are proven procedures to protect a company from malicious admins, and those procedures are not secret. They could have been implemented by his bosses in city hall. But they weren't. Yes, his boss should be held liable for not adequately ensuring safeguards existed, and he should have been fired as soon as they jailed Childs. (That he wasn't stinks of favoritism, but those kinds of shenanigans are pretty much how every corrupt city operates under the covers.)
I'm pretty sure the punishment wasn't levied for the refusal to cooperate while he was employed, or of how the system did or didn't work after he was gone. The reason he got four years was how he behaved after he was ordered to turn them over by the court. You can generally piss off your boss and risk only your job, but lesson 0 is don't mess with the courts. They are the exact set of people who have the authority and ability to get revenge, and they love to show it.
For that matter, I doubt that either the courts or the city wanted anything to rush in this case. I'm sure they figured he'd get off with time served, and they wanted to ensure that he got plenty of that to begin with. The longer he sat in a cell, the more punishment he'd receive, regardless of the eventual outcome. That part is a complete abuse of the justice system, but when it's perpetrated by the justice system itself, well, there's nothing an individual can do except run against the scumbags in the next election.
Social engineering, as an exploit vector, is not only extremely common and scalable, but becoming more so every day.
Great point, I was considering only the human-to-human attacks on specially targeted victims and forgot the machine-to-generic victim type of attacks. You're absolutely correct.
But my point is still valid in that the "generic" attacks are based on statistics. An attacker does not have to achieve 100% success with any particular aspect of their attack. Any usable fraction of attacks can still yield a benefit.
It's not so much about trusting a person. Although that's an exploitable component for social engineers, social engineering is fairly rare, and it doesn't scale well. It's really about the machines in which we place that trust, and how those machines can be hacked. That's the easy part to scale up.
Hackers (specifically criminal types) operate on statistics. They don't care so much "which" websites they break open, they care about breaking into "some" sites and harvesting what can be found there. They also harvest the easy stuff: cleartext passwords, cleartext account numbers, etc. They won't run a deep password cracker on a million accounts, but they might run a simple/usr/dict/words kind of scan.
Of course once you've broken a thousand passwords on socialsite.com, you can try correlating those to majorbank.com and amazon.com and all the other potential sources of money. Again, you don't care if 900 out of a thousand fail, because you can still effectively steal from the 100 that remain.
Negligible, sure. But the parent said "a car can't actually burn more gas to power something electrical," and that's simply not correct. Every single watt of energy expended by the car, whether the end result is mechanical, electrical, heat, or whatever, originates from those liquid dinosaurs in the tank. More consumption of any sort requires more fuel input into the system.
And it's probably not important for the car, either - I'm pretty sure a car can't actually burn more gas to power something electrical.
But it does. Electricity in a car isn't free. It has to be produced by the alternator, and spinning the alternator takes additional power from the engine. Additional power means additional fuel to provide that power.
You might be able to demonstrate it to yourself with a simple experiment some day when you're bored. In a quiet place, with the car sitting at idle, turn the headlights on and off (set the high beams on.) Listen carefully for a slight drop in engine speed when the lights come on, then listen for it to speed up again when the lights go out. That reduction in speed is due to the additional load the alternator is placing on the engine.
(Of course your mileage may vary. If you have halogen lights, they're more efficient than sealed beam lights, so it might not draw enough current to make an audible difference. Cars with bigger engines that turn slower (or diesel engines) won't have a dramatic decrease in RPM. Older cars with tiny engines that derive horsepower through high RPM are likely to demonstrate the most noticeable difference.)
Likewise, provided the practical ability to censor my speech, I would sooner trust the government to protect my anti-government speech than I would trust Verizon to protect my anti-Verizon speech. Yes I would.
OK, that line right there -- you win. That's absolutely the one place where corporations have repeatedly proven themselves to be much worse than the government.
It's like seeing a bunch of suspicious looking people standing outside a jewelry store with crowbars at midnight. Sure, a crime has not been committed yet, but you're a jackass if you don't report it to police.
Nope. It's like imagining a bunch of suspicious looking people will be standing outside your own jewelry store with crowbars at midnight. Sure, a crime has not been committed, but you're a jackal if you coerce the police to reduce protection for the rest of us while they stand around outside your jewelry store waiting for imagined phantoms.
