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Submission + - Time's Person of the Year 2006 is... You

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16, 2006 @11:23PM

An anonymous reader writes: Time Magazine's Person of the Year selects the person (man, woman, group or idea) that, "for better or worse, has most influenced events in the preceding year". Previous recipients have included Charles Lindbergh (1927), Adolf Hitler (1938), the Generation Twenty-Five and Under (1966), the Computer (1982) and the Endangered Earth (1988). The Person of the Year for 2006 is you. Time believes that you are the most influential person in 2006, by using the "Web 2.0" (i.e. Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace) to control the media and change the world. So give yourself a round of applause and a teary acceptance speech.

Submission + - ePassport cloned in less than five minutes

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 16, 2006 @08:27PM

An anonymous reader writes: Using a standard off-the-shelf component you can just buy at a component store you can have a cloned ePassport in less than five minutes. The chip inside the ePassport is a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip of the type poised to replace the barcode in supermarkets. A new British biometric European Union passport, which is embedded with a microchip, the 'enhanced' security features of ePassports. The good thing about RFID chips is that they emit radio signals that can be read at a short distance by an electronic reader. Lukas demonstrated, he can easily download the data from his passport using an RFID reader he got for 200 Euros on eBay. Lukas is less forthcoming about where he got what is called the Golden Reader Tool, it is the software used by border police and it allows him to read the chip on his ePassport, including the photo. Now for the clever bit. Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport's data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip. When the cloned ePassport is read and compared to the original one it behaves exactly the same. The UK Home Office however dismissed the ability to get hold of the information on the chip. A spokesman said: "It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip."

Submission + - Why cell phone outage reports are secret

Submitted by

thenendo

on Saturday December 16, 2006 @07:07PM

thenendo writes: "An MSNBC article reports on the recent rejection of FOIA requests for government-collected cell phone outage statistics. It would seem that the FCC is using the threat of terrorism as a thinly veiled excuse to protect Telecoms from fair market competition for reliability. From the article:
"A federal Freedom of Information Act request for the data, filed in August by MSNBC.com, has been rejected by the agency [the FCC]. The stated reasons: Release of the information could help terrorists plan attacks against the United States, and it would harm the companies involved.
...
"'There is nothing mysterious behind it, it is corporate competition protection,' said Cressey, now a partner in Good Harbor Consulting. 'The only reason for the government to not let these records get out is then one telco provider could run a full-page ad saying "the government says we're more reliable."'
...
"Al Tompkins, a Freedom of Information Act expert at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think-tank, said release of the cell phone outage reports would be 'a tremendous consumer tool,' and compared them to the Federal Aviation Administration's publication of airline on-time records.""

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