Category Archives: Technology

Bad, expensive idea–Full Speed Ahead

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The biometric ID card has been one of my hot buttons for a long time. The U.K. is a little ahead of us on this and they are finding out it’s a bad idea:

MPs attacked plans for identity cards as inconsistent and lacking clarity yesterday and called for a rethink of the technology to be used.

The Commons Science and Technology Committee published a report expressing incredulity that the Home Office claimed to be able to produce firm estimates of the costs of running ID cards when fundamental technical decisions were still unclear.

The Home Office has said that running costs would be £584 million a year, whereas the London School of Economics, in a controversial report, has put the total costs of setting up and running ID cards at between £10.6 billion and £19.2 billion.

The report called on the Government to disclose more information about how the scheme would operate, particularly the database on which personal details would eventually be held.

The criticism comes after the admission by the Home Office last month that the introduction of identity cards as a voluntary measure was likely to be delayed past the target date of 2008 because of practical difficulties in implementing a scheme of that size.

…

The MPs’ report, which focused on the use of science and risk management in the ID cards policy, was particularly critical of ministers for deciding at the outset to have a sophisticated identity card holding three forms of biometric data — ten fingerprints, two iris scans and a face scan.

They expressed surprise at the unscientific manner in which this was decided, without adequate evidence on their effectiveness, especially of iris scanning, and urged the Government to be ready to change this if necessary.

Subsequent trials of the biometric technology showed that iris scans had a higher recognition rate for white and Asian participants than those who were black, casting doubt on their effectiveness. The Government faced further embarrassment over ID cards yesterday when the Information Commissioner criticised the Treasury for refusing to release information about the programme’s budget and timetable.

So what does Blair say he is going to do about it?

Tony Blair brushed aside criticism of the Government’s plans for identity cards yesterday, saying that they would remain a central policy aim for Labour.

Addressing his monthly press conference at Downing Street, the Prime Minister said: “Don’t be in any doubt that this goes forward. Absolutely.”

He added: “Whatever the technical issues this is a major, major issue for us and will be a major plank of Labour’s manifesto at the next election.”

I just hope we can learn something from their mistakes–like don’t go there!

Quote of the day–Bruce Schneier

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I have an ultra-secure wireless network that automatically reports all hacking attempts to unsavory men with bitey dogs.

Bruce Schneier
Schneier Asks to Be Hacked
June 28, 2006
[Cool! I’d stipulate that the unsavory men and dogs enjoy guns, explosives and rough sex but that’s just me.–Joe]

Recovering a combination

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Have you lost the combination to a Master Lock combination lock? Here’s how you recover it.

Quote of the day–Lukas Grunwald

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The whole passport design is totally brain damaged. From my point of view all of these RFID passports are a huge waste of money. They’re not increasing security at all.

Lukas Grunwald
A security consultant with DN-Systems in Germany and an RFID expert.
Hackers Clone E-Passports
[In addition, the same arguments used against a national ID card can be used against passports.–Joe]

Computer quotes

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Via Samantha, a collection of computer related quotes. My favorite is this one:

1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d

Time to go back to bed. Barb is waiting for me.

Virtual babe

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Friday night I met Barb in the Tri-Cities and the next day we visited her aunt and uncle before driving back to the Seattle area to visit our Jewish friends (Randy and his new wife Kim). On the three plus hour drive alone I figured it would be appropriate to listen to some of Randy’s music. So I listened to the album Slop. I found myself very pleased with the combination of technology and sex in the song Virtual Babe (WMA, 1.34 MB).

This is going to make their heads spin

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Scientists have created artificial sperm from stem cells. Similar techniques can probably be used to create artificial eggs. Hence:

..it may even prove possible to produce sperm from female stem cells, and eggs from male ones, allowing homosexual couples to have children that bear the genes of both parents.

This would also enable a single man or woman to provide both the sperm and eggs needed to create an embryo, so that a person could essentially mate with himself or herself.

This means the arguments based on “marriage is about raising children” currently used against homosexual marriage may soon fall by the wayside. I always found those arguments weak anyway. Do supporters of that argument think that a woman past child bearing age should not be allowed to marry either? Or what of a man that is sterile? My view is that if two (or more) people want to get married to each other and spend their lives together then what’s the problem? Where’s the victim?

I turned down a software development job in rural Idaho

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One summer I worked for a short time for a local guy doing contract game development. I got an email from him yesterday asking if I or anyone I knew would be interested in working for him again:

I have a game development position open and am trying to get the word out to people who might be interested. This is work much the same as before. Lots of C++ network & graphics coding. Initially it will be code maintenance on our PS2 and PSP titles, but will transition to new code development on the PS3 in the 6-12 month time-frame. If this sounds like it might fit with your current situation, please contact me. If not, please spread the word if you know of anybody you can recommend.

