The TSA guy said that by preventing terrorists from using complicated liquid explosives, they have to move to more exotic explosives. Ignoring the very porous security perimeter of an airport (many tons of airline parts and supplies are trucked in every day, there's no way to inspect everything), what's going to keep a dedicated terrorist from using old fashioned C4 explosive hidden in an obvious body cavity. I've seen enough internet porn to know that with proper training and motivation, a quite sizeable chunk of explosives could be hidden within the body. With surgical help and no desire to stay alive for more than 12 hours, I suspect that even larger portions of explosives could be hidden within the body.
I cannot speak for others, but I have stopped flying.
If it means I get an empty middle seat between me and that fat lady with the perfume, I sincerely thank you.
It is my fond hope that your decision not to fly is taken up by a wide majority of Americans.
Be careful what you wish for...empty seats are only temporary... If demand decreases, airlines will cut back on scheduled flights (or plane size (or both)) to eliminate as many empty seats as possible.
Unlike a hotel that has a reason to keep occupancy below 100%, an airline is happiest when occupancy is at 100% (and the only way to get there is to sell 105% (or more) of the seats)
What makes this more of an invasion of privacy than whatever they used to do to find house numbers? I assume they used some combination of databases, OCR, and paying someone to do it.
I'm surprised that this is a big help to them - if they can identify that something on a house is the house number (as opposed to a shadow or some home design pattern), it's surprising that they can't identify the number itself. It seems like there's going to be relatively few instances where something is identifiable as a house number, but the number itself is not OCRable -- especially when they already have a hint from the neighboring house numbers. Though I guess when you're dealing with identifying millions of structures, even "relatively few" is a lot.
You're comparing to the previous gen Nook.. The Nook Tablet has a dual core 1GHz CPU, and 1GB of RAM, while the Kindle Fire only has 512MB of RAM. The Nook Tablet also has a microphone, so you can use skype, and it has a Micro SDHC slot. It also costs $50 more, which may be the approximate value of those add-ons. There's pros and cons for either one of them.
No, I'm comparing to the $169 Nook Color, not the $249 Nook Tablet, just like the original poster. He clearly said Nook Color. As did I.
I thought about it...but it has no 3G, 4G or the like capability...no bluetooth...only wifi.
Not sure what it would be that good for.....
I think my rooted nook color is more useful than the kindle fire if it was rooted....nook as external microSD slot..more memory...etc.
Am I missing something here?
The Fire has a dual-core 1GHz CPU (versus single core 800Mhz in the Nook Color). My biggest complaint with my Nook is the slow speed in rendering some web pages. While it does work well with a bluetooth keyboard, I've never been able to get a Bluetooth headset working with my Nook but it's been a while since I've tried. Does it work better with the latest Cyanogenmod?
(reading the fine print..) "but you may not be able to drive at the maximum speed depending on the laws in your country"
"I cry foul! You promised me I could drive this car at 100mph! None of the roads in my area allow that speed! Liars! I want money!"
sad. Brain. You have one. Use it. I'm not your Captain Obvious.
I'm not aware of any country that has a maximum speed limit, you can go as fast as you like on any private race track and anyone can purchase track time at a local track.
It's not as if the car can drive 100mph on USA pavement but not Australian pavement meaning that it will never be able to go 100mph anywhere but the USA You're even able to drive 100mph on a public road if you want to (at the risk of prosecution, but that's not a limitation of the car).
Is there any chance that someone in Australia can purchase cellular service that will let them use their 4G iPad at 4G speeds? If that answer is no, then I don't think your analogy applies.
I am a fan of the samsung line of android smartphones, but using a high-end smartphone is one of the most expensive options for a wifi router that I've ever heard of.
I don't see many hotels running with that solution.
You should look at the price of Cisco AP's - you can easily pay more than the price of an unlocked Nexus for a single AP. (but it's a lot more capable as an AP than the phone)
The article says that the fine print may make the case shaky:
The case may be a bit shaky, though, as Apple does state in the fine print: '4G LTE is supported only on AT&T and Verizon networks in the US; and on Bell, Rogers and Telus networks in Canada. Data plans sold separately. See your carrier for details.'"
