Screenshot: A Weblog

Another reason to feel sorry for the aardvark - they probably get more spam than any other animal. A study was done showing that patterns in your username, such as the first letter, seem to impact how much spam you get. Actually, their title claiming that aardvarks get more spam than zebras is misleading. The pattern is more complex than that, with L, P, R, and S seeming to lead the pack in terms of spam versus non-spam messages received. Really, it seems like all this is saying is that spammers guess email addresses, and if your address occurs on other domains frequently as well, you're more likely to be spammed. So your nice mnemonic username might be socially appealing but problematic for your junk mail folder.

Posted by Amanda at 11:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In yet another RFID update (it's funny how once you are thinking about something like this you see it everywhere) this is an interesting little video of Adam Savage explaining why Mythbusters won't be debunking any more RFID myths anytime soon. In short, they had an entire show planned around RFID myths - how hackable they are, how easy it is to track someone with them, etc. - and legal counsel for various large financial institutions contacted Discovery and scared them into blocking the show. But it is more fun to hear it in Adam's words so go watch! I'm bummed - I think that would have been a great episode, and it is frustrating to see corporate interests blocking this type of information from getting out. After all, the show has covered myths where they make various explosive materials and they bleep out key ingredients or steps; at the very least, it seems like a negotiation to do something like that could have been reached. It also reminds me on the gag order that was put on the MIT students who were going to speak on how the hacked the Boston subway system at Defcon this year, though that injunction was lifted, albeit too late for the students to speak. In fact, that talk was supposed to be in part about an RFID security weakness as well!

Posted by Amanda at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has an entertaining and informative exploration of the monetary density of things, striving to answer the question of what, if anything, is worth its weight in gold. Starting by comparing the value per pound of basic US currency (where we learn that carrying nickles is about as weight-inefficient as carrying pennies) to comparing a variety of non-currency materials. The information is mostly presented in a number of cool graphs, but the source data is provided if you're a data geek. Currency-wise, gold falls between $20 and $50 bills in terms of monetary density. My favorite graph is the one comparing relatively everyday items like Kobe beef, human blood, peacock feathers and Maine Coon cats, all of which generally fall in the monetary density range between dollar coins and dollar bills.

Posted by Amanda at 8:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Related to my post from last week, Scientific American has an article about how RFID tags are popping up in unexpected places and be able to be used to track individuals, including, due to poor security in the devices, by individuals unassociated with the tags. The main application that the article is concerned with is the desire to have border states issue drivers licenses equipped with RFID tags to simplify border crossings. Says the article:

Although such “enhanced” driver’s licenses remain voluntary in the states that offer them, privacy and security experts are concerned that those who sign up for the cards are unaware of the risk: anyone with a readily available reader device—unscrupulous marketers, government agents, stalkers, thieves and just plain snoops—can also access the data on the licenses to remotely track people without their knowledge or consent. What is more, once the tag’s ID number is associated with an individual’s identity—for example, when the person carrying the license makes a credit-card transaction—the radio tag becomes a proxy for that individual.

Posted by Amanda at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

While I have played around with sed/awk and perl and shell scripting in the past, in recent years I've spent more time using programming languages than scripting languages. This summer I've been playing around with Python a bit, though I'll probably get more into it once I think of a good problem to solve using it. I thought about picking up Flash, but between it being so closed and it being difficult to just see your code, I decided to pass on that bit of frustration. Somehow I didn't think of Javascript at all, though I do not do much web development so perhaps that is not too surprising. This discussion of the maturity of Javascript and the APIs for it has got me thinking that maybe it ought to move back up the priority list. If the APIs have gotten good enough to smooth over browser differences in a robust manner, that really would make web programming look more inviting. Of course, I return to the problem of needing a project to implement to really give the language a good test, but I think I'll be keeping my eyes open this fall for places where I might get to try out one of these tools.

Posted by Amanda at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There has been a lot of kerfluffle in the local papers about the possibility of making I-80 a toll road, which I have followed with only very modest interest as I rarely if ever drive on I-80, but a recent description of how the state proposes to use cash-free tolling to mollify local drivers caught my eye. The proposal is that if you are a local driver and you sign up for EZ-Pass, you will not be charged tolls for local trips - hopefully this will reduce the risk that local drivers will avoid I-80 and funnel extra traffic onto local roads.

Now if you know me, you may guess that I'm about to rant about the inequity in requiring one sign up for EZ-Pass in order to gain those benefits, but I kept reading the article and came across something that bothered me much more:

He [the I-80 project manager] said all new and existing toll facilities in the nation are switching to state-of-the-art electronic tolling. By 2020, he predicted, most if not all new cars will come equipped with low-watt radio transponders similar to those provided by E-ZPass and typically mounted on a windshield. Conventional toll collection systems -- as well as toll collectors -- would be phased out.

This is not a positive prediction, to my view. This is a prediction that we are going to be permit having technology built into our cars that allows our location and movements to be tracked easily. The potential for databases springing up that can identify where we are at any time, cobbled together from various government and private logs of car entrances and exits from various spaces seems probable if this technology does become standard. With the concerns there are now about the abilities of the government to access our phone records and possibly our internet search records, I cannot believe there would not be attempts to access this information as well.

But even if you do not want to get into that concern, I look at the potential benefit to average people of having this technology, versus the possible (and I would suggest likely) uses it would be put to if it were pervasive. On the positive side, it could operate as an EZ-Pass style payment system, avoiding the need to carry cash for tolls, and probably for parking lots/garages soon after. If your car were stolen, you may increase the odds that it will be recovered. Essentially, you gain the advantages touted by OnStar.

But suppose that we can assume every car has this technology. Any vehicle-oriented payment system could be automated to bill the driver - toll booths and parking garages as I mentioned, but metered parking spaces as well. So, you won't have to carry quarters for the meter, but you won't be hopping on to the end of someone's time or just leaving your car for a minute and taking your chances either. And the technology is simple enough it could be used to start ticketing regularly for parking offenses that usually one only gets dinged for sporadically - hydrants could detect if you are parked too near to them, 30 minute zones could detect if you are there too long, and so on. Most of the city here has street cleaning days where you may not park on one side of the street - only occasionally are the street cleaners followed by police handing out tickets, but it would be simple to embed technology to allow the street cleaners to send out tickets on their own. And with the simplicity of tracking cars, it would all of a sudden become plausible to add tolls and fees in places where they have not previously been collected due to the overhead of doing so. Many cities charge tolls on their major bridges - I cannot imagine how one would fit a toll booth system for the Fort Pitt tunnel, but some sensors at the entrance to the tunnel would make it feasible all of a sudden for Pittsburgh to add this source of revenue (which, granted, might then support needed bridge repairs in the area...)

Who knows - maybe there is enough resistance out there that EZ-Pass/OnStar technologies will remain something that one needs to opt into. I definitely can see their advantage for people who want them, and who choose to use them knowledgeably. But I hope to see it remain a choice, not a required feature of our cars.

Posted by Amanda at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)