Not necessarily, there are other ways around it, for example if your right hand is hacked, use your left, or revert to a card system, or use a retinal scan, or something else. My point isn't that it's impossible to overcome this challenge, because I don't believe it is. My point was that this is something that needs to be taken in to account before deployment.
My hope is that this is a misunderstanding or simplification generated by either a PR person or reporter and not in fact what the people designing this have done.
What I find more likely (assuming they are doing this even remotely right) is that it relies on some form of cryptography where each MintChip as it's own unique security key that is secret from other users. Not security through obscurity, but rather public/private key cryptography which would be the only safe way to do this properly.
I think this is 2 completely unrelated problems. What this article is talking about is a way to exchange Canadian Dollars with people without physically carrying and handing them paper bills or metal coins. The currency itself isn't changing, just the method of transfering it.
As for devaluation. This is actually a touchy subject, in some ways currency needs to devalue, doing so stops people from sitting on vast piles of it and keeps them spending it which keeps the economy going, which generates jobs, and allows more people to spend money. Of course it also needs not to devaluate too quickly for the reason you list in that you have to be able to save for future big purchases, and be able to save money for retirement. Balancing the 2 is very tricky, but also completely unrelated to this particular initiative.
I'm actually all for digital currency. But there are a few caveats, the obvious security ones apply, don't want people copying my digital money, don't want people stealing my digital money, don't want people creating money out of thin air. But in addition it needs to have a few other characteristics: - Doesn't cost me anything to use. This is why I currently ignore Interac email transfers and still write people cheques, it's much cheaper for me. (even if it should be in the bank's best interest to push me the other direction, the cheque should be a lot more expensive for them to process!) - Isn't tied to any one platform. Don't tell me I need an iPhone, or a Windows PC, or any other specific device, make it work on just about anything (obviously within reason) - Anonymous. (listed in the summary, so it's a good start, but I can't emphasize enough that you will never get rid of physical currency as long as you make all your digital currency leave a trail) - Hard to lose. I don't want to lose all my cash to a hard drive crash, or other similar event, so I need to either be able to back it up, or better yet not have to. (of course this is very difficult to accomplish while maintaining both anonymity and security, but there are a lot of bright minds out there, hopefully someone can come up with a good way to do it.) - Ideally non-network dependent. A couple of years ago requiring an internet connection for the transaction would have been a deal breaker, but with the increased ubiquity of the internet on mobile devices this has lowered somewhat in priority. I still think though that you need to be able to pay someone without necesarily having network access at the time.
And why not? There are really only 2 ways to lower crime rates. 1) strong enforcement, this is either a) not effective, or b) extremely intrusive, or more likely c) both. Not to mention very expensive. 2) Removing incentive to commit the crime in the first place, this is relatively cheap, effective, and when done properly, non-intrusive.
You are arguing for the choice envisioned by the creators of the TSA, PATRIOT act, SOPA, etc... and you don't see why that might be an unpopular opinion on Slashdot?
No, but in reality people rarely kill someone for their ATM card, they take the card, (and maybe the whole wallet) but usually don't do permanent damage to the victim (there are of course always exceptions). Now if they have to take my whole hand to accomplish the same thing, I'd really rather not give them an incentive to cause me bodily harm. Never mind the fact that making sure it's a living hand also stops attacks similar to the gummy bear attack used on early fingerprint readers, and you can see some definite benefits to doing this.
Interesting. I'm assuming that the palm-vein technology won't read the veins properly unless there is blood actively flowing?
As for both hands, the machines I've seen (very primitive ones, so possibly not comparable) were designed for only one hand, or the other, not both (ie, everyone had to use their right hand, left hands wouldn't sit right on the scanner due to positioning of pegs designed to sit between the fingers) If it can actually read either hand, that's definitely a step the right direction (though if you have neither hand, you're still screwed, but at a certain point that's always the case)
Now that still leaves the problem of duress, and what to do if someone does manage to make a functional copy of your hand (I refuse to believe that any technology exists that is impossible to fool, no matter how difficult it may be) (maybe though you have it in the both hands part, unregister the one they copied and use the other one?)
Doesn't work. Many studies have shown that tougher laws are rarely accompanied by any decrease at all in the activity being regulated. The problem isn't the severity of the punishment, but the percieved likelyhood of being caught. Seems in general, once you get past a very low threshold, it doesn't matter how severe the punishment, people are either worried they will be caught, and follow the rules, or don't think they will, and break the law.
