biometrics

Remember the magic lie-detector voice analyzer? It’s baaack. Also, Cornish Tory councillor Fiona Ferguson is a mensch. Here’s the story; it seems the council hired Capita aka Crapita to put the fear of God into people claiming single person’s council tax discount (THE BASTARDS!). Capita, which is the sole UK distributor of 100% guaranteed pure…

Read More Not this shit again. In which I praise a Tory

The creation of a database containing all 9 million Israelis’ demographic, family, and medical information plus identifying biometrics has not necessarily developed to their advantage. Bonus points for use of the phrase “Hasidic criminal underworld”. They’ll make you an offer it takes years of painstaking theological scholarship to understand.

Read More What these people need is a national biometric identity register

A classic piece at The Register on biometrics and stupidity: read David Moss and you’ll be more competent than anyone in government on this issue. It’s the false positives, of course; but the truly shocking thing is that despite everything, the ID scheme still depends on the n=10,000 trial from 2004 that they deny is…

Read More Read this now

OK, so what about those identity cards for (some kinds of) foreign nationals? You’ll recall that the Government promised, back in the spring, to have them out and operational in 300 days. As late as July, there were no actual contracts for the job, but they did actually manage to bring in Thales to start…

Read More if you’re not on the list you’re not coming in

Late to the party, I know. But is this the worst example of biometrics as a religion yet? So the Shia-led, pro-Iranian government of Iraq we’re desperately propping up doesn’t like the Sunni, Iraqi chauvinist countergangs we organised to prop them up much. So the plan to reintegrate them, as they say, into society as…

Read More SELECT * FROM policies WHERE irishash=”0xSTUPID”;

So, those Oystercard outages. I wrote a sizable post on this immediately before going on holiday, but something odd happened with WordPress’s clever ajaxy bits and it vanished. Computers…anyway, we can work out various things about the problem from the few details supplied. In the first incident, around 1% of the cards somehow became nonfunctional.…

Read More When the world was our lobster