The information that the RFID card sends is not readable at 69 feet, BUT what the reader sends is readable even further.
ISO14443 states that during the anticollision loop for class A RFID smartcards the reader broadcasts the UID (Unique IDentifier, reffered in the article as 'RFID serial number') of the card it selects to communicate with.
I know this first hand, as I checked the new European Passports for the same flaw exposed in the article, and they were vulnerable also. The only way to bypass this problem is to have the UID randomly generated on the fly, but that increases the cost of the chip.
RFID chips, including the ones specified for U.S. passports, can still be uniquely identified by their radio behavior. Specifically, these chips have a unique identification number used for collision avoidance. It's how the chips avoid communications problems if you put a bagful of them next to a reader. This is something buried deep within the chip, and has nothing to do with the data or application on the chip.
Chip manufacturers don't like to talk about collision IDs or how they work, but researchers have shown how to uniquely identify RFID chips by querying them and watching how they behave. And since these queries access a lower level of the chip than the passport application, an access-control mechanism doesn't help.
To fix this, the State Department needs to require that the chips used in passports implement a collision-avoidance system not based on unique serial numbers. The RFID spec -- ISO 14443A is its name -- allows for a random system, but I don't believe any manufacturer implements it this way.
The new European Passports have this problem, too. I worked three months with the Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands on this issue. We tested a pair of sample passports and each had a unique serial number (called UID in the ISO standard).
The only way to solve this is to randomly-generate the UID on the RFID during the anti-collision process, which dramatically increases the cost of the card. Encrypting the UID is out of the question because the anti-collision process is very low-level.
To the people who are scared of identity theft: this flaw does NOT expose the information on the card, so an atacker using this will NOT get your photo,name,age,fingerprent minutia, etc. The only malicious way this could be used is to recognize a person identified before.
But the area where the anti-collision process can be eavesdropped on is at least 10m (some 30 feet), because a part of the process requires that the RFID reader broadcast the UID of the card it selects for comunication. Wrapping the passport in tin-foil will protect you from hidden readers, so your passport will not be detectable in your pocket.
My IPU reference was an example of a fictious 'Divine Person', like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. We all know these are mere creation of the human society to keep teenagers from masturbating. Just like the Christians should accept their ancient traditions even in modern times (ex. Halloween) for the benefit of Consumerism(TM), rastafarians should accept and tolerate with a smile the preceding religious beliefs.
The FSM, on the other hand is a real 'Divine Person', with his noodly appendages and all that. How can you accuse me of being heretic when my IPU reference was an obvious mockery? How could I not believe in Heaven, the Beer Volcano and the Striptease Factory? These are true facts, as you, I and many other pastafarians know.
God (at least in Christian theology--I can't speak for all religions) is not falisifiable, but he is verifiable.
In Christian theology God is verifiable. My friends which are christians tell me they can feel His Divine Presence, His actions, His existence. I guess that if one believes something hard enough, they can see proof of it anywhere.
But for an agnostic or atheist, God (as defined in Christian theology - omnipotent, omniscient, etc.) is not verifiable. Here's why: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - A.C.Clarke
If 'God' comes out of the sky, in a blaze of glory, in front of a human, that human would have absolutely no way of verifying whether the 'person' in front of him is indeed omnipotent or is just sufficiently potent as to appear omnipotent, or is indeed omniscient or is, likewise, sufficiently knowledgeable to seem omniscient. In other words, we limited humans have no way of knowing if something has no limits or if it has finite limits, greater than our capacity to observe such limits.
Then again, I could be wrong. I don't know for sure if Christian Theology defines God as omnipotent, etc. or simply waaay better than us puny mortals, but not infinitely potent/scient.
I agree completely with what you said. But let us not forget that the poster you're replying to said "Science doesn't prove or disprove God. Good scientists and good theists know that."
I am agnostic-atheist myself, but the "strident atheist" is not a straw man. I know first-hand lots of people like that and I can tell you they all went 'radical' by reflex, counteracting the strong religious pressure in society. They do exist, and unfortunately they're the most 'vocal' ones.
I do not think I have ever met a single atheist that say says science disproves God, not even Dawkins. What an atheist says is that we should relate to God in the same way we relate to other pretty unlikely fixtures of our lives, such Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and little green men under your bed - too small to see. In other words, there is no compelling data that suggests that there is a God, so it makes no logical sense to think there is.
and therefore saying that the probability that God exists is approximately zero. And that God has never interacted with the world in any observable form. And if religion and science conflict, science wins. So basically they are saying that God doesn't exist or is powerless/unwilling to use his power.