But why can the fine print supercede what's in the main ad? How can an ad for a 4G device in Australia be legal if that device will never be able to work in Australia? They can list the 4G for USA and Canada on the specs page. As another example, if an ad screams "Unlimited 4G data!!!" in large print, they shouldn't be able to write "Unlimited plans subject to data caps that we won't reveal to you and throttling back to speeds slower than 2G speeds" down in the fine print. If it says "Unlimited" in the large print, then it really should be "Unlimited". Fine print shouldn't be able to contradict the main body of the ad.
Glik did not ask to be arrested, but he was. He asked the IAD to investigate, they told him to fuck off and file a civil suit. So he did. And by winning it and costing them $170,000 the Boston police department did what they should have done in the first fucking place - the disciplined the officers involved.
Maybe the tax payers should pay more attention in the future to their local cops.
I don't think the parent poster was lamenting the fact that the guy got a big payout, but that this ended up with a cash settlement instead of being played out to the end to set a legal precedent. Even if he ended up getting $170K (or more) in the end, at least it would have set a legal precedent that should make this kind of thing less likely in the future.
What's not clear from the article is whether or not the guy did all of the things that are found when you search his name.
If he didn't, then it seems a simple matter to tell employers that the guy that comes up when they search for him is a completely different guy. It would behoove him to do this no matter what Google does since not everyone uses Google to research job applications.
Back when I was active with online dating, I Googled myself and discovered that I share the same name as the brother of a man convicted of several murders -- I dug deeper and found that he lived in a nearby town and was around the same age as me. Because of the notoriety of the crime at the time, if anyone searched for my name, the first few hits were newspaper articles mentioning this guy talking about how he couldn't believe his brother was capable of such an act. I always warned potential online matches that if they looked me up online, I am *not* that guy.
I've heard this argument repeatedly and it is out of hand absurd. What of all the people who can't understand the language, are hard of hearing, too young etc.? Want to ban them from flying. As with all books/magazines/newspapers. Not to mention any medication which may make the occupants sleepy.
Plus the pre-departure drinks that flight attendants serve in first class. If absolute concentration during takeoff and landing is required, perhaps they should stop serving alcohol before departure and stop serving 4 hours before landing.
My fileserver uses RAID and makes a separate (encrypted) backup to an external USB hard drive (fortunately, my data hasn't grown faster than hard drive sizes so I can fit it all on a single 2TB drive, to ensure file integrity, periodically I have rsync verify file checksums,)
As a secondary backup, I use a 1TB notebook drive locked in a USB enabled fire safe:
I used metal straps to tie it down and lock it to my computer desk in the hope that if someone comes in to steal the computer, they'll just grab it and run without prying off the data safe. The safe is only rated for 30 minutes @ 1500 degrees so it's not a perfect solution, but better than nothing.
For my really important data (old tax returns, scanned in records and receipts, etc) I back them up to the cloud. For photos, I keep the full-size image locally (some TIFFs, mostly JPG's), but keep a lower res lower quality image in the cloud. All of this is less than 20GB.
Most of my big data is DVD's that I've ripped and I'll count on insurance to replace them if they are lost - I don't even back them up to the drive in the fire safe.
GP is just doing what we slashdottians love to do: if we see an idea that we didn't think of ourselves, the idea must be flawed. Furthermore, it must be flawed in a way that is painfully obvious - because surely the designers of a system we failed to think of couldn't have thought of these obvious failure cases.
I suspect you're right - especially since many of the arguments are "omg, think about the children! If schools track when children are in school, pedophiles will use this information to prey on children!"
My wife works in child care, and she faces an uphill battle to get parents of *preschool* children to ensure that their children attend, I can't imagine that it's any easier when dealing with older children. (this is a state subsidized program where unexcused absences cause lack of funding to the program and fines to the parents (who regularly complain that they shouldnt' have to pay a fee when their child doesn't attend school despite the fact that they signed an agreement that clearly spells out their obligation)).
It's nice that Slashdot readers look upon their own experience where they have parents that actually want them to be in school, but they don't realize that there are many parents out there that view school as a government mandated inconvenience - they really don't want to be responsible for making their children attend school. RFID tracking of attendance, is really no different than teacher roll calls, but it means that instead of the teacher spending the first 5 minutes of class taking roll and reporting absent students, the RFID system takes care of it so the teacher doesn't have to.
This lack of responsibility on the part of parents is (in my opinion) is why the USA is losing its edge against other countries. I've interviewed job candidates that can't write a grammatically correct paragraph (they were interviewing for a customer service job) and can't calculate a 10% discount even *with* a calculator.