Note it doesn't matter what the actual likelyhood of being caught is, only the perception. This has been shown in places such as New York where focussing on petty crime (graffitti, jaywalking, etc) caused a reduction in more severe offences, the theory being that the Police were more visible, and more people were talking about being caught, so the perception of what you could get away with changed, even though the overall likelyhood of being caught for the higher offences was largely unchanged, and the punishments were unchanged.
Now back on topic, the sort of crime envisioned here would probably be much less likely to occur than someone stealing a debit/credit card now (It's both a phycological threshold as well as a legal threshold that you would cross from simple theft to assault causing bodily harm, and that will weed out some (most?) criminals, however the severity of the offence is significantly higher, and any criminals left in the group willing to cross that threshold will cause severe damage. That's not a tradeoff everyone is willing to make.
4) include provisions to change if hacked. (Don't assume it's impossible, if someone manages to "copy" my hand, I want a way to have that access disabled and change to some other way of authenticating, now we get issued new debit cards, I'm not ready to change my hand if someone manages to copy it.)
That all depends on if it needs to be alive. I remember a study with gummy bears and some older fingerprint readers...
I'm not completely against biometrics, I just think they need to be thought through VERY thoroughly. I'd envision a few necessary provisions: 1) must include confirmation that body part is still attached to the living body (possibly with something like pulse oximetry? (I'd think that would be difficult to fake?)) 2) must still require some form of authentication (PIN or otherwise), and should include capability for a duress code. (If your debit card is stolen, you aren't in real physical danger after the theft, if you are kidnapped and forced to go with them to the bank, you are) 3) must include provisions in case of legitimate injury to said body part. (what if I loose my hand in an industrial accident, the injury itself is bad enough, the inability to access my money would just add to an already lousy situation)
This is true, but when testing emissions the diesels consistantly have higher particulate emissions than gasoline, though generally lower in several other categories. Modern Diesel vehicles have no trouble whatsoever passing even the strictest vehicle emissions testing in the world.
I'm in Canada, but the situation in the US is very similar to Canada (give or take a year)
As for your "plenty of electric vehicles available" article...
You list the Leaf... available "by the end of 2012" the Volt, not an electric car, it's a hybrid "several" ford vehicles also "by the end of 2012" the Mitsubishi i which can "now be reserved" (but not yet bought) A toyota rav4 electric "summer 2012" a Honda for the 2013 model year The tesla roadster I already covered in my original comment The Smart which will only have 300 electric cars on one specific lease program in one city and the Fisker Karma which competes directly with the tesla roadster (same problems I listed for it)
So your own article claiming how many electric cars there are backs up my point that there aren't yet any available.
And I personally don't want a frickin' internal combustion engine in my car. Don't want the weight, don't want the maintenance issues, don't want the safety issues.
There's no excuse in the world why half the cars on the road today couldn't be replaced with electric cars if someone would just offer us some.
Loud: only in North America. Seriously, North American manufacturers make awfully loud diesel engines, (Dodge being the absolute worst) modern small diesels made my all the other manufacturers in the world aren't noticeably louder than gasoline engines Smelly: give me the smell of diesel over the smell of gasoline any day. of course a reasonably tuned or modern diesel won't smell any more than a reasonably tuned or modern gas vehicle either. Polluting: less so than gasoline vehicles. more particulates, but those fall out of the air relatively quickly and aren't as harmful as some of the other chemicals that gasoline engines spew. (and if you are talking about clouds of black smoke, you're once again looking at poorly made/maintained diesels and not what a proper modern diesel does) Hard to start in cold weather: I'm Canadian, I'm on my third diesel vehicle, and the only times I've had trouble starting are when I've left the headlights on over night. In fact my diesel is more likely to start in the winter than either my fiance's gas car, or my company's gas truck.
I can give you a few reasons people don't buy them though. 1) manufacturers refuse to sell small diesels in North America (this is probably the biggest reason, it's hard to buy what isn't available for sale) 2) people seem to buy the propaganda that diesels are loud, smelly, polluting, and hard to start in cold weather, even though modern diesels are none of the above.
And that's the great thing about diesel, the further between stations, the more likely the station is to have diesel. The only stations I've ever found without diesel are in large cities where you have 4 gas stations within a block, and then only 1 of the 4 might have it, but as soon as you get out of town, almost every station has diesel.
Where I am diesel is cheaper than gas in the summer, more expensive in the winter. but generally less volatile than gas prices. mileage is better, and the engine is more robust. I find it a real shame that it's so hard to find small diesels in North America.
As I pointed out though in another post, most families don't get "a" car, they get 2, (or more) so that each adult member of the household can do their own thing, and go their own places. You can't at present replace all those cars with electrics, but in most cases you could replace one of them (or more) without any adverse effects.