So you say "you're either with religious belief, or against it"
IMHO, there is this middle-land, called "Ok, I completely disagree with what you say, but let's not let our differences prevent us from living a nice life, in mutual tolerance".
And there's also this other middle-land, called "I don't care, just leave me alone, Mr. Preacher/Priest/Guru/whatever. You could be right, you could be wrong, I don't care. I just want to have a good time without doing harm to other human beings. Thankyouverymuch"
Oh, and there's the third middle-land, called "I don't know. I WANT to know/believe , but what I've seen so far is not even remotely convincing. Try harder (or try better)"
As a mathematician, I can prove the non-existance of infinitely many things, thank you very much. In the real world, it is much harder to do but can still be done if it creates a contradiction.
As a student, majoring in engineering, I can tell you this: there's a HUGE difference between maths and 'reality'.
Given a system of axioms and basic rules, one can prove the non-existence of infinitely many things, in that system. The problem is that we do not know the axioms this 'reality' thing we observe around us is based on. And it's likely we will never fully know them.
We can only estimate some of the axioms by observing the fenomena surrounding us. No matter how precise the axioms we estimate are, there's always a chance they could be approximated to a better precision (think 'flat earth', then 'round Earth in the center of the Universe', then Copernic, then Newton's gravitation, then Einstein's general relativity with its non-euclidian space-time, then whatever we might approximate next).
Also there could be axioms that have too small an effect at our scale (for example, if we can see how f(x) = 4+sin(x)+1/x looks where x is between 10^120 and 10^120 + 2*pi we can't tell how it looks where x is between 0.2 and 10, because the 1/x part is simply too damn small for us to observe it).
Or, even better, there could be no 'axioms' in this universe, and everything is at the whim of an impredictible intelligent entity that just tricks us into believing there are 'axioms' and 'rules' that govern 'reality'. Even if such an entity would present itself to us as 'God' or whatever, how would we be able to KNOW that it is not comandeered by their 'Super-God' and so on...
Anyway, the purpose of the above rant is to say that we don't know... and it's likely we will never be able to know completely the axioms (if any) that run 'reality'.
if they only teached evolution as a thoery consistant with observations instead of claiming it as fact
When I studied biology in high-school (not so long ago and not in the USA) more than 50% of the information in the 'evolution' chapter was made of justifications to the things written therein. For example(this is what I vaguely remember, so some things might be a little off):
early tethrapodes (common ancestors of amphibians,reptilians,mammals and birds) evolved gradually from some kinds of fish, over several tens of millions of years. This is justified by fossils of the intermediary stages, found in geological strata dating from some four-five houndred million years ago, in the X and Y geographical areas. There still exist to this days 'fossil species', like the dipnoi fish, which have a skeleton structure resembling more that of thetrapodes than that of 'standard' fish.
I think he's spot on. Since atheists don't believe in 'God', they can't fight 'It'. I can't say that I fight for, or against the Invisible Pink Unicorn, since I have no way to know if She exists and leads our lives:).
However I will fight against crackpots that try to shove words up my years hoping those words'll come out my mouth. And when (and if) I have kids, I'll damn well fight against their 'salvation' to a system of self-deceit and wishfull-thinking.
I really hate having to search warez sites for cracks, serials, etc every time I install something.
Seriously, what got me hooked was having a lot of useful stuff installed from head-start. dd, vi, sed, grep, sort, tar, bzip, unzip for command-line; kwrite, OpenOffice, Gimp, Gaim in kde... Not to mention the superior scripting capabilities, easily accessible/dev/random (I'm too lazy to flip a coin sometimes, so I do dd if=/dev/random bs=2 count=1 | hexdump and see if the last cypher on the first row is > 7.
I'm still amazed I don't have a syntax-highlighting text editor in Windows on default install...
If you think of it, a thingy floating at 24 km up would be 30 degrees above horizon for a radius of some 30 km. So you would have relatively good coverage for a diameter of 60km.
40.000 people a year from car accidents is nothing. Think about the millions that die every year of OLD AGE !!!!11!. That doesn't get enough media coverage either.
Most 'farmers' in Eastern Europe are peasants, farming the land and growing animals for themselves. The avian meat one can buy at a supermarket or in Mcdonalds products etc. comes from big farms, where they keep the animals indoors all the time, in a industrial fashion.
There are no 'farming lobbies'. It's about foot that a great numnber of people depend on in a pretty high percentage.
sqrt(-1) is equal to sqrt(1/-1)
sqtr(1/-1) is not equal to sqrt(1)/sqrt(-1)
but I'm not sure why. Saying it leads to i*i = 1 is a valid explanation, yet not an interesting one.
