If you can
read the
fingerprint, so can anyone...
So what's to stop a dedicated attacker from reading the fingerprint
when they read the tag contents, and then devising a method to
duplicate all the data?
An active tag might even be programmed to emulate the fingerprint
characteristics.
If
you can read the
fingerprint, so can anyone
-true, that's not the point, no one can WRITE
the fingerprint (or at least it would be prohibitively difficult to do so currently)
An application of this could include:
-Secure building entry; the building could maintain a database of both
the RFID fingerprint and the RFID data and only grant admission to
those with that combination (the RFID data would, in theory, also
contain information about its fingerprint as well)
-RFID isn't meant to be an encryption system, it's meant to be more
like a more efficient bar code
hey -- it's capitalism at its finest as I like to say
that being said, if you don't like it (and I don't myself) -- your best recourse is to write a letter asking for some regulations like those which exist in Europe
They charge different amounts for the same data because they have the ability to differentiate the traffic (usually) and can make more money by charging different amounts...
e.g. this is why accessing an Exchange server triggers a $15/month surcharge over just a pop/imap based email account on many plans
--> they know that most people who use exchange are not as price sensitive as those who don't and the providers can generally differentiate the type of traffic going through the phone
in any even more telling example -- why is it that unlimited picture messaging costs less than wireless exchange access?
--> even though the picture messaging undoubtedly uses much more bandwidth than any (virtually) any email traffic, they know the users of picture messaging are not corporate customers and are not willing to pay a higher amount
Rest assured that the providers will fight tooth and nail to stop people from being able to swap phones between providers -- it's in their best interests to make phones as proprietary as possible for a host of economic reasons
I've posted this on here before re the ETF issue...
since you can't negotiate in the context of this monopoly (or, really, oligopoly...) why not do what I do until our gov't gets a clue (good luck to that):
buy whatever phone has the highest spread between the eBay resale price and the discounted price you get a new contract/renewal and just sell the phone you don't want?
I always thought -- though I never have any direct experience with this -- that if I had a blackberry on an exchange server (via BES) of my own (or any other phone on an exchange server) that I would get the surcharge
what you do you mean by provider provisioned --> does that mean that the server is owned/hosted/operated/maintained by Verizon/At&t?
A friend of mine was laid off several weeks ago and he was supposed to start teaching a small class at a local university in NYC just as a lecturer making a nominal amount per week for 2-3 hours of work (perhaps 100-200 or so / week, spread over two days).
Since NYS unemployment law counts a partial day of work as a full day, regardless of how much money it is, he had to withdraw from teaching the course because his loss in unemployment benefits greatly exceeded his income as a lecturer.
You just have to love incentive misalignment -- it's a government specialty.
Excellent analysis! Thanks for sending it along...
dp
On 7/24/09 9:51 PM, [Bourdain] wrote:
Dear Mr. Pogue,
I spend a rather inordinate amount of time reading up on the cell phone industry's oligopolistic behaviors and, in particular, how the carriers engage in rather sophisticated albeit subtle price discrimination.
Overall, I agree with your criticisms and identification of more significant issues (I'd imagine that the handset exclusivity issue is a function of congressmen wanting to use iPhones on Verizon) though I'd like you to reconsider one point you made with respect to handset subsidies (full disclosure, I'm an accountant of sorts, by trade)...
"But at some point during the two years, youâ(TM)ll have finished repaying the subsidy." -->How would you measure that? I'd argue that point in time is irrelevant and largely immeasurable since carriers charge what the market will bear which is a function of the behavior of market participants. (There are accounting rules for how the "costs" are allocated, but that's just an accounting convention, not a "business reality".)
Subsidies make up for the financial unsophistication of the typical consumer but are simultaneously a reward to those who are financially responsible (i.e. contractual postpaid users garner a larger subsidy than prepay users). I welcome and take advantage of subsidies because as soon as I'm eligible for an upgrade, I purchase the phone with the highest spread between the resale market value (e.g. eBay) and the upgrade price I'm entitled to (usually netting 150-200 each time in profit). I typically just use and purchase used/secondhand phones since they depreciate very quickly and generally work fine. Since I upgrade and resell at my earliest opportunity, I'm not ceding any special extra profit to my carrier.
I hate verizon's current crap phones (I use a verizon phone from 2003 which works better than the newest ones) so whenever I renew my contract, I purchase the phones with the highest discount price / retail spread and resell them --> certainly not ideal, but that way I'm being reimbursed, at least partially, for that component of the contract price
further, this only works when one is "on contract" which is obviously more valuable to the providers as a steady reliable cash flow is more valuable than one with greater churn/volatility
Too true -- I've been a CPA for years and, literally, as I was just about to write this comment, a young co-worker came up to me and asked if I had a calculator since he wanted to check numbers on a spreadsheet.
Needless to say, I explained to him that it's certainly possible for a spreadsheet to obfuscate its meaning and "miscalculate" a value, simply recalculating the values on a "virgin" spreadsheet (ideally in a new instance of excel) is superior than checking by hand. (Full Disclosure: didn't use the words obfuscate and instance with him as virtually no accountants would know them)
There's frighteningly still a market for paper-tape based calculators (they cost a lot more than you'd think) for, primarily, older accountants who want everything on a tape total. See how expensive some of the items here are.
