October 28th, 2009

Long-term Mozy for Mac review

Posted by Robin Harris @ 5:56 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Software

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Mozy, Redundancy, Backups, Desktops, Hardware, Robin Harris

I work online and live in a small town 30 miles of 2 lane road from Flagstaff, AZ. I don’t have a lot of options when my infrastructure FUBARs.

Redundancy keeps me up and running. A key piece is 3 backup systems:

1. Hourly Time Machine backups of changed files.
2. Nightly system disk backups to a bootable external drive.
3. Online backup to cloud storage system.

Am I paranoid? When a recent OS upgrade failed due to driver conflicts, I needed 2 of the 3 systems to retrieve all my data. If a backup disk had failed I would have used all 3.

Mozy for Mac
For over 2 years, at my own expense, I used Decho’s Mozy for Mac client to back up critical data - some 40+ GB of it. About 3 months ago I switched to another provider.

Why?

It wasn’t reliable. Worse, after 2+ years, it wasn’t getting more reliable. I kept hoping, not wanting to go through another multi-week data backup, but I gave up after the latest version stopped working for several weeks and 2 reinstalls didn’t fix the problem.

Mozy’s tech support people are uniformly polite and responsive. But if the product doesn’t want to work they can’t do much about it.

A sample size of 1
I want to stress that this is only 1 machine’s experience with Mozy - not a statistically valid study. I have almost 6 TB of disk on a 12 GB Intel quad-core Mac Pro. I capture hundreds of GB of video, surf a lot of websites, run several data collection utilities, support a GigE LAN and use data intensive peripherals such as a fast sheet-fed scanner and a firewire HD camcorder.

I started using Mozy for Mac when it was in beta. After a slow start I gave v1.0 an endorsement of sorts:

I started working with Mozy’s Mac client a year ago, blogged about it for a couple of months (see “Mozy Mac client beta watch” one and deux). But after many continuing bugs and failures I got depressed and stopped.

Progress was slow. Painfully slow.

New! Improved! Now It Works!
Now I can to report that their client is out in v1.0 and it works.

At the time Mozy for Mac had no competition in the $50/yr backup space.

That was then.
It did work, but as the OS upgrades continued, so did the Mozy client problems. The tech support response tended towards “uninstall and reinstall” although they would sometimes ask for logs. Mozy preserved the online data, so data didn’t need a complete backup.

In the meantime some credible competition has arrived in the form of Backblaze and Crashplan. I’ve tried both and they both worked. Now I’m doing a long-term eval of one as a paying customer.

More on that in a future post.

The Storage Bits take
Mozy’s parent company, Decho, was created by EMC, a $15 billion company with 40,000 employees, that also owns Iomega, VMware and RSA. Plenty of software talent and plenty of money to hire anything they needed.

But they couldn’t get the product to work to my satisfaction even though I installed the latest versions, trashed plist files and more. The same problems kept coming up.

It was the lack of progress to stability that finally made me dump Mozy for Mac. After more than 2 years it wasn’t getting better.

Which meant it was getting worse. And that isn’t acceptable in a back up product.

Comments welcome, of course.

October 25th, 2009

Mac ZFS is dead: RIP.

Posted by Robin Harris @ 11:34 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Software

Tags: NetApp Inc., Apple Macintosh, Sun Microsystems Inc., File System, Apple Inc., Mac ZFS, Current File System, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris

PC file system progress stalled this week with the news on MacOSforge that Apple’s ZFS project is dead.

ZFS Project Shutdown 2009-10-23
The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

ZFS, developed by Sun engineers, is the first 21st century file system. NTFS and HFS+ are firmly rooted in the 1980s. ZFS has a lot of cool features:

• End-to-end data integrity. Current file systems are prone to many problems - ranging from phantom writes to inconsistent error-handling - that mess up your data. The ZFS architecture eliminated them with parent block checksums.
• Pooled storage. Add a drive and it adds extra capacity, not another volume. Less management.
• No need for journaling. Which is one problem Solid State Drives don’t handle well. Get rid of it and SSDs work better.
• Built-in RAID that is as fast as hardware RAID. Get data protection for a lower cost.
• Low-cost snapshot copy. As a copy-on-write system, ZFS can create new snapshots - once an hour, minute or second - with low CPU and storage overhead. Cruise back in time to just before the virus hit, recover, and life is good.

Apple announced in June ‘08 that Snow Leopard server would support ZFS. But things came apart early this year.

What happened?
Jeff Bonwick, ZFS architect, posted Saturday on an earlier quoted comment:

> Apple can currently just take the ZFS CDDL code and incorporate it
> (like they did with DTrace), but it may be that they wanted a “private
> license” from Sun (with appropriate technical support and
> indemnification), and the two entities couldn’t come to mutually
> agreeable terms.