I do agree the problem is flawed as stated. My assumptions are that the switches are marked on-off, the lightbulbs are incandescent and there is no malfunction/misconfiguration in the system (i.e. each switch turns on or off one working incandescent lightbulb).
You turn them all off initially, smoke a cigarette for 5 minutes or how long you consider necessary for the lightbulbs to cool, then you proceed from an all-off state.
The whole point in storing hydrogen is to use it later as an energy source. If you 'store' it in H2O you'll have to use energy to 'remove' it from H2O, and that energy is theoretically the same amount you would get back when you use the hydrogen.
Slashdot Mirror
Even more, instead of
no one would possibly think of
And so can the windows boxes' 0wner, since you type your login and password to login.
These are contactless smartcards, so the data is secure.
Actually it is a smart chip. The ISO 14443 (mentioned in the article) deals with contactless smartcards, not dumb RFID memory chips.
Similar technology will be implemented in European Passports, too.
ISO14443 doesn't actualy deal with dumb memory storage devices, but contactless smartcards.
The information that the RFID card sends is not readable at 69 feet, BUT what the reader sends is readable even further.
ISO14443 states that during the anticollision loop for class A RFID smartcards the reader broadcasts the UID (Unique IDentifier, reffered in the article as 'RFID serial number') of the card it selects to communicate with.
I know this first hand, as I checked the new European Passports for the same flaw exposed in the article, and they were vulnerable also. The only way to bypass this problem is to have the UID randomly generated on the fly, but that increases the cost of the chip.
The only way to solve this is to randomly-generate the UID on the RFID during the anti-collision process, which dramatically increases the cost of the card. Encrypting the UID is out of the question because the anti-collision process is very low-level.
To the people who are scared of identity theft: this flaw does NOT expose the information on the card, so an atacker using this will NOT get your photo,name,age,fingerprent minutia, etc. The only malicious way this could be used is to recognize a person identified before.
But the area where the anti-collision process can be eavesdropped on is at least 10m (some 30 feet), because a part of the process requires that the RFID reader broadcast the UID of the card it selects for comunication. Wrapping the passport in tin-foil will protect you from hidden readers, so your passport will not be detectable in your pocket.
My IPU reference was an example of a fictious 'Divine Person', like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. We all know these are mere creation of the human society to keep teenagers from masturbating. Just like the Christians should accept their ancient traditions even in modern times (ex. Halloween) for the benefit of Consumerism(TM), rastafarians should accept and tolerate with a smile the preceding religious beliefs.
The FSM, on the other hand is a real 'Divine Person', with his noodly appendages and all that. How can you accuse me of being heretic when my IPU reference was an obvious mockery? How could I not believe in Heaven, the Beer Volcano and the Striptease Factory? These are true facts, as you, I and many other pastafarians know.
And don't even get me started on discordianism...
In Christian theology God is verifiable. My friends which are christians tell me they can feel His Divine Presence, His actions, His existence. I guess that if one believes something hard enough, they can see proof of it anywhere.
But for an agnostic or atheist, God (as defined in Christian theology - omnipotent, omniscient, etc.) is not verifiable. Here's why: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - A.C.Clarke
If 'God' comes out of the sky, in a blaze of glory, in front of a human, that human would have absolutely no way of verifying whether the 'person' in front of him is indeed omnipotent or is just sufficiently potent as to appear omnipotent, or is indeed omniscient or is, likewise, sufficiently knowledgeable to seem omniscient. In other words, we limited humans have no way of knowing if something has no limits or if it has finite limits, greater than our capacity to observe such limits.
Then again, I could be wrong. I don't know for sure if Christian Theology defines God as omnipotent, etc. or simply waaay better than us puny mortals, but not infinitely potent/scient.
I agree completely with what you said. But let us not forget that the poster you're replying to said "Science doesn't prove or disprove God. Good scientists and good theists know that."
I am agnostic-atheist myself, but the "strident atheist" is not a straw man. I know first-hand lots of people like that and I can tell you they all went 'radical' by reflex, counteracting the strong religious pressure in society. They do exist, and unfortunately they're the most 'vocal' ones.
IMHO, there is this middle-land, called "Ok, I completely disagree with what you say, but let's not let our differences prevent us from living a nice life, in mutual tolerance".
And there's also this other middle-land, called "I don't care, just leave me alone, Mr. Preacher/Priest/Guru/whatever. You could be right, you could be wrong, I don't care. I just want to have a good time without doing harm to other human beings. Thankyouverymuch"
Oh, and there's the third middle-land, called "I don't know. I WANT to know/believe , but what I've seen so far is not even remotely convincing. Try harder (or try better)"
As a student, majoring in engineering, I can tell you this: there's a HUGE difference between maths and 'reality'.