Schools are failing us when a high school graduate claims "oh, they didn't teach us percentages in school."
(I realize that the original article is referring to Brazilian schools, but I don't think that such a system would be out of line here. Some schools tolerate metal detectors, what's the problem with an RFID system to replace teacher roll calls?
Just because someone accepts something in grade school doesn't mean that they won't appreciate giving it up after they are out of school.
Likewise, just because you can break free from your early influence and training, and question it, and ultimately reject it, does not mean that the average person has enough individuality to do so.
That's a very sad and tragic thing to say. I wish it weren't so. But in this way, you are somewhat exceptional.
You are joking, right? You're saying that the average 18 year old doesn't have the capacity to break free from 12 years of school and accepts the same lifestyle and restrictions that he lived under while in school? Do you *know* any 18 year olds?
Let's say the pedo-hacker, good at what he does, has a preference: a young girl, aged 13, blonde, tiny. Let's say he goes on facebook and finds that preference: name, location, school they go to. Let's say he knows how to get into this chip-system, which might just list their names or giveaway-details (which may or may not be the case, but for argument's sake, it does). Oh hey, there's lil' Jenny McVulnerable, waiting outside for the bus stop.
Yea I know, it's not the USUAL, but things like this bring up the UN-usual.
Since he's such an uber-hacker, he could just hack into the school's ID card database, and download student pictures, home address, parents' names, possibly siblings and emergency contact info, then he can intercept the kid and say "omg Josh, your mom Mary and Uncle Joe were in a terrible accident, your sister Maria is already at the hospital, they sent me to pick you up".
This RFID system doesn't add a risk that's not already there.
Do you really think they're putting a GPS (plus some kind of GSM modem to keep track of the location ) in each uniform? And that whole setup fits "underneath each school's coat-of-arms"?
It's probably a basic RFID tag that gets logged by a reader by the door.
They don't need GPS to track RFID chips on-campus, they just need RFID readers at every classroom and building exits.
Now, if they want to do this to an adult, or forced embed it in a human, that is a DIFFERENT issue.
If you had always been tagged from the time you were a small child, and had all your life to get used to the idea, would you still think so?
That's the danger.
I spent 12 years of being forced to eat school cafeteria meals with no chance to go off-campus for lunch.
When I started college, I took full advantage of the freedom to eat fast food of my own choosing whenver I could afford it despite the fact that I had a "free" on-campus meal plan.
Just because someone accepts something in grade school doesn't mean that they won't appreciate giving it up after they are out of school.
With a big clump of people moving thought the door at the same time may lead to missing a few reads and with a big load of people beeps may not help as much as they do with one person at a time with a turnstile.
Many kids already enter their school single file through the metal detector, so they'll be able to get clean RFID reads.
I've run dozens of road races where literally hundreds of people were running across the RFID mats at the start, finish and random split locations, and I can only think of one instance where I didn't get a chip time (which is recorded separatly from clock time), and that was the time that someone stepped on my foot in a crowded start, flattening out the RFID tag (which put a kink in the antenna). I think RFID can handle a few dozen kids walking through the doorway together.
I sure hope pedophiles in Brazil can't hack or learn to hack. Holy crap this is bad on so many levels
I don't understand what kind of RFID hack will help a pedophile?
What good will it do to be able to scan the t-shirt of the kid walking by his van and know that it's child #1231812421?
It doesn't appear that the RFID chips will contain any identifying information, and why should they -- they just need a number to link the child to the database.
Besides, most kids (at least in the USA) these days are already broadcasting a unique ID through their phone's Wifi MAC address or unencrypted cell phone signalling.
If the phone is reported stolen, make the carriers responsible for any calls made by the handset. The victim has done the right thing by reporting the theft.
Make it an economic penalty if the company refuses to take action. It's the language they understand. Get the courts to back up the victim and the problem will go away in weeks if not days.
They already do that - when my phone was lost and someone made $300 Verizon purchases (downloadable games, videos, ringtones, etc), they refunded all of the fraudulent purchases. Since I had an unlimited phone plan there were no call charges, but I assume they would have refunded those charges as well.
But calls cost verizon almost nothing, so it's not really an economic penalty to them.
How is the carrier supposed to know that the device was stolen? What would stop you as the original owner from selling the device and then reporting it stolen? Just to piss off the new owner? Now the carrier has to setup this whole infrastructure to manage all this tracking and arbitration. With a car, there's a title that has to be moved around. You want that for cell phones???