I cannot disclose details, but that is the essence of it.

Jeff

Indemnification?
Sun is being sued by NetApp, a $3B enterprise storage company, claiming that ZFS infringes on NetApp patents. If NetApp won, Apple would find itself in a tough position unless Sun shouldered the financial damage. That’s indemnification.

Sun has made a (IMHO) strong case that NetApp’s patents should be invalidated by prior art. But with all their other problems and the Oracle purchase it was a headache they and Oracle didn’t need.

Where does Apple go from here?
Apple has hired some smart file system engineers and wants to hire more to work on “state-of-the-art file system technologies for Mac OS X.”

But writing new file systems isn’t easy. It takes 5-7 years for a new file system to achieve the maturity needed to support large-scale deployment.

So if Apple is starting from scratch we have a long wait for real innovation to appear. Like Mac OS XII.

What about Microsoft?
Redmond’s file system gurus are well aware of NTFS issues. And under the covers they are making stepwise enhancements to the architecture and implementation.

But as the NTFS and HFS+ architectures age and the pace of storage innovation increases the gap between what is and what could be grows. It’s like putting a 1001 hp Bugatti engine in a Model T: the power is there but you can’t use it.

The Storage Bits take
This kind of cock-up makes me hate software patents - but that’s another post. As long as law allows companies will try to enforce them.

NetApp missed a golden opportunity to raise their visibility in the consumer market by cutting a deal with Apple directly. “NetApp is powering Apple’s advanced storage technologies” would make the company a lot more visible outside the enterprise market.

NetApp is a good company, but they’ve lost their way lately. Note to new CEO Tom Georgens: with EMC moving aggressively into the consumer space you don’t have forever to reposition NetApp for a consumer-driven world.

Steve Jobs doesn’t get storage. Consumers are generating masses of video and photos at an accelerating pace - and they’ll need reliable, available and dirt-easy storage. Lots of it.

Until the Next New Thing in file systems rolls out of Cupertino, Redmond or, maybe, Redwood City, consumers will stuck with too many BSODs, missing and corrupted files and app crashes. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait too many more years.

Comments welcome, of course. Update:There’s now a Google Code page for MacZFS.

October 22nd, 2009

Net neutrality: a faster Internet for all

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:07 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy

Tags: Theory, Content Provider, Comcast Corp., Internet Service Provider, YouTube Inc., Net Neutrality, Hulu, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), Internet, Robin Harris

Want a faster Internet? Then the FCC’s new net neutrality focus is good news for you. Because net neutrality - another name for common carrier - means a faster Internet for all.

This discussion focuses on your local Internet service provider, be it Comcast or AT&T. Content providers already pay to get on the Internet, so the core issue is what your local ISP does.

Gee, that isn’t what ComCast said!
According to Comcast if they can’t charge content providers for priority service they won’t be able to invest to expand capacity. But using game theory we find that offering priority services makes Comcast more profitable while offering you worse service and more expensive for content providers.

Oh, that’s why the telcos doesn’t like net neutrality.

How that works
Let’s say a telco like Comcast strikes a deal with Google to offer 10 Mbit/sec priority service for YouTube. Non-payers, like Hulu, are stuck at 2 Mbit/sec, giving YouTube a 5x advantage.

As YouTube videos are faster, more people watch YouTube, which consumes more network capacity. Hulu slows down along with email, web surfing, video conferencing and all other non-priority apps.

Comcast and YouTube are happy, but all your other services have slowed down. So what does Comcast do when you complain?

Do they invest in more bandwidth so all apps can run at 5 Mbit/sec, reducing YouTube’s advantage to 2x? Or do they simply go to other app providers and sell them “priority” service?

The latter will generate more revenue for Comcast and less performance for the remaining Internet services. Good for Comcast; bad for content providers and bad for you.

How net neutrality works
Under net neutrality your service provider only gets revenue from you, the customer. Your ISP has a clear goal: keep you buying.

Now the ISP is incented to invest in higher quality service or a competitor may come in with a better deal. The free market at work!

In the real world
Game theory is well and good, but does the ISP market really play out this way? In Japan, where net neutrality is the rule, ISP compete fiercely to offer the best service. Japan has had download speeds in excess of 100 Mbit/sec for the last 5 years, with lower prices than we have in the US.

That is only a dream for us in the US, the country that invented the Internet. What’s wrong with this picture?

The Storage Bits take
Aligning private incentives to serve the public good is why we have a government empowered to set rules. When the rules are set wrong or not enforced - as the last 25 years of financial de-regulation has disastrously proved - almost all of us end up worse off.