What portion of North American households have more than 1 car? (I'd be willing to bet the vast majority) Why do ALL of them need to be capable of long range?
For example, my fiance and I both have cars, we both go to work every day, and we also both enjoy our vacations, trips to the mountains, etc. We couldn't (with current technology) replace both our vehicles with electric cars, but there is no reason at all why one of the 2 couldn't be electric, leaving the other one capable of the long road trips.
The public will only decide if the car manufacturers let us. And so far there are no electric vehicles available here. Only hybrids.
Chevrolet bragged about being the first electric vehicle to market, but still haven't offered one, only a different form of hybrid.
There's a huge market for electric cars, too bad nobody is willing to sell one (I'm ignoring the Tesla roadster due to price and availability, it's just not in the attainable range for the average person)
It sounds to me like most of the drawbacks you listed for using a tablet instead of a PC are drawbacks specific to the iPad. And not to tablets in general. I'm typing this from my Acer Iconia tablet right now, and it has completely replaced my laptop for all use away from home. I do still have a desktop, but I find myself turning it on less and less. The tablet has a full size USB port which allows me to connect external hard drives, mice, keyboards (or you can do it by bluetooth) It connects to my NAS device when I'm at home, and being an android device I am not limited to software approved by any one company. I have office software on it, I have a good SSH client, and pretty much everything else I need.. If I'm travelling for long periods of time I carry it in a keyboard folio case, otherwise I take just the tablet itself.
Unfortunately I've found chrome to really drag once you get a whole bunch of tabs open, and all too often I have a LOT of tabs open. Other than that I was pretty impressed with how far it's come, if I could get it to a useable speed with lots of tabs open, I'd use it as my primary browser. Unfortunately until then I'm sticking with firefox.
It's a battle of greed, the ISPs are willing to sell all the data they can, but the media industry isn't willing to pay for it, feeling that it's their "right" to fish endlessly... As long as both sides are greedy, we actually win. Heaven help us if they ever come to a compromise!
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily, there are other ways around it, for example if your right hand is hacked, use your left, or revert to a card system, or use a retinal scan, or something else.
My point isn't that it's impossible to overcome this challenge, because I don't believe it is. My point was that this is something that needs to be taken in to account before deployment.
My hope is that this is a misunderstanding or simplification generated by either a PR person or reporter and not in fact what the people designing this have done.
What I find more likely (assuming they are doing this even remotely right) is that it relies on some form of cryptography where each MintChip as it's own unique security key that is secret from other users. Not security through obscurity, but rather public/private key cryptography which would be the only safe way to do this properly.
I think this is 2 completely unrelated problems. What this article is talking about is a way to exchange Canadian Dollars with people without physically carrying and handing them paper bills or metal coins. The currency itself isn't changing, just the method of transfering it.
As for devaluation. This is actually a touchy subject, in some ways currency needs to devalue, doing so stops people from sitting on vast piles of it and keeps them spending it which keeps the economy going, which generates jobs, and allows more people to spend money. Of course it also needs not to devaluate too quickly for the reason you list in that you have to be able to save for future big purchases, and be able to save money for retirement. Balancing the 2 is very tricky, but also completely unrelated to this particular initiative.
I'm actually all for digital currency. But there are a few caveats, the obvious security ones apply, don't want people copying my digital money, don't want people stealing my digital money, don't want people creating money out of thin air. But in addition it needs to have a few other characteristics:
- Doesn't cost me anything to use. This is why I currently ignore Interac email transfers and still write people cheques, it's much cheaper for me. (even if it should be in the bank's best interest to push me the other direction, the cheque should be a lot more expensive for them to process!)
- Isn't tied to any one platform. Don't tell me I need an iPhone, or a Windows PC, or any other specific device, make it work on just about anything (obviously within reason)
- Anonymous. (listed in the summary, so it's a good start, but I can't emphasize enough that you will never get rid of physical currency as long as you make all your digital currency leave a trail)
- Hard to lose. I don't want to lose all my cash to a hard drive crash, or other similar event, so I need to either be able to back it up, or better yet not have to. (of course this is very difficult to accomplish while maintaining both anonymity and security, but there are a lot of bright minds out there, hopefully someone can come up with a good way to do it.)
- Ideally non-network dependent. A couple of years ago requiring an internet connection for the transaction would have been a deal breaker, but with the increased ubiquity of the internet on mobile devices this has lowered somewhat in priority. I still think though that you need to be able to pay someone without necesarily having network access at the time.