…

If you know any talented programmers who would like to get out of the city and would like to work long hours for low pay in the environs of Deary, please give them my address…

I turned it down. Right now I need a fairly high income to accomplish some particular goals and I’m pretty happy with the work I’m doing. It’s very challenging and being forced to stretch myself is probably a good thing. It can be comfortable to coast but I’m sure I’m a better person accomplishing difficult tasks.

Where is Deary? It’s about 20 miles east of Moscow on highway 3. As near as I can tell it has nine streets. And my recollection is that it doesn’t have any stop lights. There are lots of trees and mountains however.

Let me know if you are interested and I’ll forward your name on to him.

GSA wants info on nuking Medina

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How interesting! Just yesterday I was just explaining to a lawyer how information is leaked in your search terms when you search the web. One of my blog visitors from the General Services Administration did a search for “nuke medina”.

It probably was just some individual with free time on their hands as opposed to true government interest. But it’s amusing all the same:

Domain Name   gsa.gov ? (United States Government)
IP Address   159.142.227.# (GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION)
ISP   GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
Location  
Continent  :  North America
Country  :  United States  (Facts)
State  :  District of Columbia
City  :  Washington
Lat/Long  :  38.8933, -77.0146 (Map)
Distance  :  2,072 miles
Language   English (United States)
en-us
Operating System   Microsoft Win2000
Browser   Mozilla 1.6
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
Javascript   version 1.5
Monitor  

Resolution  :  1024 x 768
Color Depth  :  32 bits

Time of Visit   Jul 26 2006 12:44:00 pm
Last Page View   Jul 26 2006 12:44:00 pm
Visit Length   0 seconds
Page Views   1
Referring URL http://search.yahoo….earch&ei=UTF-8&x=wrt
Search Engine search.yahoo.com
Search Words nuke medina
Visit Entry Page   http://blog.joehuffm…Them Into Glass.aspx
Visit Exit Page   http://blog.joehuffm…Them Into Glass.aspx
Out Click    
Time Zone   UTC-5:00
Visitor’s Time   Jul 26 2006 3:44:00 pm
Visit Number   91,300

Mister Bill’s Machine

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In the summer of ’95 I was a contractor for Microsoft working on Direct X video drivers. I wrote about that before.

Randy, a fellow contractor and video driver writer had a band, The Swine, as well as a show on public access cable television. A couple of Randy’s bandmembers wrote a song about our experience. Mister Bill’s Machine (WMA, 1.52 MB) does a fairly good job of capturing my summer of ’95.

Some other time when my inhibitions are much, much lower from lack of sleep or something I’ll explain how I ended up on the cover of their CD album in a camo poncho with an SKS rifle in my arms:

Interesting times

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A comparison between the early days of home computers and the current state of the art with genetics makes for some interesting thought experiments:

In the 1970s, before the PC era, there were computer hobbyists. A group of them formed the Homebrew Computer Club in a Menlo Park garage in 1975 to trade integrated circuits and swap tips on assembling rudimentary computers, like the Altair 8800, a rig with no inputs or outputs and half a megabyte of memory.

Among the Club’s members were Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs.

As the tools of biotechnology become accessible (and affordable) to a wider public for the first time, hobbyists are recapturing that collaborative ethos and applying it to tinkering with the building blocks of life.

Eugene Thacker is a professor of literature, culture and communications at Georgia Tech and a member of the Biotech Hobbyist collective. Just as the computer hobbyists sought unconventional applications for computer circuitry, the new collective is looking for “non-prescribed uses” of biotechnology, Thacker said.

Computer hobbyists brought us the spreadsheet, BBS’s (forerunners of web forums), personal word processors, and incredibly cheap porn.  On the downside they also brought us computer viruses, Internet worms, and gave voice to barking moonbats. Now imagine what might come of genetic hobbyists. A cure for baldness, a pill that really does increase the size of your penis, food plants that don’t need fertilizer or pesticides, and killer viruses that only affect people with hazel eyes.

I wonder if there will be anti-virus services like McAfee and Norton that you will have to subscribe to prevent getting wasted by the latest “script kiddie” that sets something free that turns your skin green or causes your fingernails to fall off.

New software for my phone

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I just got some new software for my cellphone and I can now login to my blog and post using it. Very cool! It’s not fast but I can do it.

This post was done using my cellphone while at James place and using his WiFi network.

DirectXBox

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I’m only about a year late on this. I’m not big on anniversaries and generally only pay attention if it’s socially required behavior.

Alex St. John wrote an article on the 10 year anniversary of Direct-X. I had a minor role in the development of Direct-X 1 and a few of the later versions. What our son James didn’t know was that his precious XBoxes were originally intended to be the game console known as “DirectXBox”. I told him last night as we were watching another few episodes of Star Gate SG-1 using his XBox 360 as a DVD player. He thought it was quite a let down to know it was named over something as mundane as that.