I've had supervisors require me to type many values into a single cell as opposed to splitting them across cells just because "that's the way it was done before".
Be wary of most accountants, there's a reason it's not offered as a major at top schools -- having brains in the field is more often a detriment than a benefit.
that sounds to me more like GSM interference that would only affect unshielded speaker wires and not introduce garbage information into a navigation system re:
"The cause of this buzzing has to do with GSMâ(TM)s time division nature. The ever-knowledgeable Keith Nowak, spokesperson for Nokia, explains it as follows: [[With GSM]] the RF transmitter is turned on/off at a fast rate, and that pulsing is often picked up by nearby devices that donâ(TM)t have good RF shielding. In the case of GSM the pulse rate is 217 Hz, which can be easily heard.
This is really just a case of economics in the context of our country's
flavor of laissez faire capitalism...
The cell phone service provider market exists in what's
called an oligopoly
right now, i.e. a handful of large providers dominate the field.
This is further complicated by users entering into
(typically) two year contracts which freeze their monthly prices and
the providers segmenting their users by charging more for
what they perceive for "business use" (e.g. unlimited data on a typical
consumer phone through verizon is15/month (vcast), with
blackberry it is 30/month, with a blackberry using enterprise server
(i.e. the only way to file mail into folders, calendar sync wirelessly,
etc.), it's 45/month).
Given the market structure (oligopoly), prices don't have to tend
toward the price of a service. The providers have gradually increased
their prices in order to maximize their income. They realize that
people are willing to pay more for text messaging and are charging for
it. Further, each time they raise rates, they give users an
exemption from their early termination fee though most people
don't switch between providers much since most people
typically can't choose between more than 2 in a given market and still
receive good service.
Ultimately, over time mobile email will overtake SMS but that's just my
prediction.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can read the fingerprint, so can anyone... So what's to stop a dedicated attacker from reading the fingerprint when they read the tag contents, and then devising a method to duplicate all the data? An active tag might even be programmed to emulate the fingerprint characteristics.
If you can read the fingerprint, so can anyone
-true, that's not the point, no one can WRITE the fingerprint (or at least it would be prohibitively difficult to do so currently)
An application of this could include:
-Secure building entry; the building could maintain a database of both the RFID fingerprint and the RFID data and only grant admission to those with that combination (the RFID data would, in theory, also contain information about its fingerprint as well)
-RFID isn't meant to be an encryption system, it's meant to be more like a more efficient bar code
hey -- it's capitalism at its finest as I like to say
that being said, if you don't like it (and I don't myself) -- your best recourse is to write a letter asking for some regulations like those which exist in Europe
They charge different amounts for the same data because they have the ability to differentiate the traffic (usually) and can make more money by charging different amounts...
e.g. this is why accessing an Exchange server triggers a $15/month surcharge over just a pop/imap based email account on many plans
--> they know that most people who use exchange are not as price sensitive as those who don't and the providers can generally differentiate the type of traffic going through the phone
in any even more telling example -- why is it that unlimited picture messaging costs less than wireless exchange access?
--> even though the picture messaging undoubtedly uses much more bandwidth than any (virtually) any email traffic, they know the users of picture messaging are not corporate customers and are not willing to pay a higher amount
this all has to due to with the concept of price discrimination
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
10 minutes for a web page on a blackberry -- that's pretty quick
mind you, I can't even make calls in/near times square with my at&t blackberry
that's called a migraine-pad -- I have the t60p and I can barely take the resolution (1600 by 1200) and I'm relatively young
You must be from outside the US
a 350 meg XviD/Divx is markedly better than Dish Network quality (SD)
some "true HD" torrents are indeed 720
Re: a winzip / xp zip handler alternative -- I recommend izarc --> http://www.izarc.org/
It has a less convoluted interface than 7Zip though it is not OSS, I believe it is free for commercial use
Rest assured that the providers will fight tooth and nail to stop people from being able to swap phones between providers -- it's in their best interests to make phones as proprietary as possible for a host of economic reasons
I've posted this on here before re the ETF issue...
since you can't negotiate in the context of this monopoly (or, really, oligopoly...) why not do what I do until our gov't gets a clue (good luck to that):
buy whatever phone has the highest spread between the eBay resale price and the discounted price you get a new contract/renewal and just sell the phone you don't want?
I've been doing this for years
I always thought -- though I never have any direct experience with this -- that if I had a blackberry on an exchange server (via BES) of my own (or any other phone on an exchange server) that I would get the surcharge
what you do you mean by provider provisioned --> does that mean that the server is owned/hosted/operated/maintained by Verizon/At&t?
Seemingly very easy to implement...
http://www.punchscan.org/
A friend of mine was laid off several weeks ago and he was supposed to start teaching a small class at a local university in NYC just as a lecturer making a nominal amount per week for 2-3 hours of work (perhaps 100-200 or so / week, spread over two days).
Since NYS unemployment law counts a partial day of work as a full day, regardless of how much money it is, he had to withdraw from teaching the course because his loss in unemployment benefits greatly exceeded his income as a lecturer.
