In which the Database nearly got me. So I went to 3GSM (sorry, sorry, Mobile World Congress). Now, these things are usually fairly good previews of the ID-card future – constant RFID-tag badging, lists everyone in the world is either on or they aren’t, security theatre aplenty. On this occasion, when I visited the registration…
Read More a terrible experience with extremely dangerous bugsHa. Ha. Ha. So, how are those ID cards going? It seems that despite the government’s fanfare, repeated several times, of announcing the issue of the first ID cards, it is impossible to check anyone’s card because there are no card readers. Of course, it’s actually worse than that – even if the card readers…
Read More They have the watches, but we have all the timeID cards sliding right again. This time it’s the airport workers – they’ve been downscaled from all the airport workers to just London City and Manchester, and from a production deployment to an “18-month trial”. This comes after the planned issue of cards last month went from “actually issuing the cards” to “announcing it again”.…
Read More all-purpose Home Office bashingOK, 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 inLate 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 lobsterDoes anyone else think the reason the Oystercard system had a multi-hour outage might be somehow connected with the fact that TFL’s response to the class break of the NXP MiFare Classic cards it uses has so far been even worse than the manufacturers’? NXP’s contribution to dealing with this has been to sue the…
Read More Security By AudacityBack in 2004, this blog went to the European Social Forum – we weren’t that impressed, but we did call it “the Caesar’s Palace of Ranting”. I’m not sure what the equivalent for the UKUUG’s OpenTech 2008 would be; there was plenty of ranting, but a sight less committee wank, more practicality, even if no-one…
Read More OpenTech 2008: It’s like the ESF, with code…Ha. Ha. Ha. Looks like Kelvin McFuck won’t be standing after all. Too risky, eh? There we were, thinking he was a heroic fighter for all he thought was right, not to mention a formidable enterpreneur, and a man confident in the backing of the deadliest nonkinetic weapon system on the planet. After all, heroism…
Read More fully recyclable cellulosic macro-feline predatorSaid Sir Michael Rose, speaking at the SAS passing-out parade in 1979: One intelligent soldier can achieve more than a fleet of B-52s. There’s some debate as to whether that statement could be applied to Rose himself, but I doubt many would disagree with it. David Davis apparently agrees. His resignation from Parliament should be…
Read More one intelligent soldier