I think the used phone marketplaces already have a way to take care of this - seems like you'd handle this the same way you handle it if someone sells you a phone that won't power on. You go back to the seller for a refund.
A carrier is an accomplice to murder because it sold the victim a cell phone that happens to be desirable to criminals?
I could see this being successfully argued in court if the cell phone providers have an easy way to make a cell phone nearly worthless if stolen thereby making it less desirable to criminals.
I can't help wondering if this is really AT&T's fault? They were tasked to provide this service by the government. Were they then supposed to filter-out the overseas hearing-impaired? Doesn't that violate the Common Carrier requirement that phone calls not be monitored for content or restricted? (ponder). I'm curious to see how this turns-out.
How can this not be AT&T's fault? They are the ones with the tools to detect and reduce this fraud. If a city pays a company to run a paratransit service, they shouldn't allow it to be used as a getaway car for a bank robbery, even if the passenger appears to be disabled.
What I want to know is why Blurays take so long to load.
When I want to watch a movie, typically, I want to watch the movie, not wait sevefral minutes for the disk to load, then try to skip through 15 minutes of commercials (if it's possible to skip through them at all).
When I first got my Bluray play, I upgraded my Netflix membership to Bluray. 2 weeks later, I downgraded back to DVD because DVD's are more usable. I've bought a few movies on Bluray, but for the vast majority of what I watch, DVD quality is more than sufficient (even Netflix streaming quality is more than sufficient).
The operating system on my laptop boots up faster than the time it takes most Blurays to load on my bluray player.
And what's with the firmware updates that are needed for some disks to work!? My 8 year old DVD player has never needed a firmware update and it plays all of the DVDs I own but I've already run into a couple disks that refused to work without a bluray player firmware update.
I'm sure the Bluray gives content producers much more freedom to produce rich content, fancy menus and other features (which includes enhanced DRM), but all I want to do is watch my movie.
Slashdot Mirror
The TSA guy said that by preventing terrorists from using complicated liquid explosives, they have to move to more exotic explosives. Ignoring the very porous security perimeter of an airport (many tons of airline parts and supplies are trucked in every day, there's no way to inspect everything), what's going to keep a dedicated terrorist from using old fashioned C4 explosive hidden in an obvious body cavity. I've seen enough internet porn to know that with proper training and motivation, a quite sizeable chunk of explosives could be hidden within the body. With surgical help and no desire to stay alive for more than 12 hours, I suspect that even larger portions of explosives could be hidden within the body.
If it means I get an empty middle seat between me and that fat lady with the perfume, I sincerely thank you.
It is my fond hope that your decision not to fly is taken up by a wide majority of Americans.
Be careful what you wish for...empty seats are only temporary... If demand decreases, airlines will cut back on scheduled flights (or plane size (or both)) to eliminate as many empty seats as possible.
Unlike a hotel that has a reason to keep occupancy below 100%, an airline is happiest when occupancy is at 100% (and the only way to get there is to sell 105% (or more) of the seats)
Awesome. More invasion of privacy. Fuck Google.
bonch
What makes this more of an invasion of privacy than whatever they used to do to find house numbers? I assume they used some combination of databases, OCR, and paying someone to do it.
I'm surprised that this is a big help to them - if they can identify that something on a house is the house number (as opposed to a shadow or some home design pattern), it's surprising that they can't identify the number itself. It seems like there's going to be relatively few instances where something is identifiable as a house number, but the number itself is not OCRable -- especially when they already have a hint from the neighboring house numbers. Though I guess when you're dealing with identifying millions of structures, even "relatively few" is a lot.
You're comparing to the previous gen Nook.. The Nook Tablet has a dual core 1GHz CPU, and 1GB of RAM, while the Kindle Fire only has 512MB of RAM. The Nook Tablet also has a microphone, so you can use skype, and it has a Micro SDHC slot. It also costs $50 more, which may be the approximate value of those add-ons. There's pros and cons for either one of them.
No, I'm comparing to the $169 Nook Color, not the $249 Nook Tablet, just like the original poster. He clearly said Nook Color. As did I.
I thought about it...but it has no 3G, 4G or the like capability...no bluetooth...only wifi.
Not sure what it would be that good for.....
I think my rooted nook color is more useful than the kindle fire if it was rooted....nook as external microSD slot..more memory...etc.
