Build Date: Sat Feb 22 05:40:20 2025 UTC
I know it would like suck and all for everybody else, but I am sorry, I would like to be responsible for crashing the universe. I can just see myself saying "Oooppss, I didn't mean to do that.... say you guys should have made this like idiot proof."
-- Johnnie Royale
Passport Insecurity
2006-02-20 17:33:57
With the growing identity theft problem in the United States, why is the government moving ahead with a technology that gives identity thieves another way to steal your personal data and allows terrorists to pick individual Americans out of crowds?
The Department of Homeland Security wants every American passport to include an RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) tag identifying the person carrying the passport. The Dutch are introducing passports with the same technology, but when a Dutch television news program put the technology to the test they were able to intercept the passport data at a distance and crack the encryption scheme on a home PC in a few hours.
California driver's licenses have been magstrip-coded for years, and if Homeland Security's idea was to speed up U.S. Customs checkpoints a magstrip would have worked just fine, and it has the advantage of not being scannable from 30 feet away.
But wait! There's more! Although cracking the encryption could take an hour or two, you can get a unique RFID signature from a passport instantly. If you collect a database of signatures and crack them when you have time, you can later identify an individual passing by instantly with just the signature. Now when Americans travel abroad, technologically-inclined terrorists can scan a crowd and PICK OUT THE AMERICANS by scanning their passports remotely. Car bombs and improvised roadside mines could be modified to explode when a particular individual passes by. Why should a terrorist waste ammo blowing up a Halliburton rent-a-cop shuttling MREs around Baghdad when by simply checking the RFID signature they can target and take out high-ranking U.S. officials?
I still can't figure out what in hell the Department of Homeland Security is thinking. Using RFIDs for ID purposes is an insanely bad idea.
T O P S T O R I E S
The Future Ain't What It Used To Be
Ideas have taken horrifying shape and rooted into our modern reality. (More...)
The Once & Future King of Dust
Only The Onion could have acquired Infowarts. (More...)
Another Nobel Prize-Winning Author Describes Drunkenness
This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Here's its famous paragraph on getting drunk... (More...)
Why I'm pretty sure JD Vance had sex with a couch
True or false? The answers await us in that magical land where all truths are revealed -- the internet. (More...)
In 2010 Dr. Cheng-Huai Ruan discovered a way to cause a patient with an abnormal heartbeat to get back into a normal rhythm by sticking a finger up the patient's ass. (More...)
WKRP in Cincinnati aired from 1978 through 1982. Howard Hesseman played Dr. Johnny Fever, a DJ from Los Angeles who was fired from his previous job for saying the word "booger" on the air. In the show Hesseman would do some dialogue, introduce a song, and start the song. You'd hear a few notes, but never the whole song. (More...)
C L A S S I C P I G D O G
About 14 years ago when I was on a road trip and stopped in Seattle, I was invited to a party. At this party there were these little tiny glasses sitting in a flat-bottomed bowl of ice. Thin cylinders about an inch in diameter and 4 inches tall, with thick glass at the bottom. Into these were poured frozen AKVAVIT... also known as the water of life. (More...)
First there was the Bloody Mary: Vodka, Tomato Juice, Worcestershire sauce, some spices, and celery. We drank it, and it was good. Then any drink with tomato juice got a prefix of "bloody" attached to it. We drank them, and they were mostly bad. Now Pigdog gets back to basics and introduces The Bloody Dog, a drink with REAL BLOOD in it. HUMAN BLOOD. (More...)
Patient Joab's scientifick editorial discusses aspect of the space-time-beer continuum never before processed by sub-bush-robot minds!!! Too fabulantastic to contempulate! (More...)
This was an old standby back in my poor college days. Back then the goal was to get butt fucking wasted for as little money as possible. The problem was we hated dirt cheap beer - and some weekends, even Henry's was far more lucre then we could scratch together. So we invented Red. (More...)
Extreme pimpin' under pressure ... how to tell a playa from a sucka ... keeping your hoes under control ... tips for mackin' success from Pigdog's own Terrordrone. (More...)
It was the night of the Leonid meteor showers -- the perfect opportunity to break out the evil opaline liquor, get madder than hatters, and test wireless ethernet hardware... Would the plunging meteorites interfere with the 2.4GHz band? What about our delicate brain waves? (More...)
