Just because you put information into a database does not mean that anyone can get it out.
Let's see. The photo is okay, because you're there anyway. (If it's not okay for people to know what you look like, you're probably carrying a cyanide capsule instead of ID.)
The rest of identification should boil down to:
U.S.: tell me what you know about the presenter them: blah blah blah U.S.: match
or U.S.: no match
This set of fields might be the empty set.
Stuff that border control people need to know is printed on the document's paper, and they can submit it to DoS for verification (but can't just go fishing). Presumably we'd give a handful of high-level individuals keys for more sensitive fields, and revoke that key quickly if it's being abused. Maybe they'd have to get our ambassador to use *his* key (and depend on his judgment).
It occurs to me that the *really* ugly mess is going to be working out international standards for RFIDs so the guards can have one set of equipment instead of a hundred, and juggling scores of different national ideas about what it is okay to disclose.
But okay, if you want to stuff all that info. into the chip, it should be encrypted. That should keep casual snoopers out. Again, maybe the guards have to submit the packets to our embassy for the final round of decryption, so there's a key that they don't possess and thus can't leak. I think that's less secure than "yes"/"no" from a central authority but it's an option.
I think you're assuming an unutterably stupid design. Such things happen, but there's always a chance that someone has thought about this for at least a millisecond and realized that the ID chip shouldn't itself contain any information about the holder.
All you really need from the RFID chip is a serial number which can be used to pull up actual personal information from a (suitably secured) database. As soon as two countries are using RFID'ed passports, there's no way to know whether you found an American just by checking your receiver.
Besides, it's got to be cheaper to burn serial numbers into the chips than to be able to program them with all sorts of unencrypted data that shouldn't be carried around in someone's pocket anyway.
Let's see. Rackspace has an "investor relations" contact, but I can't find a stock listing. Nevertheless they seem to have filed a DBA or something of the sort in the U.S. and whatever the equivalent is in the UK, so they are subject to the laws and the justice apparatus of those countries. So while law enforcement may not have been involved, it is very likely someone in a host country's government was.
But the complaint, what little we know about it, was thought to be from Italy and/or Switzerland, was it not? So whoever contacted Rackspace to take note of their responsibilities under the law was probably just an official conduit for the actions of someone else. That "whoever" is probably just as stuck (under the MLAT) as Rackspace, unless he wants to kick up a big fuss, and he's probably still trying to sort out just how big a fuss and whether it is worth the effort, particularly since we won't know for months or years whether the action was justified (i.e. a court hears the case and hands down a decision). And if a court does decide that the action was unjustified, it ain't "whoever"'s problem; the problem sticks to the Italian or Swiss or whichever agency that invoked the MLAT.
As to the "should we do it" question: assuming that one is not legally restrained (by third-party licensors, etc.) from Revealing All, I'd say it boils down to this: how much money do you make selling graphics card drivers? I thought so.
Maybe we should pass the hat and send every NASA manager a copy of _Systemantics_, for their enlightenment. (Likely the scientists and engineers already have their own copies.)
1) Now all I need is a real HDTV, not just an "HDTV-ready" toob.
2) We can't even get SBC to keep our copper pair dry and working, so I won't hold my breath waiting to see them pulling fiber through my neighborhood. (We're not on top of a mountain, either; their wire-center is easily less than 5kft. away.)
It takes all of that, but none of the others will get anywhere without persistence.
Persistence without talent, education, or genius, on the other hand, generally leads to the kind of fame that most of us would rather avoid. It's the single driving quality of that leechlike salesman you'd love to punch in the nose, or the lunatic-fringe politician who just won't go away even though he never comes within 1/100 of winning. It's the life and breath of tin-pot dictators and fanatics.
I agree with Cal's observations but not his conclusion. Persistence and determination can accomplish nothing worthwhile if you have no idea what you are doing.
Bits have been told in many places, with various perspectives. The way I heard it, for example, DR was IBM's first choice of OS vendor for the new PC, but Kildall refused to talk to them so they went with their second choice: Microsoft (which had no OS of its own but was able to latch onto QDOS so they'd have something to sell to IBM).
"Customers have become numb to mHz numbers, so we're refocusing our efforts on a core-count arms race instead."
While there are good reasons to go some way in that direction, I couldn't help remembering the battle for the hearts and minds of transistor-radio purchasers away back when. The marketing people got a lot of consumers to believe that more transistors == better radio, and then it was found that some "10-transistor" radios had only two or three functional transistors; the rest were just soldered to isolated pads, or used as diodes, or something. Let's not go *there* again.