Am I missing something here?
The Fire has a dual-core 1GHz CPU (versus single core 800Mhz in the Nook Color). My biggest complaint with my Nook is the slow speed in rendering some web pages. While it does work well with a bluetooth keyboard, I've never been able to get a Bluetooth headset working with my Nook but it's been a while since I've tried. Does it work better with the latest Cyanogenmod?
(reading the fine print..) "but you may not be able to drive at the maximum speed depending on the laws in your country"
"I cry foul! You promised me I could drive this car at 100mph! None of the roads in my area allow that speed! Liars! I want money!"
sad. Brain. You have one. Use it. I'm not your Captain Obvious.
I'm not aware of any country that has a maximum speed limit, you can go as fast as you like on any private race track and anyone can purchase track time at a local track.
It's not as if the car can drive 100mph on USA pavement but not Australian pavement meaning that it will never be able to go 100mph anywhere but the USA You're even able to drive 100mph on a public road if you want to (at the risk of prosecution, but that's not a limitation of the car).
Is there any chance that someone in Australia can purchase cellular service that will let them use their 4G iPad at 4G speeds? If that answer is no, then I don't think your analogy applies.
I am a fan of the samsung line of android smartphones, but using a high-end smartphone is one of the most expensive options for a wifi router that I've ever heard of.
I don't see many hotels running with that solution.
You should look at the price of Cisco AP's - you can easily pay more than the price of an unlocked Nexus for a single AP. (but it's a lot more capable as an AP than the phone)
The article says that the fine print may make the case shaky:
The case may be a bit shaky, though, as Apple does state in the fine print: '4G LTE is supported only on AT&T and Verizon networks in the US; and on Bell, Rogers and Telus networks in Canada. Data plans sold separately. See your carrier for details.'"
But why can the fine print supercede what's in the main ad? How can an ad for a 4G device in Australia be legal if that device will never be able to work in Australia? They can list the 4G for USA and Canada on the specs page. As another example, if an ad screams "Unlimited 4G data!!!" in large print, they shouldn't be able to write "Unlimited plans subject to data caps that we won't reveal to you and throttling back to speeds slower than 2G speeds" down in the fine print. If it says "Unlimited" in the large print, then it really should be "Unlimited". Fine print shouldn't be able to contradict the main body of the ad.
Seriously, you are an idiot.
Glik did not ask to be arrested, but he was. He asked the IAD to investigate, they told him to fuck off and file a civil suit. So he did. And by winning it and costing them $170,000 the Boston police department did what they should have done in the first fucking place - the disciplined the officers involved.
Maybe the tax payers should pay more attention in the future to their local cops.
I don't think the parent poster was lamenting the fact that the guy got a big payout, but that this ended up with a cash settlement instead of being played out to the end to set a legal precedent. Even if he ended up getting $170K (or more) in the end, at least it would have set a legal precedent that should make this kind of thing less likely in the future.
What's not clear from the article is whether or not the guy did all of the things that are found when you search his name.
If he didn't, then it seems a simple matter to tell employers that the guy that comes up when they search for him is a completely different guy. It would behoove him to do this no matter what Google does since not everyone uses Google to research job applications.
Back when I was active with online dating, I Googled myself and discovered that I share the same name as the brother of a man convicted of several murders -- I dug deeper and found that he lived in a nearby town and was around the same age as me. Because of the notoriety of the crime at the time, if anyone searched for my name, the first few hits were newspaper articles mentioning this guy talking about how he couldn't believe his brother was capable of such an act. I always warned potential online matches that if they looked me up online, I am *not* that guy.
I've heard this argument repeatedly and it is out of hand absurd. What of all the people who can't understand the language, are hard of hearing, too young etc.? Want to ban them from flying. As with all books/magazines/newspapers. Not to mention any medication which may make the occupants sleepy.
Plus the pre-departure drinks that flight attendants serve in first class. If absolute concentration during takeoff and landing is required, perhaps they should stop serving alcohol before departure and stop serving 4 hours before landing.
