An Open Letter to Our Tone

Yup.

NOC, NOC: Who's There?

To my eternal shame the UK is not exactly at the forefront of free software adoption, not least because Our Glorious Tone seems as dazzled by the business and intellectual achievements of Bill Gates as he is by the social and political ones of George W. Bush. But apparently we are to get our very own National Open Centre. I'm not holding my breath for massive open source uptake, but it's a start.

The Great ID FUD

When will they ever learn?

Unlike traditional forms of identification, the VeriChip can’t be lost, stolen, misplaced, or counterfeited.

That's what the human-implantable RFID VeriChip site says. And this is what happened at the Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) 6 conference:

two presenters demonstrated the electronic equivalent of making a copy of an implanted RFID or radio frequency ID chip.

The point was to show just how easy it is to fool a detection device that purports to uniquely identify any individual.

So let's just do a quick recap: which technologies are available for establishing identity unambiguously these days?

Irises: nope
Faces: nope
Fingerprints: nope
DNA: nope
Implanted RFID: nope

So, tell me Mr Blair, how exactly you were going to implement this ID card system in a way that it can't be spoofed to hell?