I already have Linux on PPC if I want it, so why would I want to downgrade to MS Windows? It's the *hardware* that offers little choice in PPC-land: every PPC motherboard comes with a Macintosh wrapped around it.
The problem with this idea is that the people who are interested in Thinking Outside the Intel Box are also, by and large, the people who are interested in thinking outside of the Microsoft box. And they already have a choice of solutions. One more is no big deal.
Microsoft would also have to overcome the ill will they generated for themselves with their last foray into PPC territory, which ended with many customers left twisting slowly in the wind. How long will we be supported *this* time, will be the question of the hour.
This reminds me of an idea from Larry Niven's Known Space stories. He thought that intrasystem transport would go through a phase in which photo-sail craft would receive an additional push from orbiting lasers sitting where they have access to high-density power supplies, making the light and simple vehicles fast enough to be practical for routine use.
(This plan figured interestingly in the first Man-Kzin War. Kzinti planners had not used reaction drives in so long that they failed to realize what a fleet of exawatt laser stations scattered all over a star system could do to an incoming force.:-)
Come to think of it, long-range focused plasma beams could have military uses, even if they aren't dense enough to instantly zap the other guy out of existence. So, funding should be assured.:-/
Yup, the problem is definitely caused by downloading third-party software. ActiveX controls, for example.
Now, the AV/spyware thing: both BillG and BWJones are confounding two separate pieces of the puzzle. Clearly AV and anti-spy infrastructure can be built into the base product (although I'd rather have a choice of products than be locked into one). But they need up-to-the-minute information about current threats, which requires ongoing research and updates. That means the features continue to cost the vendor lots of money after deployment, so the vendor would like to separate the updates out as a for-pay service in order to recover the cost without having to guess at long-term revenue figures for OS sales.
Uh, both? It's a problem if you are a music retailer. It's not a problem if you are a music consumer who has found a channel for acquiring music which is better suited to your needs and tastes than what the music shops were doing for you.
Incidentally, harness makers and cartwrights can still earn a decent living; there's just far, far fewer of them per 1000 than in centuries past.
The two ideas are not antithetical. Of course people would rather get valuable things in exchange for less value -- if this was not possible, markets would not form. And giving zero value is usually the best deal you can get.
But there is information that rightly should not be owned. If, for example, someone decided that he owns the fact that the sky is blue, and tried to charge people for saying that to each other, we'd send him in for psychiatric treatment.
There is also information which is more productive when unowned. The way to wring the most benefit from the sciences is to publish far and wide, in the hope that someone will build on one's own work. (Anyone care to argue the notion that we should distinguish between pure and applied science in this context?)
Then there is information which is owned by the wrong people. Historically the telephone company has acted as though the association between my name, address, and telephone number is theirs. I assert that it is mine, and that I permit them to know it in order to provide service to me.
That doesn't happen, does it? Species only disappear (entirely due to evil humankind). We don't get new ones anymore; that stopped just before history began. No?
Fluidic circuits have been around at least since I read about them in Popular Science as a teenager in the 1970s. Making them small enough to think it reasonable to build something as complex as an adder is new, and for that, kudos.
New BOFH excuse: viscosity-index improver wore out.
I'd like to suggest that the problem with hierarchies is that people often get the idea that one's position in the hierarchy says things about what it's someone else's job to do, but not about what it's my job to do. All those people closer to the leaves than I am (as if there were any!) are depending on me to get them good useful work and the resources with which to do it. Every edge indicates *two* bundles of claims: mine on him, and his on me.
I was somewhat enlightened years ago by the suggestion to turn the org chart upside down, so that we see the CEO at the bottom supporting everyone. The only people *not* in a supporting role are the workers who actually make or do things wanted by customers.
Oh, I could tell you about the time we had *already built* good input editing and were told to *take it out* because it was rejecting too many invalid records in an existing database.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you put information into a database does not mean that anyone can get it out.
Let's see. The photo is okay, because you're there anyway. (If it's not okay for people to know what you look like, you're probably carrying a cyanide capsule instead of ID.)
The rest of identification should boil down to:
U.S.: tell me what you know about the presenter
them: blah blah blah
U.S.: match
or
U.S.: no match
This set of fields might be the empty set.
