MaxRedline

Latest TSA Move:

Facial recognition scanning of all airline passengers before they can board an aircraft. They call this their Biometric Entry-Exit Program.

It doesn't work as well as they'd like, due to a few minor issues: they could only identify 85% of passengers due to poor network availability, lack of staff, and airlines' insistence on on-schedule takeoff. The latter seemed particularly vexing.

The report goes on to again bemoan “airlines’ recurring tendency to bypass the biometric matching process in favor of boarding flights for an on-time departure.” DHS, apparently, is worried that it could be habit-forming for the airlines: “Repeatedly permitting airlines to revert to standard flight-boarding procedures without biometric processing may become a habit that is difficult to break.”

The report ends up concluding that this and other logistical issues “pose significant risks to CBP scaling up the biometric program to process 100 percent of all departing passengers by 2021.” And it has some ideas to do something about it, namely “enforcement mechanisms or back-up procedures to prevent airlines from bypassing biometric processing prior to flight boarding.”

"Enforcement measures", eh? It won't be long before they decide that everybody should have implanted microchips.

 

During t

Unmanned Airport Control Tower?

LOVELAND, Colo. (CBS4) — A new high-tech experiment is underway at the Northern Colorado Regional Airport that could have ramifications around the country.

The Colorado Department of Transportation Division of Aeronautics is nearing completion on the Remote Tower Project.

It has multiple cameras feeding streams to an array of monitors, along with radar and other instrumentation, into what they call a virtual control tower.

They just don't have to build an actual tower, which would cost a lot more.

 

Wyden, Yo Time Is Up

The Senator from New York (who claims, on occasion, to represent Oregon), went just a little too far in an open letter posted at TechCrunch last week; effectively demanding that internet sites self-censor views that he feels are indecent. It seems he's picked up a few tricks during his years in New York - like the Mafia tactic of opining, "Nice little thing you've got here. Be a shame if something was to happen to it".

I give him full credit for the law that he wrote many years ago - and for which he credits himself. But that was then, and this is now.

I wrote the law that allows sites to be unfettered free speech marketplaces. I wrote that same law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to provide vital protections to sites that didn’t want to host the most unsavory forms of expression. The goal was to protect the unique ability of the internet to be the proverbial marketplace of ideas while ensuring that mainstream sites could reflect the ethics of society as a whole.

In general, this has been a success — with one glaring exception. I never expected that internet CEOs would fail to understand one simple principle: that an individual endorsing (or denying) the extermination of millions of people, or attacking the victims of horrific crimes or the parents of murdered children, is far more indecent than an individual posting pornography.

And Ron's entitled to his opinion - as are other people. But unlike those other people, Ron seeks to impose his opinion as the new rules under which the internet lives or dies. And that's not only wrong, it's scarily so. When people post Holocaust denials or claim that mass shootings are actually "false-flag" operations, sane people just write them off as the conspiracy nuts that they are. But 20 years on after the adoption of Section 230, Ron now seems to believe that such views should be censored by internet platform providers, simply because he personally finds them indecently offensive. And I'm with Ron on the indecently offensive part - just not on the demanding censorship part (and the part where he says that CEOs should be fired if that's what it takes to get social media platforms to toe his line). Sorry, Ron, that's over the top.

There are real consequences to social media hosting radically indecent speech, and those consequences are looming.

And Ron - your view of what constitutes radically indecent speech may differ from the views of others. I've been running a blog for many years. I can handle things on my own; I pay for the site, so it's my decision. Not yours.

Time for you to retire.

 

We're Baack!

The page hijacking issue that several of you folks mentioned has apparently been resolved. Typepad suggested that someone had hijacked a sidebar widget, which may have caused the problem. Indeed, that turned out to be the case; the Debt Counter has been removed, and everything seems normal again. Yay.

And due to the wildfire smoke enveloping our area earlier in the week, my wife's asthma started kicking in big-time. So we packed up the kid and the dog and some other stuff, and I got us space in Yachats, on the central Oregon coast for a few days. After we got there, I had to drive back up to Newport so my wife could get nebulizer treatment at a clinic there to restore her ability to actually breathe. But that all worked out, and she spent most of the time we were there just resting and relaxing.

While we were there and she was resting, I hiked through  the botanical garden in Yachats, then proceeded onto a trail in the Siskiyou National Forest. It had been a few years, and I'd forgotten what the terrain was like. I remember now! I may be getting too old for that stuff. Clambering up-and-downhill over innumerable tree roots tends to take a bit out of you, although I felt great the next day.

We had good sun and no wildfire smoke, so it was all good.

Today, we saw that the wildfire smoke had been mostly blown away from our home area, so we bailed and came back. You can actually see the moon this evening, so yeah - it's looking a lot better.

Things are returning to normal all 'round.

 

Massive Attack

Great.

Researchers Jonathan Butts, founder of QED Secure Solutions, and Billy Rios, founder of WhiteScope LLC, presented findings at Black Hat on Thursday that raised concern that a lack of encryption on firmware updates could open the door for malicious hackers to compromise Medtronic pacemakers.

Fewer bombs, but more directed attacks. Fortunately, I'm invulnerable; all of my body parts are standard issue.

 

‘Microsoft Managed Desktop’

Well, yeah. They will charge a monthly fee to configure computers running Windows 10 and keep them running smoothly as new updates are released. If that's a problem for you, you're gonna have to move to Linux. Unless, of course, you still run unsupported versions of Winders, like XP or 7. I run older versions on some of the systems, along with a Linux system. But there are a couple of systems here that do run Winders 10. I wondered what the catch was when they were pushing their free upgrades. I reckon they figger they've roped as many users as they're gonna get into Winders 10, so now they're set to change the terms.

 

General Magic

It's in your pocket.

Security - Not A Priority

The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.

In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.

60% of ballots cast in 2006 were tabulated by ES&S machines. And in 2006, hackers stole the source code for Symantec's pcAnywhere software. Symantec didn't acknowledge that for another six years.

Wyden told Motherboard that installing remote-access software and modems on election equipment “is the worst decision for security short of leaving ballot boxes on a Moscow street corner.”

For once, I agree with Wyden.

 

 

Fob Foolishness

DETROIT – Given that the best way to store your car keys at night is by putting them in a coffee can, what's an ex-FBI agent's advice to protect cars from theft during the day?

Wrap car fobs in aluminum foil.

Right. That's just stupid. Sure, it can work, but so would building things better. It's not that hard.

 

Skynet Is Operational In China

Much as in the television show "Person of Interest", it uses facial recognition to identify people whose images are captured by their multitudes of cameras.

And yes, they call it "Skynet". As in the TV show, the system places a box around the object - or the faces - of interest.

It's not 100% at identification, but the system is learning fairly quickly.

With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people.

Here in America, lots of people just post every detail of their lives on social media platforms like Facebook.

The possibility of surveillance never seems to occur to them - or they just don't care.