And why not? There are really only 2 ways to lower crime rates.
1) strong enforcement, this is either a) not effective, or b) extremely intrusive, or more likely c) both. Not to mention very expensive.
2) Removing incentive to commit the crime in the first place, this is relatively cheap, effective, and when done properly, non-intrusive.
You are arguing for the choice envisioned by the creators of the TSA, PATRIOT act, SOPA, etc... and you don't see why that might be an unpopular opinion on Slashdot?
No, but in reality people rarely kill someone for their ATM card, they take the card, (and maybe the whole wallet) but usually don't do permanent damage to the victim (there are of course always exceptions). Now if they have to take my whole hand to accomplish the same thing, I'd really rather not give them an incentive to cause me bodily harm. Never mind the fact that making sure it's a living hand also stops attacks similar to the gummy bear attack used on early fingerprint readers, and you can see some definite benefits to doing this.
Interesting. I'm assuming that the palm-vein technology won't read the veins properly unless there is blood actively flowing?
As for both hands, the machines I've seen (very primitive ones, so possibly not comparable) were designed for only one hand, or the other, not both (ie, everyone had to use their right hand, left hands wouldn't sit right on the scanner due to positioning of pegs designed to sit between the fingers) If it can actually read either hand, that's definitely a step the right direction (though if you have neither hand, you're still screwed, but at a certain point that's always the case)
Now that still leaves the problem of duress, and what to do if someone does manage to make a functional copy of your hand (I refuse to believe that any technology exists that is impossible to fool, no matter how difficult it may be) (maybe though you have it in the both hands part, unregister the one they copied and use the other one?)
Doesn't work. Many studies have shown that tougher laws are rarely accompanied by any decrease at all in the activity being regulated.
The problem isn't the severity of the punishment, but the percieved likelyhood of being caught. Seems in general, once you get past a very low threshold, it doesn't matter how severe the punishment, people are either worried they will be caught, and follow the rules, or don't think they will, and break the law.
Note it doesn't matter what the actual likelyhood of being caught is, only the perception. This has been shown in places such as New York where focussing on petty crime (graffitti, jaywalking, etc) caused a reduction in more severe offences, the theory being that the Police were more visible, and more people were talking about being caught, so the perception of what you could get away with changed, even though the overall likelyhood of being caught for the higher offences was largely unchanged, and the punishments were unchanged.
Now back on topic, the sort of crime envisioned here would probably be much less likely to occur than someone stealing a debit/credit card now (It's both a phycological threshold as well as a legal threshold that you would cross from simple theft to assault causing bodily harm, and that will weed out some (most?) criminals, however the severity of the offence is significantly higher, and any criminals left in the group willing to cross that threshold will cause severe damage. That's not a tradeoff everyone is willing to make.
Hate to reply to self, but:
4) include provisions to change if hacked. (Don't assume it's impossible, if someone manages to "copy" my hand, I want a way to have that access disabled and change to some other way of authenticating, now we get issued new debit cards, I'm not ready to change my hand if someone manages to copy it.)
That all depends on if it needs to be alive. I remember a study with gummy bears and some older fingerprint readers...
I'm not completely against biometrics, I just think they need to be thought through VERY thoroughly. I'd envision a few necessary provisions:
1) must include confirmation that body part is still attached to the living body (possibly with something like pulse oximetry? (I'd think that would be difficult to fake?))
2) must still require some form of authentication (PIN or otherwise), and should include capability for a duress code. (If your debit card is stolen, you aren't in real physical danger after the theft, if you are kidnapped and forced to go with them to the bank, you are)
3) must include provisions in case of legitimate injury to said body part. (what if I loose my hand in an industrial accident, the injury itself is bad enough, the inability to access my money would just add to an already lousy situation)
This is true, but when testing emissions the diesels consistantly have higher particulate emissions than gasoline, though generally lower in several other categories.
Modern Diesel vehicles have no trouble whatsoever passing even the strictest vehicle emissions testing in the world.
Leaf is almost available... I was only counting ones I could go to a dealer and buy today and drive home tomorrow.
I'm in Canada, but the situation in the US is very similar to Canada (give or take a year)
As for your "plenty of electric vehicles available" article...
You list the Leaf... available "by the end of 2012"
the Volt, not an electric car, it's a hybrid
"several" ford vehicles also "by the end of 2012"
the Mitsubishi i which can "now be reserved" (but not yet bought)
A toyota rav4 electric "summer 2012"
a Honda for the 2013 model year
The tesla roadster I already covered in my original comment
The Smart which will only have 300 electric cars on one specific lease program in one city
and the Fisker Karma which competes directly with the tesla roadster (same problems I listed for it)
So your own article claiming how many electric cars there are backs up my point that there aren't yet any available.
