Applied Miscellany

The CNNMoney.com article “e-Passports: Ready or not here they come” reports on the security and personal safety risks associated with the RFID (radio frequency identification) tags that will be embedded in U.S. passports by August 2006. These tags are meant to be read via radio waves from a “short” distance by a passport reader; they [...]

Ed Felten has posted a paper called Nuts and Bolts of Network Neutrality. It provides just enough technical details of the Internet to nicely cover the policy issues of network neutrality.

As reported by Slashdot, Google has announced the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) which allows web developers to create AJAX applications in Java. The GWT then translates the Java code into client-side code. The client-side code is either Java bytecode (“hosted mode”) during development or JavaScript and HTML (“web mode”) for production deployment. It should be [...]

The Guaridan reports that with just a discarded British Airways boarding-pass stub that was found in a dustbin, the journalist and his computer expert was able to access personal details: We logged on to the BA website, bought a ticket in [the passenger's] name and then, using the frequent flyer number on his boarding pass [...]

It is becoming increasingly difficult to protect one’s personal data these days. The threat, of course, is that the more complete a profile someone has on you, the greater chance that the information can be used against you for everything from unwanted solicitations to identity theft. Computers are very good at combining information from multiple [...]

From Risks Digest 24.18 (which obtained the information from Slashdot): An anonymous reader writes “The New Jersey legislature is considering a bill [link] that would require operators of public forums to collect users’ legal names and addresses, and effectively disallow anonymous speech on online forums. This raises some serious issues, such as to what extent [...]

In the article, Senate Approves Curbs on Some Patriot Act Powers, The New York Times reports: If Mr. Feingold spoke for the bill’s critics, Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, offered another perspective in support of the antiterrorism measure: “Civil liberties do not mean much when you are dead.” Had he been around in 1775, [...]

The other day, I attended a talk titled, “The Future of Music and the 5¢ Solution — How artists and consumers can reclaim ownership of music,” by Daniel Levitin, a professor in the psychology department of McGill University, who has had an impressive career in the music/recording industry. The basic idea behind the talk was [...]

Referring to a Doctor Fun cartoon in which a man objects to an RFID implant until he learns that the implant is also a cellphone, digital camera, and an MP3 player, Bruce Schneier writes, “This is 100% right.” I agree—in fact, the same argument could apply to the privacy implications of the new version of [...]

The EFF is recommending that users do not use the new Google Desktop because it greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. It seems that the the new “Search Across Computers” feature will send copies of one’s local documents to Google’s servers so that they can be searched by the user from, say, their work [...]