] "Portland's top brass said it was OK to swipe your
] garbage--so we grabbed theirs."

Real journalism is almost non-existant these days. This is a gem. You may have heard rumblings about this controversy. The government in Portland has been swiping people's trash without a warrant for several decades. Fortunately, a judge has declared this practice unconstitutional.

Journalists go trashing.

Although most of the articles in the new phrack consist of more boring papers on buffer overflows, this article is interesting. How to Jam civilian GPS receivers. There is also an entertaining article about how traffic lights work...

Phrack: Jamming GPS

] "Nowadays people don't want you to sing good. They want
] you to sing sloppy and have a good beat to your songs.
] That's what angle I'm going to shoot for. That's where
] the money is."

Hey Dad, I'm selling out - Jimi Hendrix

Jeremy wrote:

] My favorite customer comment on the system: "I support new
] technology."

Lets take a real-politik perspective on this.

1. It doesn't matter what customers think. This is obviously not the item at the top of the Kroger Shoppers' wish list. I'm a kroger shopper. The thing I most want is for them to shelve the ice cream cones within reasonable proximity to the bloody ice cream. Fingerprinting isn't even on the list.

2. Actually, it does matter, but only if it literally means they loose business, and only if the lost business is more expensive then the savings associated with the system. THAT is exactly what they are trying to figure out with these trials. How much business does this cost them. So, if you see a trial like this, avoiding the stores in question is a good strategy if you don't like this sort of thing.

3. There are three things that matter here: Security, Convenience, and Cost. (There is one thing that does NOT matter here: privacy. These stores are no more interested in protecting your privacy then they are in helping TIA collect fingerprints. They don't care about this either way.)

4. This is being done because its convenient. Convenience = shorter grocery lines = more customers per hour = revenues. The people who have designed it are ONLY thinking about grocery stores. In that context it is far more secure then existing options as anyone trying to fake a print would be easily noticed by the anti-shrinkage brigade. Its also cheaper then loyalty cards because they don't have to print anything. Its win win win for them in their context.

5. The trouble is that they are ONLY thinking about THEIR context. Fingerprints are an absolute nightmare from a security perspective for doing online purchases. Its a password you can't change! Because you are going to want a single payment solution that works in every environment, and because fingerprints don't work in every environment, fingerprints will not be your payment solution, no matter how much it might make sense for Kroger and TIA.

6. However, you might need to use your fingerprint for the customer loyalty program. There is a significant risk that these systems will also serve a law enforement purpose. If you don't like that, opt out. You will be able to opt out, even if it costs you money. If enough people opt out the system will go away. Enough people is not the same as a large amount of people. There only has to be enough dissent such that the cost of that lost business is greater then the savings caused by shaving 30-60 seconds off of each person's checkout time. This may be as little as a hundred customers per store.

7. I have a feeling that the success of this sort of system will vary greatly from community to community. High levels of education, high income levels, or significant political leanings (right OR left) will cause higher rates of opt-out.

RE: Kroger Lets Shoppers Pay Via Fingerprint

This is Salman Rushdie's op-ed piece for the Christmas Day edition of the Washington Post.

He compares and contrasts The Two Towers and Gangs of New York in the context of contemporary history and current events.

Getting Into Gang War

This is a really poor website, with few details, but these folks seem to have a very interesting polymer with dramatic piezoelectric properties. Its marketed as "plastic muscle."

EAMEX Corporation

] I pinged the elf. He had a lot of left-handed Whuffie;
] respect garnered from people who shared very few of my
] opinions. I expected that. What I didn't expect was that
] his weighted Whuffie score, the one that lent extra credence
] to the rankings of people I respected, was also high — higher
] than my own. I regretted my nonlinear behavior even more.
] Respect from the elf — Tim, I had to remember to call him
] Tim — would carry a lot of weight in every camp that
] mattered.

A short excerpt from Cory Doctorow's new novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which seems to have some, ehem, familiar ideas.

The Infinite Matrix | Cory Doctorow | Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom 1

Soundmosaic constructs an approximation of one sound out of small pieces of other sounds.

The soundmosaic algorithm is: Split the target file up into equal-sized segments, or "tiles". For each tile in the target file, find the closest match in the source files, and replace the target tile with the tile from the source files.

soundmosaic

] "U.S. retailers reeling from a lackluster holiday season
] that is forecast to be the weakest in more than 30 years."

Recovery? What?? Hello???

Forbes.com: RPT-US retailers face worst holiday sales in 3 decades

] "People cheated."

Blogging this for future reference (if/when I speak at the O'Reilly conference. In addition to creating oligarchies, the mono-hierarchical moderation systems that people are now spinning as "reputation systems" do not work because they can be manipulated.

Why Mono-hierarchical Reputation Systems Fail