My fileserver uses RAID and makes a separate (encrypted) backup to an external USB hard drive (fortunately, my data hasn't grown faster than hard drive sizes so I can fit it all on a single 2TB drive, to ensure file integrity, periodically I have rsync verify file checksums,)
As a secondary backup, I use a 1TB notebook drive locked in a USB enabled fire safe:
http://www.amazon.com/SentrySafe-QA0121-Fire-Safe-Waterproof-Storage/dp/B00166187Q/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
I used metal straps to tie it down and lock it to my computer desk in the hope that if someone comes in to steal the computer, they'll just grab it and run without prying off the data safe. The safe is only rated for 30 minutes @ 1500 degrees so it's not a perfect solution, but better than nothing.
For my really important data (old tax returns, scanned in records and receipts, etc) I back them up to the cloud. For photos, I keep the full-size image locally (some TIFFs, mostly JPG's), but keep a lower res lower quality image in the cloud. All of this is less than 20GB.
Most of my big data is DVD's that I've ripped and I'll count on insurance to replace them if they are lost - I don't even back them up to the drive in the fire safe.
GP is just doing what we slashdottians love to do: if we see an idea that we didn't think of ourselves, the idea must be flawed. Furthermore, it must be flawed in a way that is painfully obvious - because surely the designers of a system we failed to think of couldn't have thought of these obvious failure cases.
I suspect you're right - especially since many of the arguments are "omg, think about the children! If schools track when children are in school, pedophiles will use this information to prey on children!"
My wife works in child care, and she faces an uphill battle to get parents of *preschool* children to ensure that their children attend, I can't imagine that it's any easier when dealing with older children. (this is a state subsidized program where unexcused absences cause lack of funding to the program and fines to the parents (who regularly complain that they shouldnt' have to pay a fee when their child doesn't attend school despite the fact that they signed an agreement that clearly spells out their obligation)).
It's nice that Slashdot readers look upon their own experience where they have parents that actually want them to be in school, but they don't realize that there are many parents out there that view school as a government mandated inconvenience - they really don't want to be responsible for making their children attend school. RFID tracking of attendance, is really no different than teacher roll calls, but it means that instead of the teacher spending the first 5 minutes of class taking roll and reporting absent students, the RFID system takes care of it so the teacher doesn't have to.
This lack of responsibility on the part of parents is (in my opinion) is why the USA is losing its edge against other countries. I've interviewed job candidates that can't write a grammatically correct paragraph (they were interviewing for a customer service job) and can't calculate a 10% discount even *with* a calculator.
Schools are failing us when a high school graduate claims "oh, they didn't teach us percentages in school."
(I realize that the original article is referring to Brazilian schools, but I don't think that such a system would be out of line here. Some schools tolerate metal detectors, what's the problem with an RFID system to replace teacher roll calls?
Just because someone accepts something in grade school doesn't mean that they won't appreciate giving it up after they are out of school.
Likewise, just because you can break free from your early influence and training, and question it, and ultimately reject it, does not mean that the average person has enough individuality to do so.
That's a very sad and tragic thing to say. I wish it weren't so. But in this way, you are somewhat exceptional.
You are joking, right? You're saying that the average 18 year old doesn't have the capacity to break free from 12 years of school and accepts the same lifestyle and restrictions that he lived under while in school? Do you *know* any 18 year olds?
Let's say the pedo-hacker, good at what he does, has a preference: a young girl, aged 13, blonde, tiny. Let's say he goes on facebook and finds that preference: name, location, school they go to. Let's say he knows how to get into this chip-system, which might just list their names or giveaway-details (which may or may not be the case, but for argument's sake, it does). Oh hey, there's lil' Jenny McVulnerable, waiting outside for the bus stop.
Yea I know, it's not the USUAL, but things like this bring up the UN-usual.
Since he's such an uber-hacker, he could just hack into the school's ID card database, and download student pictures, home address, parents' names, possibly siblings and emergency contact info, then he can intercept the kid and say "omg Josh, your mom Mary and Uncle Joe were in a terrible accident, your sister Maria is already at the hospital, they sent me to pick you up".
This RFID system doesn't add a risk that's not already there.
Do you really think they're putting a GPS (plus some kind of GSM modem to keep track of the location ) in each uniform? And that whole setup fits "underneath each school's coat-of-arms"?
It's probably a basic RFID tag that gets logged by a reader by the door.
They don't need GPS to track RFID chips on-campus, they just need RFID readers at every classroom and building exits.
Now, if they want to do this to an adult, or forced embed it in a human, that is a DIFFERENT issue.
If you had always been tagged from the time you were a small child, and had all your life to get used to the idea, would you still think so?
That's the danger.