You can sue people for things they haven't done yet? Well fuck. HEY GATES! I'm suing you for slandering me! You haven't done it yet, but YOU MIGHT.
That's not quite what this is. They're suing non-people (placeholders) hoping/expecting that someone will fill the placeholders. They're probably asking for summary judgment since the John Does didn't show in court.
Isn't this exactly the same as police officers having "quotas" of tickets to write?
The difference is that I actually trust big corporations to honor their contractual obligations.
At least if a corporation violates them, I can sue for breach of contract. My personal risk is minimal, and is limited to monetary damages. If Congress violates my rights, my option is to break the new law and take my chances with the courts eventually overturning the bad law. My personal risk is physical incarceration. I can support someone else who breaks the bad law in a public fashion (and I do donate to the EFF), but that's cowardly, slow, and almost always ineffective.
Sure, the contract can be filled with weasel words, traps, arbitration agreements, contradictory clauses, etc. But the prisons are filled with weasels, shivs, be-my-bitch agreements, demented Santa Clauses, etc. One of these options is much worse than the other.
So the question is, who do you feel is more likely to treat you fairly: a profit-driven organization with absolutely no accountability to anyone, the the same profit-driven organization with *some* rules of fair dealing enforced by a democratically elected government?
Theoretically, there's room for both within a single provider. If consumer demand were loud enough, BigNet might offer their $80 "neutral package" as opposed to their $50 "FAPped package". The offering of an extra choice could even be mandated by Congress.
But to get to your real question, I have to say that our democratically elected government has a piss-poor record when it comes to passing rules. Once they feel they have the right to pass a single restriction, the floodgates will open for all kinds of bad restrictions: no packets that don't identify the originator, no packets that don't pass unencrypted through a government router, no packets that contain foul language, no packets critical of the demopublican party, no packets that contain atheist sentiments, etc.
I know people claim the "slippery slope" argument is a fallacy, but Capital Hill has an endless supply of lube, no direction to go but down, and have demonstrated a continual, unrelenting desire to pass bad laws. Everything I've seen them do gets worse.
So all in all, I'd rather pay a company to protect my network access. At least if they violate our contract, I can sue them.
In America, most metropolitan buses have an array of CCTV cameras, continually recording on a locked-up storage device. Theoretically these deter criminals. But they record regardless of your non-criminal actions.
Correlation is not your friend. You can expend a lot of energy trying to avoid giving the tire seller your name, but the first camera+RFID Reader combo you encounter will associate your tires with your license plate. This could happen at a gas station, or county courthouse, or parking garage.
If you're that concerned, you need to kill the RFID tags. I'm not sure how you'd do that, as a tire in the microwave is not exactly feasible.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the killer (pun intended) feature a mobileme enabled iPhone needs to have!
If done properly, it would be an impressive theft deterent.
I dream of the day I can just log in and click on "Remotely disable iPhone".
I use the Exchange client on the iphone for work email. In order to be a "corporate approved" device, it has to support a number of Exchange policies, one of which is it must support being remotely wiped. If my iphone goes missing, I tell the security team and they remotely wipe my email, contacts, and who knows what else. There's even a box I can check on Outlook Web Access to remotely wipe it myself.
Essentially, they're doing the hard technical part of the thief's job. They're restoring the phone to "like new" condition for resale on eBay!
But on the comparison to air traffic, do you really think it will board in 10 minutes?
That's the real question, and my tea leaves aren't giving out any hints. So far, we haven't had any such nonsense on rail travel, but that might only be because rail travel isn't common. We certainly don't have it on bus travel, but buses never carry more than about 50 passengers at a time.
And if we turn these ideas sideways, consider what would happen if we built a high speed rail network today (spending $x giga-bucks) and people actually start using it because it's better/faster/more convenient than planes. Now, if an outbreak of common sense happens (doubtful, but hear me out) and we end the stupid security nonsense at airports, suddenly planes might become appealing again and all the high-speed rail infrastructure would be abandoned for lack of riders!
I think there's a sweet spot for high speed rail, and it's somewhere around 300-400 miles to a destination that has decent public transit.
