Monday, May 02, 2005

Missoula student's decision to bring BB pistol he found to school results in one-year suspension. [Missoulian.com] A horror story about a boy from a poor family who was expelled for a year from the aptly named Hellgate Elementary School for finding a BB gun on the way to school. Read the entire article for a complete picture of the actions of some incredibly vile government goons. Note this quote from the district Superindentent in particular: "The gun involved looked exactly like the Beretta pistol carried by the sheriff's department deputies," Reisig said. "If a child pulls that gun out on the playground, the officer's reaction would be to shoot immediately. And that endangers everyone in the school. So here we have the government goon publicly admitting that there are homicidal maniacs roaming around an elementary school just waiting to murder children. And it's one of the children who's arrested? This man and his murderous "officers" are the ones who should be locked up! 10:23:29 PM    comment () Bullies in the World. I had to laugh at Andrew Card's preposterous reaction to the news that North Korea has test-fired a missile which may or may not one day be armed with some sort of nuclear warhead. Card was actually heard to say "I think they're looking to kind of be bullies in the world. And they're causing others to stand up and take notice." Wait. Was Andy talking about Pyongyang or Washington D.C.? What do you call it when the bullies accuse the bullies? To put this in perspective, the... [Antiwar.com Blog] This isn't even a case of the pot calling the kettle black--more like the pot calling the slightly off-white snow black. The North Korean government is certainly very nasty, but trying to bully the rest of the world is certainly not one of its crimes. Nowdays it barely even tries to bully its neighbors. 12:10:05 PM    comment () You can change your password, but not your finger. We didn't post anything about the fingerprint deal? Seriously? We're getting slow. Japanese cryptographer Tsutomu Matsumoto has figured out a way to defeat a fingerprint reader about 80% of the time. "Using his crazy super-cryptographer skills!", you say. No, not really. It's all about the Gummi Bears: First Tsutomu Matsumoto used gelatine (as found in Gummi Bears and other sweets) and a plastic mould to create a fake finger, which he found fooled fingerprint detectors four times out of five. Flushed with his success, he took latent fingerprints from a glass, which he enhanced with a cyanoacrylate adhesive (super-glue fumes) and photographed with a digital camera. Using PhotoShop, he improved the contrast of the image and printed the fingerprint onto a transparency sheet. Here comes the clever bit. Matsumoto took a photo-sensitive printed-circuit board (which can be found in many electronic hobby shops) and used the fingerprint transparency to etch the fingerprint into the copper. The PCB kit is used to turn a latent print into a 3D image to be used as a mold for your Gummi fingerprint. You could even put it over your own finger to conceal it with a guard watching, then eat the delicious evidence once you're past the scanner. Not even James Bond got a break-in tool that doubled as a snack. "Crazy Aaron" makes a pretty good point on why biometrics are not the end-all of security tools: If someone rips off a password of yours, you can change it. If someone steals your credit card, you can cancel it. Lost a key? Change your locks. But if someone figures out a way to duplicate your fingerprint or voiceprint or retinal or iris ID, there's nothing you can do. Well, OK, you can switch to a different finger or a different eye, but nature puts certain hard limits on how many times you can do that. Once you're out of organs, you're out of luck. The limited number of biometrics each person carries around with them also makes it impossible to have a large number of different biometric keys. So here's a twist: IBM has recently used the advertising equivalent of the Nuclear Option, $6M Lee Majors, to tout their new notebook with integrated fingerprint scanner. The fingerprint scanner ties into a password keyring that lets you log into your machine, websites, you name it. So suppose I steal your laptop. With an ordinary laptop, I would have a hard time getting into your stuff because I don't have the passwords. If I steal your Thinkpad, though, I do have your password in the form of the latent prints you left on the lid, the CD drive, and every key on the keyboard. D'oh! [Gadgetopia] My PC laptop came with one of those fingerprint scanners, but I turned it off. Aside from all the problems described here, I ran into a more basic problem: the scanner usually didn't work. 10:48:12 AM    comment () FRAUD — AND FREE-LANCE MURDER — IN IRAQ. No matter how criminally inept you think the U.S.'s performance in Iraq has been -- and I use the word "criminally" advisedly and with deliberation -- the actual performance turns out to be infinitely worse: His career in Baghdad was brief. And it ended badly. On a blistering July afternoon, three MP5 submachine guns were pointed [...] [The Light Of Reason] And people actually had the nerve to act surprised when some people in Fallujah mutilated the corpses of some dead mercenaries. All things considered, I think the mercenaries were lucky that the locals didn't mutilate them before killing them. 10:39:54 AM    comment () LIARS AND MURDERERS. You can read the entire article for many more details, but as far as I'm concerned, there are only two paragraphs -- and one sentence in particular -- that matter. And because that sentence is supported by a wealth of other information, there is only one conclusion to be drawn: Tony Blair and George Bush, along [...] [The Light Of Reason] Yet more evidence (as if more was really needed) that Bush was determined to conquer Iraq, and all of the excuses he offered about "weapons of mass destruction" had nothing to do with it. 10:32:33 AM    comment ()

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