And I personally don't want a frickin' internal combustion engine in my car. Don't want the weight, don't want the maintenance issues, don't want the safety issues.
There's no excuse in the world why half the cars on the road today couldn't be replaced with electric cars if someone would just offer us some.
Loud: only in North America. Seriously, North American manufacturers make awfully loud diesel engines, (Dodge being the absolute worst) modern small diesels made my all the other manufacturers in the world aren't noticeably louder than gasoline engines
Smelly: give me the smell of diesel over the smell of gasoline any day. of course a reasonably tuned or modern diesel won't smell any more than a reasonably tuned or modern gas vehicle either.
Polluting: less so than gasoline vehicles. more particulates, but those fall out of the air relatively quickly and aren't as harmful as some of the other chemicals that gasoline engines spew. (and if you are talking about clouds of black smoke, you're once again looking at poorly made/maintained diesels and not what a proper modern diesel does)
Hard to start in cold weather: I'm Canadian, I'm on my third diesel vehicle, and the only times I've had trouble starting are when I've left the headlights on over night. In fact my diesel is more likely to start in the winter than either my fiance's gas car, or my company's gas truck.
I can give you a few reasons people don't buy them though.
1) manufacturers refuse to sell small diesels in North America (this is probably the biggest reason, it's hard to buy what isn't available for sale)
2) people seem to buy the propaganda that diesels are loud, smelly, polluting, and hard to start in cold weather, even though modern diesels are none of the above.
And that's the great thing about diesel, the further between stations, the more likely the station is to have diesel. The only stations I've ever found without diesel are in large cities where you have 4 gas stations within a block, and then only 1 of the 4 might have it, but as soon as you get out of town, almost every station has diesel.
Where I am diesel is cheaper than gas in the summer, more expensive in the winter. but generally less volatile than gas prices. mileage is better, and the engine is more robust. I find it a real shame that it's so hard to find small diesels in North America.
As I pointed out though in another post, most families don't get "a" car, they get 2, (or more) so that each adult member of the household can do their own thing, and go their own places. You can't at present replace all those cars with electrics, but in most cases you could replace one of them (or more) without any adverse effects.
What portion of North American households have more than 1 car? (I'd be willing to bet the vast majority) Why do ALL of them need to be capable of long range?
For example, my fiance and I both have cars, we both go to work every day, and we also both enjoy our vacations, trips to the mountains, etc. We couldn't (with current technology) replace both our vehicles with electric cars, but there is no reason at all why one of the 2 couldn't be electric, leaving the other one capable of the long road trips.
The only current mass produced electric car (the tesla roadster) brags a range of over 300 miles... so I'm not sure what you're comparing to.
The public will only decide if the car manufacturers let us. And so far there are no electric vehicles available here. Only hybrids.
Chevrolet bragged about being the first electric vehicle to market, but still haven't offered one, only a different form of hybrid.
There's a huge market for electric cars, too bad nobody is willing to sell one (I'm ignoring the Tesla roadster due to price and availability, it's just not in the attainable range for the average person)
sorry, that feature was removed before vista
It sounds to me like most of the drawbacks you listed for using a tablet instead of a PC are drawbacks specific to the iPad. And not to tablets in general. I'm typing this from my Acer Iconia tablet right now, and it has completely replaced my laptop for all use away from home. I do still have a desktop, but I find myself turning it on less and less. The tablet has a full size USB port which allows me to connect external hard drives, mice, keyboards (or you can do it by bluetooth) It connects to my NAS device when I'm at home, and being an android device I am not limited to software approved by any one company. I have office software on it, I have a good SSH client, and pretty much everything else I need.. If I'm travelling for long periods of time I carry it in a keyboard folio case, otherwise I take just the tablet itself.
Unfortunately I've found chrome to really drag once you get a whole bunch of tabs open, and all too often I have a LOT of tabs open. Other than that I was pretty impressed with how far it's come, if I could get it to a useable speed with lots of tabs open, I'd use it as my primary browser. Unfortunately until then I'm sticking with firefox.
It's a battle of greed, the ISPs are willing to sell all the data they can, but the media industry isn't willing to pay for it, feeling that it's their "right" to fish endlessly... As long as both sides are greedy, we actually win. Heaven help us if they ever come to a compromise!
Give up, some people are too stupid to understand the difference between libertarianism and anarchy.
You could argue until you're blue in the face, people like him would still not see your point and would still cry for an ever bigger government.