吃瓜大本营

A disgruntled worker at a Texas auto dealership hacked into a vehicle-immobilization system and disabled more than 100 vehicles. Our automobiles are getting more and more computerized, so the threat of hacking vehicles is being taken increasingly seriously, according to this interesting in CIO Magazine. And as computerization proceeds, with cars tied in to GPS, social networks, and who knows what else, the threat will increasingly be not just to security but also to privacy. Already today鈥檚 cars contain as many as 70 independent computers with up to 100 megabytes of code. And, vehicles鈥攑erhaps we should start calling them 鈥渢ransportation computers鈥濃�攁re increasingly being plugged into various networks, which greatly increases their vulnerability. Already, the job description 鈥渃ar thief鈥� has come to take on some of the qualities of 鈥渉acker,鈥� with plugging into vehicles鈥� data ports, replicating RFID key fobs, and otherwise manipulating data rather than hardware. It鈥檚 always seemed to me that one way to increase the security in cars and other publicly important software, is to require that their code be .

Speaking of RFID chips, Wired has an by David Kravets on the Texas school district that is tagging its kids with RFIDs, which I about in June. Kravets reports that the primary motivation for chipping students is money鈥攕chools鈥� budgets are tied to attendance, so they are seeking more accurate attendance records in order to get more money from the state. The ACLU recently endorsed a laying out the problems with deploying RFIDs in school. Students at the school are 鈥溾�� against the radio chip deployment鈥攕howing that resistance to authority is not dead yet in America. Wired also notes that the RFIDs used by the school contain no encryption, so they could be easily read and cloned by anyone with the (easily obtained) equipment. Aside from the privacy problems, the security problems that could arise from tracking not actual children, but computer chips (which the school simply assumes are connected to human bodies) are legion, as the position paper points out. Separate the child from the chip and the school will be fooled into thinking the child is somewhere he or she is not.

On the subject of socializing a generation of children to accept surveillance technologies, Disney World is installing a new biometric fingerprint tracking system, and is interested in deploying face recognition, Medill . The company鈥檚 involvement in the technology is so extensive that a Disney executive provided expertise on biometrics to the government after 9/11, and several Disney employees have left the company to take jobs at the NSA or elsewhere in the intelligence community, according to the article. In some ways it鈥檚 surprising that Disney would embrace such a technology, so seemingly at odds with the innocence and nostalgia that the company sells. On the other hand, the 鈥渟impler times鈥� that the company appeals to are of course completely illusory鈥攄evoid of political, economic or ethnic conflict, protest, and social change鈥攁nd maintaining that illusion at its theme parks has often prompted the company to lean towards policies of order and control, with which fingerprinting fits right in.

Finally, don鈥檛 miss this hilarious . We are VERY offended by the stereotypical portrayal of a wacky privacy advocate in the piece, but the rest of it is funny.