It takes me about three hours to fly to Chicago from Minneapolis (100 minutes dicking around at the terminals, and 80 minutes on the plane) and costs about $150 for the cheapest round trip. I have to go through scanners, TSA friskers, check bags, hike a concourse or two, origami myself into a tiny seat next to a farting stranger, listen to safety nonsense, wait for departure on the tarmac, hide my headphones until the pre-programmed flight attendant passes, shut off my phone and computer, listen to a captive baby screech for about an hour, and I can still get routed around a thunderstorm and set down in Gary, Indiana.
Buses make the journey in seven hours for about $60 for the round trip; I can use my cell phone and their free wi-fi the whole way, and I can check all the luggage I want for free without waiting at a carousel at the end of the trip. But babies are still a problem, and seven hours is just a little too long.
Driving is maybe six hours, there is no(!) possibility of a crying baby, and I have my car when I get there. I can stop at whatever restaurant I want on the way. But I don't have the opportunity to read, work or nap during the trip, and it costs me about $350 in vehicle wear and tear, and fuel.
If I could board a high speed train in 10 minutes, and get there in about three hours or so, I'd choose rail 10 out of 10 times, assuming the rail price is less than double the cost of the plane tickets. Coach class on a train compares favorably with comfort over business class on a crappy airplane. And I really like first class on a train :-)
Sure, I wouldn't want to sit on a train for fourteen hours if I could fly it (with delays) in six hours, so there wouldn't be much value in a high speed Minneapolis to New York run. But when you're looking at distances less than about 400 miles, high speed rail has a lot of appeal.
Easy solution: Nudist trains. I would love to travel without worrying about all that crap, and get to do so comfortably. Nudist airlines would be pretty cool too.
Apparently you've never seen me nude. The railroads might save a bit on uneaten meals, but they'd spend a lot more on mops and janitors.
Your argument amounts to, "at some time in the future, things will get bad. Why not just make it bad now and get it over with?" Do you see why this thinking is not popular?
The argument I have for making it "artificially bad" right now is to preserve the remaining crude oil to ration it out for non-fuel purposes, like plastics, or reserving it for strategic fuel purposes.
Consider the case of Halon. We used to use Halon in all kinds of fire suppression systems, from computer rooms to hospitals. But Halon damages the environment, so the world agreed to stop making it. The replacements don't have all the same characteristics -- either they are more toxic to humans, or leave a damaging residue, or take up more volume to provide the same amount of protection. It turns out that Halon is still the ideal fire retardant for submarines where there's no possible escape for the contained humans, but since it's not made any more, they have to buy existing Halon for their subs. Current reserves will get the Navy through many decades to come, but they wouldn't have a single cc left if we had kept filling commercial tanks with the remaining Halon. The price for real Halon is now so high that the installation of a brand-new alternative system is essentially free just for trading in your existing Halon tanks. (Just imagine trading in your old car with a full tank of gas even-up for a new electric car!)
Fossil oil will be in the same situation as Halon at some point in the future. If we stopped burning the stuff today, we'd have centuries worth of supplies for the non-fuel uses of petroleum. Or maybe crude oil is exactly the right fuel for certain farming or construction or rural Alaskan needs, but the rest of us city dwellers can get by with electric vehicles. By jacking the "road fuel use" price today (by taxing at the pump) we shift transportation's demand to alternative fuels quicker, before we run out of fossil oil completely.
Right, text mode is safe because PHP is so secure? Not following the train of your thought on that one...
(Score: +5, Troll)
Since when? 2009.
You couldn't even be bothered to google the nonsense you're spouting before claiming I'm the troll?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3905
http://us.sanyo.com/News/SANYO-Dual-Cameras-are-World-s-First-with-iFrame-Video-Format
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/iFrame_(video_format)
Given that nothing factual in your post is correct, the only thing I can assume is that you're the troll, and that I'm feeding you. Congrats on a well-played hand of stupidity!
Right - is any of that a browser bug or is that merely people failing at phishing detection?
The two are pretty much the same these days. Half the populace can't tell the difference between the internet and their browser, and those people will never understand security attacks like phishing or malicious redirection. But some of them at least can be taught that a warning box is a scary thing that you should click "no" on.
