Don't know how many of the forgers hack up the mag-stripe data as well, but it's probably not a lot.
The hell it isn't. I know a lot of people who re-encode their license mag stripes to get into bars (the bouncers take a quick glance at the photo and swipe the card...they will believe whatever the machine has to say.)
For this reason, I believe that machine readability is a disaster waiting to happen.
I would first of all point you to a good book on this topic, written by a very well regarded ex teacher, Mr. Gatto.
First of all, a standardized curriculum would be nothing short of disastrous. Consider this, unlike my home state of Ohio, where textbooks are purchased by the local school board, Texas purchases the books statewide. That means that every high school student studying american history is reading from the same book.
This means that, regardless of the political preferences of the area, that everyone in Texas has the same book, which is politically skewed to fit comfortably with conservatives. Because text book makers wanna get the gold and sell a book to Texas statewide, all textbooks are written to make Texas happy, whether or not they are actually used there. Because of this, high school biology text books tend to be rather "conservative" regarding evolution and leave it up to the teacher in the classroom to deal with the topic.
Now with a Texan president and a major leader in the House of Reps being from Texas do you think that a natinoal educational curriculum would be open to variety?
and the end to local school boards (populated by political failures with no background in education whatsoever
In big american cities, local school district boards are often stepping stones to higher offices. Not always mind you, but often.
Administration of schools should be run by a very professionalized administration with a strong background in educational theory and practice, not a group of yahoos.
I would say that this is already done in part. The teacher's union is amazingly powerful...most of the time at least as powerful as the local school board, especially since they are very much so united across not just the region or state, but the country.
Having said that, most teachers, who are honest with themselves, will admit that educational theory is complete bunk, invented to keep educators teaching education at the college level...and by requiring teachers to take those classes, it serves as a way of keeping the labor supply down.
I would accompany all these changes with a dramatic increase in teacher's salaries and benefits.
I woudl change starting and ending salaries. Teachers get paid absurdly low to start, and obscenely high to finish. That needs to be flattened (thereby encouraging good people to become teachers and making sure that bad ones don't have so much incentive to hang on.)
Administrator salaries are worse than obscenely high. They are overeducated and overpaid. You'll find that your large american school systems pay at least 30% of the costs to administrative salaries (easily.) Big changes are needed there.
I just cannot stand people like this that fear RFID is a step toward "the mark of the beast".
That seems like a very ugly thing to say. It's one thing to say that you hate someone because their religion is causing *you* inconvenience or is restricting your life in some way. Those who are of faith and believe that the SSN or RFID is the mark of the beast simply are saying that such things contradict their faith and they don't want them for themselves. I'm sure there is no Christian out there who will stop you personally from doing whatever you want with RFID however.
what about it? my belief is that the people who have marriage problems as a result of porn are highly likely to have marriage problems ANYWAY, likely due to lack of the ability to communicate honestly with each other about their sexual needs.
FYI, the man who headed the Ohio constitutional initiative against gay marriage, Phil Buress, is a Cincinnati area crusader, who first got into politics with anti-porn laws/initiatives. He said he became a fundamentalist christian when he was battling a porn addiction that ruined his first marriage.
Apparently the porn addiction didn't ruin his 2nd and 3rd marriages--he did that himself. It was of course pointed out that the man claiming to be protecting marriage blew threw three of them.
The design of many existing mass transit systems suggests that moving people efficiently and conveniently is not a goal of mass transit.
There are a bunch of anti-PRT websites on the internet...some of which have good points, some of which however seem to just plain hate PRT.
I think there are people in this world who like mass transit simply because it has an egalitarian element--everyone riding around in the same carriage at the same speed. PRT blows this egalitarianess by putting everyone in a separate car (even if the cars are practically the same and do indeed run around at the same speed.)
Also as spam filters get better, profits will go down.
In the same way that the more resources we put into preventing illegal drugs entering the country, the profits for drugs lords drop.
As I type this up, I'm still figuring out if that's an apt analogy. On the other hand, the economist in me rejects what you said, noting that the most important spam filter is the email receiver. Clearly if there are individuals out there who keep on buying from spam emails, then profit per person can't be declining, even if the potential customer base is shriking (which it may be in some places, but I suspect its' growing in others.) Fortunately, there are no spam buying addictions out there (except for those whoh really get suckered into the nigerian scams.)