Given a system of axioms and basic rules, one can prove the non-existence of infinitely many things, in that system. The problem is that we do not know the axioms this 'reality' thing we observe around us is based on. And it's likely we will never fully know them.
We can only estimate some of the axioms by observing the fenomena surrounding us. No matter how precise the axioms we estimate are, there's always a chance they could be approximated to a better precision (think 'flat earth', then 'round Earth in the center of the Universe', then Copernic, then Newton's gravitation, then Einstein's general relativity with its non-euclidian space-time, then whatever we might approximate next).
Also there could be axioms that have too small an effect at our scale (for example, if we can see how f(x) = 4+sin(x)+1/x looks where x is between 10^120 and 10^120 + 2*pi we can't tell how it looks where x is between 0.2 and 10, because the 1/x part is simply too damn small for us to observe it).
Or, even better, there could be no 'axioms' in this universe, and everything is at the whim of an impredictible intelligent entity that just tricks us into believing there are 'axioms' and 'rules' that govern 'reality'. Even if such an entity would present itself to us as 'God' or whatever, how would we be able to KNOW that it is not comandeered by their 'Super-God' and so on...
Anyway, the purpose of the above rant is to say that we don't know... and it's likely we will never be able to know completely the axioms (if any) that run 'reality'.
early tethrapodes (common ancestors of amphibians,reptilians,mammals and birds) evolved gradually from some kinds of fish, over several tens of millions of years. This is justified by fossils of the intermediary stages, found in geological strata dating from some four-five houndred million years ago, in the X and Y geographical areas. There still exist to this days 'fossil species', like the dipnoi fish, which have a skeleton structure resembling more that of thetrapodes than that of 'standard' fish.
I think he's spot on. Since atheists don't believe in 'God', they can't fight 'It'. I can't say that I fight for, or against the Invisible Pink Unicorn, since I have no way to know if She exists and leads our lives :).
However I will fight against crackpots that try to shove words up my years hoping those words'll come out my mouth. And when (and if) I have kids, I'll damn well fight against their 'salvation' to a system of self-deceit and wishfull-thinking.
I really hate having to search warez sites for cracks, serials, etc every time I install something.
/dev/random (I'm too lazy to flip a coin sometimes, so I do dd if=/dev/random bs=2 count=1 | hexdump and see if the last cypher on the first row is > 7.
Seriously, what got me hooked was having a lot of useful stuff installed from head-start. dd, vi, sed, grep, sort, tar, bzip, unzip for command-line; kwrite, OpenOffice, Gimp, Gaim in kde... Not to mention the superior scripting capabilities, easily accessible
I'm still amazed I don't have a syntax-highlighting text editor in Windows on default install...
I for one, hate to have to search warez sites for cracks, serials, etc. everytime I install stuff.
Seriously, having stuff like dd, sed, tar, vi for the command-line or kwrite, OpenOffice, gimp out of the box is a great plus.
If you think of it, a thingy floating at 24 km up would be 30 degrees above horizon for a radius of some 30 km. So you would have relatively good coverage for a diameter of 60km.
a new victorian era?
what's this world coming to?!
40.000 people a year from car accidents is nothing. Think about the millions that die every year of OLD AGE !!!!11!. That doesn't get enough media coverage either.
Most 'farmers' in Eastern Europe are peasants, farming the land and growing animals for themselves. The avian meat one can buy at a supermarket or in Mcdonalds products etc. comes from big farms, where they keep the animals indoors all the time, in a industrial fashion.
There are no 'farming lobbies'. It's about foot that a great numnber of people depend on in a pretty high percentage.
sqrt(-1) is equal to sqrt(1/-1)
sqtr(1/-1) is not equal to sqrt(1)/sqrt(-1)
but I'm not sure why. Saying it leads to i*i = 1 is a valid explanation, yet not an interesting one.
I do agree the problem is flawed as stated. My assumptions are that the switches are marked on-off, the lightbulbs are incandescent and there is no malfunction/misconfiguration in the system (i.e. each switch turns on or off one working incandescent lightbulb).
There's an error when going from 4 to 5. I think it's that when going from (a/b)^c to a^c/b^c , c must be >= 1.
You turn them all off initially, smoke a cigarette for 5 minutes or how long you consider necessary for the lightbulbs to cool, then you proceed from an all-off state.
The whole point in storing hydrogen is to use it later as an energy source. If you 'store' it in H2O you'll have to use energy to 'remove' it from H2O, and that energy is theoretically the same amount you would get back when you use the hydrogen.