Bruce Schneier on RFID passports

An interesting podcast on the Digital Identity Blog about RFID passports. It’s an interview with Bruce Schneier where the security guru’s gives explains his disapproval of.

Executive summary: We need to update passports for the 21st century. We need to put more machine readable data on them and ideally also be able to write data on them to support things like digital visas. Of the available techinologies, RFID is certainly not the ideal one becase it enables someone to read the data on the passport at a distance and without the passport holder’s consent, for example in a crowded train. Passports last for 10 years, in which time radio technology will certainly get better and make RFID passports even less secure. Get a conventional passport while you can; don’t be a guinea pig.

Links:

• podcast
• Bruce Schneier’s Blog
• Digital Identity Forum (or Blog?)

Anji Bee’s Chillcast Cocktail Party DJ Mix

Podcast celebrity Anji Bee has just released a 90 mins long mix podcast. Except an intro and and outro with some talking, the rest is just chilled music.

Worth downloading and keeping on your mp3 player.

Have a look on her website.

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman died November 16 at the age of 94. He was one of the most influential economists of this century.

Numerous new stories and blog articles have reported his death and discussed his enormous contributions to Economics: NY Times, The Economist, again The Economist, and the FT. Also in Greg Mankiw’s and Becker and Posner among many others.

Most of the articles above hardly mention that Friedman was a fierce advocate not only of ecomonic friedom, but also of social freedom, such as ligalisation of drugs. I assume this is because most of the writers of the articles have politically conservative tendencies. It’s worthy of note that Friedman’s support for ligalisation of drugs is not based on abstract moral convictions, but on paracmatic economic analysis.

Here is an articles that don’t:
- The Baxter Bulletin
- American Chronicle

Here are some articles my the man himself:
- An Open Letter to Bill Bennett (April 1990)
- The Drug War as a Socialist Enterprise (November 1991)
- Prohibition and Drugs (May 1972)

He also co-coauthored a book on the subject: Friedman and Szasz on Liberty and Drugs: Essays on the Free Market and Prohibition, by by Arnold S. Trebach, Kevin B. Zeese, Milton Friedman. It’s out of print, you can get it used on Amazon or Bookfinder.

PS: This is already the second post on drug legalisation. I hope I won’t end up on Crack Whore Magazine!

Momix – Lunar Sea

I went to see it last Wednesday. I like that Momix do really good contemporary dance and physical theatre that it is also very apprachable by audiences not composed of hard core dance geeks. The placing on Sadlers Well’s calendar was spot on, just before the more “pop” shows of the Holiday season.

Watch the e-trailer

I could not find any video clip from this show on the web. There is some stuff from old shows on youtube and on Sadlers Well’s website

Other links:

• Momix website
• the show’s page

News puns

Are they so necessary? They are always found in the title, at the beginning, and at the end of an article.

This time The Economist as outdone itself. The closing sentence of an otherwise respectable article on AIDS concludes with the following sentence: “To rub out AIDS there is still no substitute for rubber.”

No comment. Full article here: http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_RPTPSGS .

Cocaine

The BBC reports that the UK is the cocaine capital of Europe, that the street price of the drug is falling, and that cocaine is being sole sold cut with a carcinogenic agent. It also reports that traffickers smuggle cocaine gruesomely inside live dogs and that producers exploit children to obtain it from coca plants.

In the video an interviewee comments that Cocaine is seen as a glamorous drug, much like Champaign is seen as a glamorous wine, but unlike Champaign, which is subject to rigorous quality assurance processes, Cocaine can be found mixed with any kind of rubbish.

Read story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6178026.stm

Watch the news story from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/help/3681938.stm

The news story fails to propose the idea that if Cocaine were legal and sold in supermarket isles like Champaign, it would indeed be subject to rigorous quality assurance processes, children would not be exploited for its production, and there would be no need to smuggle it inside dogs. As an added benefit, profits from its sale would not feed into organised crime.