Think about it, if there are the screen actors unions and contruction worker unions, why can't there be Software Engineer Unions?
Keep in mind, the screen actors guild (and to a lesser extent, the theatre and radio guilds) exist as a protectionist racket.
Whereas most unions you more or less get into just be getting the job, getting into the screen actor's guild is a very difficult task, which involves a lot of luck, and that luck has to be repeated. Furthermore, once you become a member of SAG, your ability to work in non union productions is severely limited (there are many who are SAG eligible but choose not to become members because it will close off too many opportunities for them...especially if they are in New York.)
I'm not saying that SAG is a bad thing entirely, but I feel, as a young actor trying to get into the business, that its devoted more to protectionism than helping actors.
I'd like to hear what Americans think about results and exit polls for eastern states being published before polls in western states have closed
As an Ohio voter, whose politics on this issue may be gently described as Ohio uber alles, I find myself as concerned about this as much as I do Western TV audiences getting TV programs at weird times (when shifting isn't possible.) There are disadvantages and advantages to living anywhere, and this is just an example.
I would of done so if I felt at odds with the voting technology, but from observation it seemed like the process was a good balance between the use of electronic mechanisms, ease of use, and having a human readable ballot for counting.
The machines used here in Franklin County, the Shouptronics, have no paper trail.
At 7.30 we (the pollworkers, I'm a candidate today otherwise I would be working the polls) press a button on the back that closes the polls. The machine performs internal calculations (about 5 minutes worth) and prints off the voting results onto a paper roll (several times.) It also encodes the information onto a data cartridge of some type. Then we pop open a panel on the back of the machine, which was sealed with twist ties, remove the paper receipts, and the data cartridge. Some of the paper receipts are hung at the polling place, others are sent to the board of elections and the county clerk's office, with the data cartridge. The precinct judge takes the package with the cartridge and the receipts and hands them off to a county sheriff at a particular location who ferries them to the county.
But, having said all that, these are a first generation of voting machines, and there is no paper trail/paper receipt. The machine keeps everything internally until polls are closed.
The smokeless Premier cigarette played a small part in the movie Barbarians at the Gate in which James Garner plays wily, crude RJR CEO F. Scott Johnson, who said I think has some of the most priceless movie quotes ever.
At the beginning of the film, Johnson first tries the premier, which was receiving poor reviews and which was described as "tastes like shit, smells like a fart." When Johnson noted that the draw on the cigarette was wrong (difficult) and the RJR scientist said that was the "hernia effect" Johnson said something like "that's fucking great! Buy Premier cigarettes, they'll rip your balls off!"
What I would really like, more than the arrest of identity thieves, is the entire identification system become more immune to this kind of theft.
This would be impossible if the system is centralized over a large population. (And I'm thinking large is more than 500,000)
Prior to photo ID cards (which were only introduced in the late 1960s, and it wasn't really until the 1980s that someone could be expected to have one, at least in the US, add 10 years for Canada) the cost and issues involved in indentifying an individual rest with the institution that needed to do the identifying. Though a pain, each institution had to develop its own way of identifying the person. Without a central identity to steal, fraud was much lower.
While centralized ID systems (state issued ID, centralized database systems) take the economic costs of identification off institutions, it creates such a huge security hole that it creates all new costs on its own. (And in security terms it's a very bad system, since everything is so brittle--a single failure is a complete failure.)
I like to illustrate the problem this way. California issues all its drivers licenses from one central location. According to my estimates that's 25,000 licenses per day. How hard could it be to throw in an extra 100 of them, and would anyone notice?
The economics simply aren't on the side of a perfect system. When you find examples of identity systems without fraud, either the population is small or the ID system has no particular value to a criminal.
My sig line goes more into photo ID cards themselves. I've often entertained the idea that there is a mathematical formula that would show how accuracy in a large database (like a credit union) drops with the quantity of data objects, and the quantity of data holders. Such a formula would show why the credit union databases are heinous accuracy wise, and why it's so easy to steal identities from them. I'm not able to put such a theory together however.
Keep in mind that the ID card experience in ever country, every regime, is very different from that in other countries.