Stuff that border control people need to know is printed on the document's paper, and they can submit it to DoS for verification (but can't just go fishing). Presumably we'd give a handful of high-level individuals keys for more sensitive fields, and revoke that key quickly if it's being abused. Maybe they'd have to get our ambassador to use *his* key (and depend on his judgment).
It occurs to me that the *really* ugly mess is going to be working out international standards for RFIDs so the guards can have one set of equipment instead of a hundred, and juggling scores of different national ideas about what it is okay to disclose.
But okay, if you want to stuff all that info. into the chip, it should be encrypted. That should keep casual snoopers out. Again, maybe the guards have to submit the packets to our embassy for the final round of decryption, so there's a key that they don't possess and thus can't leak. I think that's less secure than "yes"/"no" from a central authority but it's an option.
I think you're assuming an unutterably stupid design. Such things happen, but there's always a chance that someone has thought about this for at least a millisecond and realized that the ID chip shouldn't itself contain any information about the holder.
All you really need from the RFID chip is a serial number which can be used to pull up actual personal information from a (suitably secured) database. As soon as two countries are using RFID'ed passports, there's no way to know whether you found an American just by checking your receiver.
Besides, it's got to be cheaper to burn serial numbers into the chips than to be able to program them with all sorts of unencrypted data that shouldn't be carried around in someone's pocket anyway.
Let's see. Rackspace has an "investor relations" contact, but I can't find a stock listing. Nevertheless they seem to have filed a DBA or something of the sort in the U.S. and whatever the equivalent is in the UK, so they are subject to the laws and the justice apparatus of those countries. So while law enforcement may not have been involved, it is very likely someone in a host country's government was.
But the complaint, what little we know about it, was thought to be from Italy and/or Switzerland, was it not? So whoever contacted Rackspace to take note of their responsibilities under the law was probably just an official conduit for the actions of someone else. That "whoever" is probably just as stuck (under the MLAT) as Rackspace, unless he wants to kick up a big fuss, and he's probably still trying to sort out just how big a fuss and whether it is worth the effort, particularly since we won't know for months or years whether the action was justified (i.e. a court hears the case and hands down a decision). And if a court does decide that the action was unjustified, it ain't "whoever"'s problem; the problem sticks to the Italian or Swiss or whichever agency that invoked the MLAT.
Is it just me, or does _The Last Starfighter: the Musical_ sound like it ought to be the funniest thing since _Springtime for Hitler_?
(Hint to those wondering about _Springtime_: look for _The Producers_ instead.)
Thanks for thinking of us, whatever the outcome!
As to the "should we do it" question: assuming that one is not legally restrained (by third-party licensors, etc.) from Revealing All, I'd say it boils down to this: how much money do you make selling graphics card drivers? I thought so.
I'm having an interesting time working out the relationship between privacy and RFID-tagging of a document that one is required to produce on demand.
Maybe we should pass the hat and send every NASA manager a copy of _Systemantics_, for their enlightenment. (Likely the scientists and engineers already have their own copies.)
1) Now all I need is a real HDTV, not just an "HDTV-ready" toob.
2) We can't even get SBC to keep our copper pair dry and working, so I won't hold my breath waiting to see them pulling fiber through my neighborhood. (We're not on top of a mountain, either; their wire-center is easily less than 5kft. away.)
So does the challenger, apparently.
Oh, man, how right you are! How dare they help their friends?
}sarcasm off{
Simple question, simple answer. How can AOL improve the Internet? Disconnect from it, of course! :-)
It takes all of that, but none of the others will get anywhere without persistence.
Persistence without talent, education, or genius, on the other hand, generally leads to the kind of fame that most of us would rather avoid. It's the single driving quality of that leechlike salesman you'd love to punch in the nose, or the lunatic-fringe politician who just won't go away even though he never comes within 1/100 of winning. It's the life and breath of tin-pot dictators and fanatics.
I agree with Cal's observations but not his conclusion. Persistence and determination can accomplish nothing worthwhile if you have no idea what you are doing.
Bits have been told in many places, with various perspectives. The way I heard it, for example, DR was IBM's first choice of OS vendor for the new PC, but Kildall refused to talk to them so they went with their second choice: Microsoft (which had no OS of its own but was able to latch onto QDOS so they'd have something to sell to IBM).
"Customers have become numb to mHz numbers, so we're refocusing our efforts on a core-count arms race instead."