You just have to love incentive misalignment -- it's a government specialty.
it is in major DNSBL (i.e. to test that, my fastmail.fm account blocked it and yahoo, of course, let it straight on through)
Last time I checked, the MTA's schedules are not fact -- just merely their best, but rough estimates of possible train or bus service
Excellent analysis! Thanks for sending it along...
dp
On 7/24/09 9:51 PM, [Bourdain] wrote:
Dear Mr. Pogue,
I spend a rather inordinate amount of time reading up on the cell phone industry's oligopolistic behaviors and, in particular, how the carriers engage in rather sophisticated albeit subtle price discrimination.
Overall, I agree with your criticisms and identification of more significant issues (I'd imagine that the handset exclusivity issue is a function of congressmen wanting to use iPhones on Verizon) though I'd like you to reconsider one point you made with respect to handset subsidies (full disclosure, I'm an accountant of sorts, by trade)...
"But at some point during the two years, youâ(TM)ll have finished repaying the subsidy."
-->How would you measure that?
I'd argue that point in time is irrelevant and largely immeasurable since carriers charge what the market will bear which is a function of the behavior of market participants.
(There are accounting rules for how the "costs" are allocated, but that's just an accounting convention, not a "business reality".)
Subsidies make up for the financial unsophistication of the typical consumer but are simultaneously a reward to those who are financially responsible (i.e. contractual postpaid users garner a larger subsidy than prepay users). I welcome and take advantage of subsidies because as soon as I'm eligible for an upgrade, I purchase the phone with the highest spread between the resale market value (e.g. eBay) and the upgrade price I'm entitled to (usually netting 150-200 each time in profit). I typically just use and purchase used/secondhand phones since they depreciate very quickly and generally work fine. Since I upgrade and resell at my earliest opportunity, I'm not ceding any special extra profit to my carrier.
Just my 1.5 cents
-D
lol -- i was really referring to one that resides on my machine scanning every file i access, etc. you're absolutely right
except the one at www.virustotal.com when on rare occasion I encounter a suspicious file
yeah, i just do a "completed auction" search on ebay to find the relevant market prices on the handsets to determine the spreads
hmm -- why don't you do what I do...
I hate verizon's current crap phones (I use a verizon phone from 2003 which works better than the newest ones) so whenever I renew my contract, I purchase the phones with the highest discount price / retail spread and resell them --> certainly not ideal, but that way I'm being reimbursed, at least partially, for that component of the contract price
further, this only works when one is "on contract" which is obviously more valuable to the providers as a steady reliable cash flow is more valuable than one with greater churn/volatility
just my 1.5 cents
Too true -- I've been a CPA for years and, literally, as I was just about to write this comment, a young co-worker came up to me and asked if I had a calculator since he wanted to check numbers on a spreadsheet.
Needless to say, I explained to him that it's certainly possible for a spreadsheet to obfuscate its meaning and "miscalculate" a value, simply recalculating the values on a "virgin" spreadsheet (ideally in a new instance of excel) is superior than checking by hand. (Full Disclosure: didn't use the words obfuscate and instance with him as virtually no accountants would know them)
There's frighteningly still a market for paper-tape based calculators (they cost a lot more than you'd think) for, primarily, older accountants who want everything on a tape total. See how expensive some of the items here are.
I've had supervisors require me to type many values into a single cell as opposed to splitting them across cells just because "that's the way it was done before".
Be wary of most accountants, there's a reason it's not offered as a major at top schools -- having brains in the field is more often a detriment than a benefit.
I'm looking forward to that -- I still can't predict when I'm going to poop
"The cause of this buzzing has to do with GSMâ(TM)s time division nature. The ever-knowledgeable Keith Nowak, spokesperson for Nokia, explains it as follows: [[With GSM]] the RF transmitter is turned on/off at a fast rate, and that pulsing is often picked up by nearby devices that donâ(TM)t have good RF shielding. In the case of GSM the pulse rate is 217 Hz, which can be easily heard.
from link 1
not to mention: link 2
This is really just a case of economics in the context of our country's flavor of laissez faire capitalism...
The cell phone service provider market exists in what's called an oligopoly right now, i.e. a handful of large providers dominate the field. This is further complicated by users entering into (typically) two year contracts which freeze their monthly prices and the providers segmenting their users by charging more for what they perceive for "business use" (e.g. unlimited data on a typical consumer phone through verizon is15/month (vcast), with blackberry it is 30/month, with a blackberry using enterprise server (i.e. the only way to file mail into folders, calendar sync wirelessly, etc.), it's 45/month).
Given the market structure (oligopoly), prices don't have to tend toward the price of a service. The providers have gradually increased their prices in order to maximize their income. They realize that people are willing to pay more for text messaging and are charging for it. Further, each time they raise rates, they give users an exemption from their early termination fee though most people don't switch between providers much since most people typically can't choose between more than 2 in a given market and still receive good service.
Ultimately, over time mobile email will overtake SMS but that's just my prediction.
That's my 2 cents.
Hey, that's what my texts used to cost :)