One of the things I like to say is, if you don't have a problem with ID fraud, then you probably don't need to have the card in the first place. What the card is used for in places like Sweden, Germany or Belgium is achieved in other parts of the world perfectly effectively without an ID card.
Further, ID card fraud rises at least geometrically with the quantity of cards issued (for a variety of reasons.) California has probably ten times the driver's license fraud problem of my Ohio even though they only have 3 times the amount of cards issued.
On the other hand, while Sweden has a fairly benign fraud issue, a much smaller country, like my birthplace of Costa Rica, has massive ID card fraud, with a sophisticated standardized biometric based ID card. There are a variety of reasons for this, a lot of it owing to easily bribed officials and the fact that the cards are too powerful (allow illegals to work in Costa Rica) but it's amusing to me because Costa Rica is a relatively small country.
A standardized ID will let them make sure who's who though, so that you won't get confused with that terrorist guy on the floor above, who just happens to share your last name.
Fortunately that's because terrorist get special ID cards with the letter T on them.
then his entry could read (assuming the British card follows the European model)
It seems that the trend for identification documents is moving away from machine readability that is simultaneously human readable. I would imagine that the new card would be more likely to have a PDF-417 barcode than the human readabile machine text.
A system like that wouldn't be too bad. The problem is those that don't stop at over 3 miles an hour.
You've actually just made an interesting argument for allowing such systems. I have seen people mount a TV on their dashboard here in the US. On the other hand, between them mounting a regular TV to their dashboard, and having one which I know automatically turns off after 3mph, I would definitely prefer knowing that drivers had the latter and the former. And the best way of eliminating the former, would be bringing out the latter.
Since certain states *cough*Virginia*cough* do not allow their use, most foreign OEMs disable the rear fog functionality on the cars the export to NA.
Well Virginia...umm...is a very odd state. I will not make any apologies for it...it's oddly fascist.
At any rate, my Saab does have the working mighty rear fog lamp. I dunno if newer Saabs have it, but mine does, and I do use it when it's foggy and dark.
Whereas I think the addition of RFID chips to passports is simply another incremental step, and passports are in fact there to identify you anyway, if you take a step back and read your last paragraph
If I may correct that point...passports have the holder's name on them but that element was never necessary. The main reason for the passport is to determine your citizenship, not necessarily your identity.
I'm actually helping a close friend purchase a new 12" apple laptop...we had more or less settled on the powerbook (she's a new college student studying film, the thinking being that the powerbook's more robust bus would help with video editing, if she decided to do that) but now I wonder again...what should one know in comparing the ibook to the powerbook, now that the ibook has the new speed increases?
Yeah, they can be as happy as they want, but I for one am VERY happy that my bank checks up on other customers, and there are cases when it's obvious that PayPal should have done the same.
The chexsystems report is incapable of figuring out if a person will commit fraud on the account...the vast majority of people who get stuck in the database are those who overdrafted on the account and didn't pay the bank. The only reason banks care is that the banking association has a monolithic line regarding usurious overdraft fees.
There are apparently some banks that, in lieu of chex systems, use credit reports before opening the account, and that would better indicate the person's intentions regarding fraud.
advantages of Paypal not being a bank...
on
Paypal Grinds To A Halt
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Though a lot of posts on here are along the lines of "see...haha...paypal is not a bank!!" I for one am grateful that it isn't.
There are a lot of people, for a variety of reasons, who have been screwed out of getting a bank account from a regular bank. Because of negative reporting on chex systems, they can't get a regular checking account at all.
In tandem with a savings account (which you *can* sometimes get even with a bad chexsystems report) and a paypal account, you have essentially the same services of a checking account.
I for one got screwed by my bank (5/3rd) after fraud hit my account and they refused to take responsibility for some items. Thanks to paypal I still can have checking account like abilities until I sue my bank.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know how many of the forgers hack up the mag-stripe data as well, but it's probably not a lot.
The hell it isn't. I know a lot of people who re-encode their license mag stripes to get into bars (the bouncers take a quick glance at the photo and swipe the card...they will believe whatever the machine has to say.)
For this reason, I believe that machine readability is a disaster waiting to happen.
I would first of all point you to a good book on this topic, written by a very well regarded ex teacher, Mr. Gatto.
