KickIdle.com Blog

Much as predicted, now that the national ID craze has blown over, there’s a push to setup a state driver license program that can be used in the same fashion. Bruce Schneier published an informative essay on the matter of national ID cards which applies equally as well to the current debate. One of the things that I find so annoying about these types of proposals is that they totally ignore the Point-Of-Sale implications. For these new biometrics to supply any reasonable amount of trust at binding an ID to a person, two functions must be available at the location of the verifier:

• Equipment to read the biometrics off the card, off the person in question, and render a useful comparision of those two readings (i.e. a “match” or “don’t match” indicator).
• Means to verify that the biometrics on the card match biometric information that has been verified when the ID was issued.

The reality is, even simplistic IDs current used by most states (i.e. a text description of things like height, age, race, and eye color, combined with a minimal photo) frequently are not verified, even though all the verifier has to do is look at the ID and look at the person. Even with the miniscule amount of information supplied on current IDs, no one actually bothers to verify the information matches what’s on file with the state, except for people like law enforcement, who have expensive and specialized systems to support their needs. Now, with a newly proposed ID, the bouncer at the local club would need to have a special reader to get a finger-print off each patron, and then match it to their ID. And you can bet that people won’t take to being finger-printed entering their favorite club….
And you can forget about verifying the new biometric data in real-time. Even for specialized uses like verifying airline passengers, the system will still be impractical. What are you going to do when the system is down? And it will be down. Even if they operate at 99.999% uptime (the holy grail of “Five Nines”), that’s over 525 minutes of downtime per year! Nearly 45 minutes per month that the system will un-expectedly be offline. And operating a system this complex at Five Nines uptime would be incredibly expensive. Many critical government systems operate at closer to 98% uptime, which would be over 14 hours per month of downtime.

The lawyer didn’t comment on the matter, but I’m sure we’ll see this being appealled to the Supreme Court.

Should priests sue churches?

I still have a gut level dislike of the “axis of evil” terminology, but I’m starting to re-evaluate my thoughts on the subject. But even if you don’t agree with it, you have to admit that Colin Powell makes a good point about the Europeans.

“My European colleagues should be pounding on Iraq as quickly as they pound on us when the president makes a strong, principled speech,” Secretary of State Colin Powell said on CNN’s “Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer.”

Well, the French have made the ultimate surrender. And before you give me that “the French aren’t surrender monkeys” crap, even the Parisien quoted in the article knows better:

Parisien café owner Jean-Claude told The Associated Press news agency: France no longer exists. It’s Europe now.”

ARGENTINA UPDATE: A World Bank economist told CNN that he expects the current recovery plan to be workable, but that recession is pretty much inevitable for this year, and will affect most of South America. Not that that’s a suprise. The recovery plan seems to consist of getting rid of the artificial exchange rate for the peso and easing restrictions on withdraws from bank accounts.

Here’s an interesting article about Bush’s foreign policy, and how it’s been influenced by the writings of Robert Kaplan. Kaplan’s latest book is already on my wishlist.

If Natalija Radic is a Euroblogger, what am I? If it’s based on geography (Natalija is in the EU, thus a Euroblogger), then I’m probably a redneck blogger. But, much as I’m sure Natalija would protest that logic, I don’t think redneck is a good label for me, probably for many of the same reasons as Natalija would give. So am I an Ameriblogger? A East Coast Blogger? A North American Free Trade Association Blogger? Or just A Blogger (for that US-centric feeling of Internet hegemony)?
Beats me, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet I guess.

Well, it’s belated, but I think I’ll try mentioning Britney Spears on my website. Just to test that theory about her name driving hits through the roof. Now if only I could say I had “totally authentic nude photos of Britney Spears in hardcore xxx action!”, I bet that would drive the hits way up. Too bad I don’t…

The Czech Prime Minister sure knows how to cut to the chase:

Asked specifically whether Israel should negotiate with Arafat and whether he is a terrorist, the Czech prime minister said, “Any political leader who tolerates political terrorism as a legitimate tool for his political campaign… is a terrorist.”
“You know the English expression,” he said. “If it looks like a duck, goes like a duck, tastes like a duck, then it is a duck.”

The EU pansies who complain about unilateral action must have shit themselves when they heard that one.