I should take his autographed (by Eric Engstrom) copy of Renegades of the Empire away from him.

AK clays

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Suppose you could mount a red-dot scope securely on the top of an AK rifle. What would that do for you in terms of target acquistion speed and accuracy? 

The answer is AK clays (~60 MByte .MOV file) are a reality.

Brought to you, in more ways than one, by UltiMAK.

One of these days we are going to make Boomer Clays work.  If nothing else I’m going to fill a milk jug with Boomerite and lob it into the air with giant slingshot for Lyle to shoot.

Password protected cartridges

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The idea is just plain stupid:

Safety catches do not always prevent firearm accidents and even newfangled biometric guns, which check the identity of a user by their fingerprint, cannot stop thieves from using stolen ammunition in other weapons.

The way to make firearms really safe, says Hebert Meyerle of Germany, is to password-protect the ammunition itself.

Meyerle is patenting a design for a modified cartridge that would be fired by a burst of high-frequency radio energy. But the energy would only ignite the charge if a solid-state switch within the cartridge had been activated. This would only happen if a password entered into the gun using a tiny keypad matched one stored in the cartridge.

The people in the comments get it right. The commenters missed (as of my last reading) another concern of mine that the communication between the gun and the ammo might also be electronically jammed.

An idea doesn’t have to have a market to patentable and a patent was granted on this bad idea.

Regulating CO2

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From the Seattle Times:

The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear arguments on whether the federal government must regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant, a case that could have broad implications for utilities, auto manufacturers and other industries nationwide.

The high court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide in order to combat global warming.

CO2?????  If it weren’t for it being a violation of the various rights (sometimes I wonder why I should respect the rights of those that don’t respect my rights to keep and bear arms) the way I would reduce CO2 emissions would be to encourage the environmental wackos to stop breathing.  This attack from the wackos is not about “global warming” or “climate change”.  The man-made effects on the global climate are so small it’s almost impossible to measure.  Therefore the motivation for these attacks can only be attributed to something else.  Possible candidates for the real reason include anti-capitalism, a scam to make money by the proponents of these claims, and mental disorders.  I’m partial the mental disorder hypothesis myself–When Prophecy Fails successfully explains many of these nut cases.

Did you know that water vapor is a bigger contributor to the green house effect than CO2?  See also Jeff’s post on this subject.  And that when gasoline or diesel is burned it produces more water vapor (by volume, not mass) than it does CO2?  Of course we could always limit water vapor emissions from the wackos as well.

Sex with robots

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There once was a young man named Gene
who invented a screwing machine.
Concave and convex,
it served either sex,
and it played with itself in between.

Ho-hum.  This guy is worried about a “code of ethics” for robots:

THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a “code of ethics” for machines as they become more and more sophisticated.

Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now — before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control.

“There are two levels of priority,” said Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month. “We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.”

…

“Security, safety and sex are the big concerns,” said Henrik Christensen, a member of the Euron ethics group. How far should robots be allowed to influence people’s lives? How can accidents be avoided? Can deliberate harm be prevented? And what happens if robots turn out to be sexy?

…

Other dilemmas may arrive sooner than we think, says Christensen. “People are going to be having sex with robots within five years,” he said. So should limits be set on the appearance, for example, of such robotic sex toys?

People have been having sex with machines for decades.  I’ve commented on this before:

Ethics for robots?  That’s a nice thought but futile.  If a market exists it will be met.  If whether it’s to wage war, perform assassinations, or brothels filled with mechanical sex machines there will be some to supply the programming to accomplish the task if there is enough money on the table for the task.  Asimov’s three laws will be simply commented out in the code.

Global warming–NOT

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At least human activities aren’t a significant contributor.  Take the quiz and then read the answers.  Thanks for posting that Jeff.

Get your Windows update installed soon

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I got an email at work yesterday saying I needed to update all my Windows machines.  I did so and it seemed like there were a LOT of updates.  I updated my boxes at my “home” in the Seattle area and had James (who is staying with me until he can move into his new apartment tomorrow) do the same.  It turns out there were a very large number of updates released by Microsoft yesteday and a lot of them were for security vulnerabilities.

The vulnerabilities being fixed makes them known to attackers. If you haven’t updated your computer after the fixes have been released then you are, in most cases, more vulnerable than before they were released. Update your computer now.

Quote of the day–Raymond Chen

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It would be unreasonable to expect the HTML parser to be able to understand every language both present and future. (At least not until clairvoyance has been perfected.)

Raymond Chen
June 5, 2006
[I absolutely love this quote.  Understatement in the first sentence followed by the only known exception to the stated rule.  Succinct yet complete encapsulation of the situation.  Some people get annoyed at me when I find exceptions to their overly broad generalizations but I think they are an essential component of understanding the situation and almost always just trying to help.  Today, as most days, Raymond is my technological and word-smithing hero.-Joe]