First of all, a standardized curriculum would be nothing short of disastrous. Consider this, unlike my home state of Ohio, where textbooks are purchased by the local school board, Texas purchases the books statewide. That means that every high school student studying american history is reading from the same book.
This means that, regardless of the political preferences of the area, that everyone in Texas has the same book, which is politically skewed to fit comfortably with conservatives. Because text book makers wanna get the gold and sell a book to Texas statewide, all textbooks are written to make Texas happy, whether or not they are actually used there. Because of this, high school biology text books tend to be rather "conservative" regarding evolution and leave it up to the teacher in the classroom to deal with the topic.
Now with a Texan president and a major leader in the House of Reps being from Texas do you think that a natinoal educational curriculum would be open to variety?
and the end to local school boards (populated by political failures with no background in education whatsoever
In big american cities, local school district boards are often stepping stones to higher offices. Not always mind you, but often.
Administration of schools should be run by a very professionalized administration with a strong background in educational theory and practice, not a group of yahoos.
I would say that this is already done in part. The teacher's union is amazingly powerful...most of the time at least as powerful as the local school board, especially since they are very much so united across not just the region or state, but the country.
Having said that, most teachers, who are honest with themselves, will admit that educational theory is complete bunk, invented to keep educators teaching education at the college level...and by requiring teachers to take those classes, it serves as a way of keeping the labor supply down.
I would accompany all these changes with a dramatic increase in teacher's salaries and benefits.
I woudl change starting and ending salaries. Teachers get paid absurdly low to start, and obscenely high to finish. That needs to be flattened (thereby encouraging good people to become teachers and making sure that bad ones don't have so much incentive to hang on.)
Administrator salaries are worse than obscenely high. They are overeducated and overpaid. You'll find that your large american school systems pay at least 30% of the costs to administrative salaries (easily.) Big changes are needed there.
Unlike some previous efforts, this one doesn't require anything to be implanted in your brain.
/monty python reference
Yes, but it's not in colour.
I was able to get my free credit report, even though my state does not require the yearly free report, nor is a western state.
Tell em that their Ohio vote is at least five times more powerful than a vote in almost any other state.
Maybe a slightly better solution would have been to tick up a page stating the cock-up
Seems to me that showing a cock-up is exactly what they were trying to avoid.
I just cannot stand people like this that fear RFID is a step toward "the mark of the beast".
That seems like a very ugly thing to say. It's one thing to say that you hate someone because their religion is causing *you* inconvenience or is restricting your life in some way. Those who are of faith and believe that the SSN or RFID is the mark of the beast simply are saying that such things contradict their faith and they don't want them for themselves. I'm sure there is no Christian out there who will stop you personally from doing whatever you want with RFID however.
what about it? my belief is that the people who have marriage problems as a result of porn are highly likely to have marriage problems ANYWAY, likely due to lack of the ability to communicate honestly with each other about their sexual needs.
FYI, the man who headed the Ohio constitutional initiative against gay marriage, Phil Buress, is a Cincinnati area crusader, who first got into politics with anti-porn laws/initiatives. He said he became a fundamentalist christian when he was battling a porn addiction that ruined his first marriage.
Apparently the porn addiction didn't ruin his 2nd and 3rd marriages--he did that himself. It was of course pointed out that the man claiming to be protecting marriage blew threw three of them.
The design of many existing mass transit systems suggests that moving people efficiently and conveniently is not a goal of mass transit.
There are a bunch of anti-PRT websites on the internet...some of which have good points, some of which however seem to just plain hate PRT.
I think there are people in this world who like mass transit simply because it has an egalitarian element--everyone riding around in the same carriage at the same speed. PRT blows this egalitarianess by putting everyone in a separate car (even if the cars are practically the same and do indeed run around at the same speed.)
Also as spam filters get better, profits will go down.
In the same way that the more resources we put into preventing illegal drugs entering the country, the profits for drugs lords drop.
As I type this up, I'm still figuring out if that's an apt analogy. On the other hand, the economist in me rejects what you said, noting that the most important spam filter is the email receiver. Clearly if there are individuals out there who keep on buying from spam emails, then profit per person can't be declining, even if the potential customer base is shriking (which it may be in some places, but I suspect its' growing in others.) Fortunately, there are no spam buying addictions out there (except for those whoh really get suckered into the nigerian scams.)