Yes, because static, unchanging, unchangeable pages provide such a useful, engaging wealth of information, and provide an effective direct line to commerce.
Bemoaning 15 year old decisions embraced by the rest of the world is f'ing useless. Here's the key piece of information your ego refuses to acknowledge: it doesn't matter what you thought 15 years ago. Without you, HTML evolved anyway; browsers have evolved, consumers have evolved, and content providers have evolved. So get over your whiny self and start dealing with reality.
"iFrame"? Seriously? Of all the possible choices of camelCasing you could have picked from, "iFrame" is the only one that describes an Apple video format for the iPhone.
When referencing the inline frame HTML element, it's a lot clearer to use "iframe", "IFRAME", or even "IFrame".
OK, consider if he were to behave like that in a bank. In a bank, he could hold money hostage, and cost the bank a fortune. So most banks implement separation of duties policies to prevent stuff like this, and their procedures would prevent a megalomaniac from rising to this position in the first place.
So we know there are proven procedures to protect a company from malicious admins, and those procedures are not secret. They could have been implemented by his bosses in city hall. But they weren't. Yes, his boss should be held liable for not adequately ensuring safeguards existed, and he should have been fired as soon as they jailed Childs. (That he wasn't stinks of favoritism, but those kinds of shenanigans are pretty much how every corrupt city operates under the covers.)
I'm pretty sure the punishment wasn't levied for the refusal to cooperate while he was employed, or of how the system did or didn't work after he was gone. The reason he got four years was how he behaved after he was ordered to turn them over by the court. You can generally piss off your boss and risk only your job, but lesson 0 is don't mess with the courts. They are the exact set of people who have the authority and ability to get revenge, and they love to show it.
For that matter, I doubt that either the courts or the city wanted anything to rush in this case. I'm sure they figured he'd get off with time served, and they wanted to ensure that he got plenty of that to begin with. The longer he sat in a cell, the more punishment he'd receive, regardless of the eventual outcome. That part is a complete abuse of the justice system, but when it's perpetrated by the justice system itself, well, there's nothing an individual can do except run against the scumbags in the next election.
Social engineering, as an exploit vector, is not only extremely common and scalable, but becoming more so every day.
Great point, I was considering only the human-to-human attacks on specially targeted victims and forgot the machine-to-generic victim type of attacks. You're absolutely correct.
But my point is still valid in that the "generic" attacks are based on statistics. An attacker does not have to achieve 100% success with any particular aspect of their attack. Any usable fraction of attacks can still yield a benefit.
It's not so much about trusting a person. Although that's an exploitable component for social engineers, social engineering is fairly rare, and it doesn't scale well. It's really about the machines in which we place that trust, and how those machines can be hacked. That's the easy part to scale up.
Hackers (specifically criminal types) operate on statistics. They don't care so much "which" websites they break open, they care about breaking into "some" sites and harvesting what can be found there. They also harvest the easy stuff: cleartext passwords, cleartext account numbers, etc. They won't run a deep password cracker on a million accounts, but they might run a simple /usr/dict/words kind of scan.
Of course once you've broken a thousand passwords on socialsite.com, you can try correlating those to majorbank.com and amazon.com and all the other potential sources of money. Again, you don't care if 900 out of a thousand fail, because you can still effectively steal from the 100 that remain.
How about "Another RIM job for Blackberry Users"?
Negligible, sure. But the parent said "a car can't actually burn more gas to power something electrical," and that's simply not correct. Every single watt of energy expended by the car, whether the end result is mechanical, electrical, heat, or whatever, originates from those liquid dinosaurs in the tank. More consumption of any sort requires more fuel input into the system.
And it's probably not important for the car, either - I'm pretty sure a car can't actually burn more gas to power something electrical.
But it does. Electricity in a car isn't free. It has to be produced by the alternator, and spinning the alternator takes additional power from the engine. Additional power means additional fuel to provide that power.
You might be able to demonstrate it to yourself with a simple experiment some day when you're bored. In a quiet place, with the car sitting at idle, turn the headlights on and off (set the high beams on.) Listen carefully for a slight drop in engine speed when the lights come on, then listen for it to speed up again when the lights go out. That reduction in speed is due to the additional load the alternator is placing on the engine.