I spent 12 years of being forced to eat school cafeteria meals with no chance to go off-campus for lunch.
When I started college, I took full advantage of the freedom to eat fast food of my own choosing whenver I could afford it despite the fact that I had a "free" on-campus meal plan.
Just because someone accepts something in grade school doesn't mean that they won't appreciate giving it up after they are out of school.
With a big clump of people moving thought the door at the same time may lead to missing a few reads and with a big load of people beeps may not help as much as they do with one person at a time with a turnstile.
Many kids already enter their school single file through the metal detector, so they'll be able to get clean RFID reads.
I've run dozens of road races where literally hundreds of people were running across the RFID mats at the start, finish and random split locations, and I can only think of one instance where I didn't get a chip time (which is recorded separatly from clock time), and that was the time that someone stepped on my foot in a crowded start, flattening out the RFID tag (which put a kink in the antenna). I think RFID can handle a few dozen kids walking through the doorway together.
I sure hope pedophiles in Brazil can't hack or learn to hack. Holy crap this is bad on so many levels
I don't understand what kind of RFID hack will help a pedophile?
What good will it do to be able to scan the t-shirt of the kid walking by his van and know that it's child #1231812421?
It doesn't appear that the RFID chips will contain any identifying information, and why should they -- they just need a number to link the child to the database.
Besides, most kids (at least in the USA) these days are already broadcasting a unique ID through their phone's Wifi MAC address or unencrypted cell phone signalling.
If the phone is reported stolen, make the carriers responsible for any calls made by the handset. The victim has done the right thing by reporting the theft.
Make it an economic penalty if the company refuses to take action. It's the language they understand. Get the courts to back up the victim and the problem will go away in weeks if not days.
They already do that - when my phone was lost and someone made $300 Verizon purchases (downloadable games, videos, ringtones, etc), they refunded all of the fraudulent purchases. Since I had an unlimited phone plan there were no call charges, but I assume they would have refunded those charges as well.
But calls cost verizon almost nothing, so it's not really an economic penalty to them.
How is the carrier supposed to know that the device was stolen? What would stop you as the original owner from selling the device and then reporting it stolen? Just to piss off the new owner? Now the carrier has to setup this whole infrastructure to manage all this tracking and arbitration. With a car, there's a title that has to be moved around. You want that for cell phones???
I think the used phone marketplaces already have a way to take care of this - seems like you'd handle this the same way you handle it if someone sells you a phone that won't power on. You go back to the seller for a refund.
A carrier is an accomplice to murder because it sold the victim a cell phone that happens to be desirable to criminals?
I could see this being successfully argued in court if the cell phone providers have an easy way to make a cell phone nearly worthless if stolen thereby making it less desirable to criminals.
and i'm "hearing impaired" i hate it when people do stupid shit like this to be more "politically correct"
I dated a girl once that was deaf in one ear. She preferred to call it "deaf in one ear".
Don't be an ATT customer.
I can't help wondering if this is really AT&T's fault? They were tasked to provide this service by the government. Were they then supposed to filter-out the overseas hearing-impaired? Doesn't that violate the Common Carrier requirement that phone calls not be monitored for content or restricted? (ponder). I'm curious to see how this turns-out.
How can this not be AT&T's fault? They are the ones with the tools to detect and reduce this fraud. If a city pays a company to run a paratransit service, they shouldn't allow it to be used as a getaway car for a bank robbery, even if the passenger appears to be disabled.
What I want to know is why Blurays take so long to load.
When I want to watch a movie, typically, I want to watch the movie, not wait sevefral minutes for the disk to load, then try to skip through 15 minutes of commercials (if it's possible to skip through them at all).
When I first got my Bluray play, I upgraded my Netflix membership to Bluray. 2 weeks later, I downgraded back to DVD because DVD's are more usable. I've bought a few movies on Bluray, but for the vast majority of what I watch, DVD quality is more than sufficient (even Netflix streaming quality is more than sufficient).
The operating system on my laptop boots up faster than the time it takes most Blurays to load on my bluray player.
And what's with the firmware updates that are needed for some disks to work!? My 8 year old DVD player has never needed a firmware update and it plays all of the DVDs I own but I've already run into a couple disks that refused to work without a bluray player firmware update.
I'm sure the Bluray gives content producers much more freedom to produce rich content, fancy menus and other features (which includes enhanced DRM), but all I want to do is watch my movie.