Think about it, if there are the screen actors unions and contruction worker unions, why can't there be Software Engineer Unions?
Keep in mind, the screen actors guild (and to a lesser extent, the theatre and radio guilds) exist as a protectionist racket.
Whereas most unions you more or less get into just be getting the job, getting into the screen actor's guild is a very difficult task, which involves a lot of luck, and that luck has to be repeated. Furthermore, once you become a member of SAG, your ability to work in non union productions is severely limited (there are many who are SAG eligible but choose not to become members because it will close off too many opportunities for them...especially if they are in New York.)
I'm not saying that SAG is a bad thing entirely, but I feel, as a young actor trying to get into the business, that its devoted more to protectionism than helping actors.
I'd like to hear what Americans think about results and exit polls for eastern states being published before polls in western states have closed
As an Ohio voter, whose politics on this issue may be gently described as Ohio uber alles, I find myself as concerned about this as much as I do Western TV audiences getting TV programs at weird times (when shifting isn't possible.) There are disadvantages and advantages to living anywhere, and this is just an example.
I would of done so if I felt at odds with the voting technology, but from observation it seemed like the process was a good balance between the use of electronic mechanisms, ease of use, and having a human readable ballot for counting.
The machines used here in Franklin County, the Shouptronics, have no paper trail.
At 7.30 we (the pollworkers, I'm a candidate today otherwise I would be working the polls) press a button on the back that closes the polls. The machine performs internal calculations (about 5 minutes worth) and prints off the voting results onto a paper roll (several times.) It also encodes the information onto a data cartridge of some type. Then we pop open a panel on the back of the machine, which was sealed with twist ties, remove the paper receipts, and the data cartridge. Some of the paper receipts are hung at the polling place, others are sent to the board of elections and the county clerk's office, with the data cartridge. The precinct judge takes the package with the cartridge and the receipts and hands them off to a county sheriff at a particular location who ferries them to the county.
But, having said all that, these are a first generation of voting machines, and there is no paper trail/paper receipt. The machine keeps everything internally until polls are closed.
The smokeless Premier cigarette played a small part in the movie Barbarians at the Gate in which James Garner plays wily, crude RJR CEO F. Scott Johnson, who said I think has some of the most priceless movie quotes ever.
At the beginning of the film, Johnson first tries the premier, which was receiving poor reviews and which was described as "tastes like shit, smells like a fart." When Johnson noted that the draw on the cigarette was wrong (difficult) and the RJR scientist said that was the "hernia effect" Johnson said something like "that's fucking great! Buy Premier cigarettes, they'll rip your balls off!"
A highly recommend movie.
What I would really like, more than the arrest of identity thieves, is the entire identification system become more immune to this kind of theft.
This would be impossible if the system is centralized over a large population. (And I'm thinking large is more than 500,000)
Prior to photo ID cards (which were only introduced in the late 1960s, and it wasn't really until the 1980s that someone could be expected to have one, at least in the US, add 10 years for Canada) the cost and issues involved in indentifying an individual rest with the institution that needed to do the identifying. Though a pain, each institution had to develop its own way of identifying the person. Without a central identity to steal, fraud was much lower.
While centralized ID systems (state issued ID, centralized database systems) take the economic costs of identification off institutions, it creates such a huge security hole that it creates all new costs on its own. (And in security terms it's a very bad system, since everything is so brittle--a single failure is a complete failure.)
I like to illustrate the problem this way. California issues all its drivers licenses from one central location. According to my estimates that's 25,000 licenses per day. How hard could it be to throw in an extra 100 of them, and would anyone notice?
The economics simply aren't on the side of a perfect system. When you find examples of identity systems without fraud, either the population is small or the ID system has no particular value to a criminal.
My sig line goes more into photo ID cards themselves. I've often entertained the idea that there is a mathematical formula that would show how accuracy in a large database (like a credit union) drops with the quantity of data objects, and the quantity of data holders. Such a formula would show why the credit union databases are heinous accuracy wise, and why it's so easy to steal identities from them. I'm not able to put such a theory together however.
Here in Sweden...
Keep in mind that the ID card experience in ever country, every regime, is very different from that in other countries.