(Of course your mileage may vary. If you have halogen lights, they're more efficient than sealed beam lights, so it might not draw enough current to make an audible difference. Cars with bigger engines that turn slower (or diesel engines) won't have a dramatic decrease in RPM. Older cars with tiny engines that derive horsepower through high RPM are likely to demonstrate the most noticeable difference.)
Likewise, provided the practical ability to censor my speech, I would sooner trust the government to protect my anti-government speech than I would trust Verizon to protect my anti-Verizon speech. Yes I would.
OK, that line right there -- you win. That's absolutely the one place where corporations have repeatedly proven themselves to be much worse than the government.
Quotas were found to be illegal in many jurisdictions, as they presumed the guilt of a certain number of people.
In this case, the plaintiff is presuming the offense will be committed by 200 unknown John/Jane Does.
It's like seeing a bunch of suspicious looking people standing outside a jewelry store with crowbars at midnight. Sure, a crime has not been committed yet, but you're a jackass if you don't report it to police.
Nope. It's like imagining a bunch of suspicious looking people will be standing outside your own jewelry store with crowbars at midnight. Sure, a crime has not been committed, but you're a jackal if you coerce the police to reduce protection for the rest of us while they stand around outside your jewelry store waiting for imagined phantoms.
You can sue people for things they haven't done yet? Well fuck. HEY GATES! I'm suing you for slandering me! You haven't done it yet, but YOU MIGHT.
That's not quite what this is. They're suing non-people (placeholders) hoping/expecting that someone will fill the placeholders. They're probably asking for summary judgment since the John Does didn't show in court.
Isn't this exactly the same as police officers having "quotas" of tickets to write?
The difference is that I actually trust big corporations to honor their contractual obligations.
At least if a corporation violates them, I can sue for breach of contract. My personal risk is minimal, and is limited to monetary damages. If Congress violates my rights, my option is to break the new law and take my chances with the courts eventually overturning the bad law. My personal risk is physical incarceration. I can support someone else who breaks the bad law in a public fashion (and I do donate to the EFF), but that's cowardly, slow, and almost always ineffective.
Sure, the contract can be filled with weasel words, traps, arbitration agreements, contradictory clauses, etc. But the prisons are filled with weasels, shivs, be-my-bitch agreements, demented Santa Clauses, etc. One of these options is much worse than the other.
So the question is, who do you feel is more likely to treat you fairly: a profit-driven organization with absolutely no accountability to anyone, the the same profit-driven organization with *some* rules of fair dealing enforced by a democratically elected government?
Theoretically, there's room for both within a single provider. If consumer demand were loud enough, BigNet might offer their $80 "neutral package" as opposed to their $50 "FAPped package". The offering of an extra choice could even be mandated by Congress.
But to get to your real question, I have to say that our democratically elected government has a piss-poor record when it comes to passing rules. Once they feel they have the right to pass a single restriction, the floodgates will open for all kinds of bad restrictions: no packets that don't identify the originator, no packets that don't pass unencrypted through a government router, no packets that contain foul language, no packets critical of the demopublican party, no packets that contain atheist sentiments, etc.
I know people claim the "slippery slope" argument is a fallacy, but Capital Hill has an endless supply of lube, no direction to go but down, and have demonstrated a continual, unrelenting desire to pass bad laws. Everything I've seen them do gets worse.
So all in all, I'd rather pay a company to protect my network access. At least if they violate our contract, I can sue them.
I can put a whole in your brake line and get the same results
a whole what?
A whole hole, of course. A partial hole would do nothing.
In America, most metropolitan buses have an array of CCTV cameras, continually recording on a locked-up storage device. Theoretically these deter criminals. But they record regardless of your non-criminal actions.
Correlation is not your friend. You can expend a lot of energy trying to avoid giving the tire seller your name, but the first camera+RFID Reader combo you encounter will associate your tires with your license plate. This could happen at a gas station, or county courthouse, or parking garage.
If you're that concerned, you need to kill the RFID tags. I'm not sure how you'd do that, as a tire in the microwave is not exactly feasible.