While there are good reasons to go some way in that direction, I couldn't help remembering the battle for the hearts and minds of transistor-radio purchasers away back when. The marketing people got a lot of consumers to believe that more transistors == better radio, and then it was found that some "10-transistor" radios had only two or three functional transistors; the rest were just soldered to isolated pads, or used as diodes, or something. Let's not go *there* again.
I already have Linux on PPC if I want it, so why would I want to downgrade to MS Windows? It's the *hardware* that offers little choice in PPC-land: every PPC motherboard comes with a Macintosh wrapped around it.
The problem with this idea is that the people who are interested in Thinking Outside the Intel Box are also, by and large, the people who are interested in thinking outside of the Microsoft box. And they already have a choice of solutions. One more is no big deal.
Microsoft would also have to overcome the ill will they generated for themselves with their last foray into PPC territory, which ended with many customers left twisting slowly in the wind. How long will we be supported *this* time, will be the question of the hour.
This reminds me of an idea from Larry Niven's Known Space stories. He thought that intrasystem transport would go through a phase in which photo-sail craft would receive an additional push from orbiting lasers sitting where they have access to high-density power supplies, making the light and simple vehicles fast enough to be practical for routine use.
:-)
:-/
(This plan figured interestingly in the first Man-Kzin War. Kzinti planners had not used reaction drives in so long that they failed to realize what a fleet of exawatt laser stations scattered all over a star system could do to an incoming force.
Come to think of it, long-range focused plasma beams could have military uses, even if they aren't dense enough to instantly zap the other guy out of existence. So, funding should be assured.
Yup, the problem is definitely caused by downloading third-party software. ActiveX controls, for example.
Now, the AV/spyware thing: both BillG and BWJones are confounding two separate pieces of the puzzle. Clearly AV and anti-spy infrastructure can be built into the base product (although I'd rather have a choice of products than be locked into one). But they need up-to-the-minute information about current threats, which requires ongoing research and updates. That means the features continue to cost the vendor lots of money after deployment, so the vendor would like to separate the updates out as a for-pay service in order to recover the cost without having to guess at long-term revenue figures for OS sales.
Uh, both? It's a problem if you are a music retailer. It's not a problem if you are a music consumer who has found a channel for acquiring music which is better suited to your needs and tastes than what the music shops were doing for you.
Incidentally, harness makers and cartwrights can still earn a decent living; there's just far, far fewer of them per 1000 than in centuries past.
The two ideas are not antithetical. Of course people would rather get valuable things in exchange for less value -- if this was not possible, markets would not form. And giving zero value is usually the best deal you can get.
But there is information that rightly should not be owned. If, for example, someone decided that he owns the fact that the sky is blue, and tried to charge people for saying that to each other, we'd send him in for psychiatric treatment.
There is also information which is more productive when unowned. The way to wring the most benefit from the sciences is to publish far and wide, in the hope that someone will build on one's own work. (Anyone care to argue the notion that we should distinguish between pure and applied science in this context?)
Then there is information which is owned by the wrong people. Historically the telephone company has acted as though the association between my name, address, and telephone number is theirs. I assert that it is mine, and that I permit them to know it in order to provide service to me.
That doesn't happen, does it? Species only disappear (entirely due to evil humankind). We don't get new ones anymore; that stopped just before history began. No?
Fluidic circuits have been around at least since I read about them in Popular Science as a teenager in the 1970s. Making them small enough to think it reasonable to build something as complex as an adder is new, and for that, kudos.
New BOFH excuse: viscosity-index improver wore out.
...decide not to spend money until they have it. This *is* government, after all.
I'd like to suggest that the problem with hierarchies is that people often get the idea that one's position in the hierarchy says things about what it's someone else's job to do, but not about what it's my job to do. All those people closer to the leaves than I am (as if there were any!) are depending on me to get them good useful work and the resources with which to do it. Every edge indicates *two* bundles of claims: mine on him, and his on me.
I was somewhat enlightened years ago by the suggestion to turn the org chart upside down, so that we see the CEO at the bottom supporting everyone. The only people *not* in a supporting role are the workers who actually make or do things wanted by customers.
Yes, I try not to say "X is finished" until I'm ready to hand it over. If I'm not done testing it, then it isn't finished.
Oh, I could tell you about the time we had *already built* good input editing and were told to *take it out* because it was rejecting too many invalid records in an existing database.