One of the things I like to say is, if you don't have a problem with ID fraud, then you probably don't need to have the card in the first place. What the card is used for in places like Sweden, Germany or Belgium is achieved in other parts of the world perfectly effectively without an ID card.
Further, ID card fraud rises at least geometrically with the quantity of cards issued (for a variety of reasons.) California has probably ten times the driver's license fraud problem of my Ohio even though they only have 3 times the amount of cards issued.
On the other hand, while Sweden has a fairly benign fraud issue, a much smaller country, like my birthplace of Costa Rica, has massive ID card fraud, with a sophisticated standardized biometric based ID card. There are a variety of reasons for this, a lot of it owing to easily bribed officials and the fact that the cards are too powerful (allow illegals to work in Costa Rica) but it's amusing to me because Costa Rica is a relatively small country.
A standardized ID will let them make sure who's who though, so that you won't get confused with that terrorist guy on the floor above, who just happens to share your last name.
Fortunately that's because terrorist get special ID cards with the letter T on them.
then his entry could read (assuming the British card follows the European model)
It seems that the trend for identification documents is moving away from machine readability that is simultaneously human readable. I would imagine that the new card would be more likely to have a PDF-417 barcode than the human readabile machine text.
A system like that wouldn't be too bad. The problem is those that don't stop at over 3 miles an hour.
You've actually just made an interesting argument for allowing such systems. I have seen people mount a TV on their dashboard here in the US. On the other hand, between them mounting a regular TV to their dashboard, and having one which I know automatically turns off after 3mph, I would definitely prefer knowing that drivers had the latter and the former. And the best way of eliminating the former, would be bringing out the latter.
Since certain states *cough*Virginia*cough* do not allow their use, most foreign OEMs disable the rear fog functionality on the cars the export to NA.
Well Virginia...umm...is a very odd state. I will not make any apologies for it...it's oddly fascist.
At any rate, my Saab does have the working mighty rear fog lamp. I dunno if newer Saabs have it, but mine does, and I do use it when it's foggy and dark.
Whereas I think the addition of RFID chips to passports is simply another incremental step, and passports are in fact there to identify you anyway, if you take a step back and read your last paragraph
If I may correct that point...passports have the holder's name on them but that element was never necessary. The main reason for the passport is to determine your citizenship, not necessarily your identity.
You cracked some crypto. Spiffy. Might not be the best idea to lump yourself in with a lot of talented folks who ARE working to defend rights.
The EFF and others probably wouldn't appreciate that.
Umm...unless I read the original post incorrectly, I believe s/he is specifically *not* lumping himself with those who work actively to defend rights.
Please see the line "I don't pontificate about how I'm helping to preserve the freedom of people everywhere."
I'm entirely unsure how you were rated so highly.
I'm actually helping a close friend purchase a new 12" apple laptop...we had more or less settled on the powerbook (she's a new college student studying film, the thinking being that the powerbook's more robust bus would help with video editing, if she decided to do that) but now I wonder again...what should one know in comparing the ibook to the powerbook, now that the ibook has the new speed increases?
It's a hugely profitable bank that has figured out how to most efficiently screw its customers.
Yeah, they can be as happy as they want, but I for one am VERY happy that my bank checks up on other customers, and there are cases when it's obvious that PayPal should have done the same.
The chexsystems report is incapable of figuring out if a person will commit fraud on the account...the vast majority of people who get stuck in the database are those who overdrafted on the account and didn't pay the bank. The only reason banks care is that the banking association has a monolithic line regarding usurious overdraft fees.
There are apparently some banks that, in lieu of chex systems, use credit reports before opening the account, and that would better indicate the person's intentions regarding fraud.
Though a lot of posts on here are along the lines of "see...haha...paypal is not a bank!!" I for one am grateful that it isn't.
There are a lot of people, for a variety of reasons, who have been screwed out of getting a bank account from a regular bank. Because of negative reporting on chex systems, they can't get a regular checking account at all.
In tandem with a savings account (which you *can* sometimes get even with a bad chexsystems report) and a paypal account, you have essentially the same services of a checking account.
I for one got screwed by my bank (5/3rd) after fraud hit my account and they refused to take responsibility for some items. Thanks to paypal I still can have checking account like abilities until I sue my bank.