The few who benefit, be they Wall Street i-bankers, MRI-owning doctors or duopolistic telcos, argue for their “right” to damage the rest of us. But just as our military sacrifices to defend our nation and everyone pays taxes, the privileged can sacrifice some profit potential for the greater good.

As game theory demonstrates, America as a whole will be better off with net neutrality, when ISPs focus on serving customers instead of chiseling money from content providers. Free markets work best when the incentives are aligned to create lasting wealth for us all.

Comments welcome, of course. I’ve drawn heavily from the work of Professors Hsing Kenneth Cheng, Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay and Hong Guo. Here is a brief, non-technical introduction to their work. Serious econ gearheads will like their recent 55 page, algebra-heavy paper The Debate on Net Neutrality: A Policy Perspective.

See also: FCC unanimously approves next steps toward Net Neutrality

October 11th, 2009

Optical storage: RIP

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:51 pm

Categories: Disk drives, Infrastructure

Tags: Hard Drive, Disk, Capacity, Storage, Blu-ray, BD, TDK, Robin Harris

TDK recently demo’d an impressive technical achievement: a 10 layer 320 GB optical disk - using standard Blu-ray (BD) drive technology.

Too bad it will never be a commercial success. Optical is at the end of the line.

Why do formats die?
When their reliability, capacity, performance, density and cost aren’t competitive. Which is where optical is now - even 320 GB optical.

You probably don’t remember punched paper tape - all the rage in the 60s and early 70s - but it was popular on 16 bit minicomputers back when 4k of RAM was respectable and 64k unaffordable. It was limited to a few dozen KB of capacity and not reliable in long-term use, so when 240KB 8” floppies arrived in 1973 paper tape was toast.

But floppies couldn’t keep up with the growth of applications and data sets. The 100 MB Zip drive was insanely popular when introduced in 1994, but by 1999 the format was on the way out thanks to cheaper and more capacious CD-R drives.

Despite heroic efforts to increase removable magnetic disk capacities - culminating in 2001 with the 5.7 GB Orb drive - today removable magnetic disk media is dead, killed by cheaper optical and more convenient flash media. Just like magnetic killed paper.

Removable: backup and transfer
Removable media is good for 2 things: data backup and data transfer. Tape dominates removable media backup today with capacities rivaling the largest disks.

Thumb drives long ago replaced floppies for smaller file transfers - “sneakernet” - with external hard drives handling large capacities. With 1 TB 2.5” hard drives, even a writeable 50 GB Blu-ray (BD-R) can’t compete with a small hard drive in transfer speed or capacity.

TDK’s problem
Which gets us to the 10x Blu-ray problem: even if they started selling it there’s no market. Why?

• Capacity. Successful optical media capacities have been competitive with current disks - CD-ROM in the early 90s; DVD-R in the early 2000s. Multi-layer Blu-ray will never be more than a small fraction of hard drive capacities.
• Performance. 24x Blu-ray transfer rates are half that of today’s disks. And as capacities increase, disks get faster. Not so with Blu-ray: 48x, if it happens, will be the outer limit.
• Reliability. Early adopters report that BD burner disks often don’t play on commercial players. That will get fixed, but multi-layer DB-R will have to solve it again.
• Density. Managing a single piece of media is much simpler than managing 6 or 10. Hard drive density makes them much more convenient.
• Cost. BD-playing DVD drives haven’t been popular on PCs, and BD burners are way more expensive, as is the media. A FireWire or USB hard drive can be had for less than $100, has much faster access times, higher capacity and faster data transfer. With volume BD-R prices will come down - but where will the volume come from?

Multi-layer BD-R has advantages, especially if current BD players can be updated to use it. But there is no commercial justification for distributing content on 320 GB optical disks and there isn’t likely to be one.

Hollywood has a real chance to make 3D work, but 3D HD movies will fit fine on BD. Put a 3D “Band of Brothers” on a single disk? OK, but really, getting up every 50 minutes to change disks isn’t so hard, is it?

The Storage Bits take
New optical formats will get introduced - like 750 MB Zip drives and 5.7 GB Orb drives did - but they’ll stumble around the fringes of consumer acceptance before a quiet death. Many of the same forces that are killing BD - downloading, upconverting, cost - are closing in on optical media in general.

DVDs will be around for years - even as CD-Rs still are - but the focus is shifting to online storage and local disks. The industry has yet to crack the code on massive home disk storage, but that day is coming.

You’ll buy HD 3D content online, download it, store it in your digital library, and watch it when and where you want. If your house floods your content suppliers will let you download again. Who needs the hassle to burn disks?

The one remaining piece is for hard drive vendors to get serious about building archive-quality hard disks. I love their technology, but they aren’t the most forward looking group.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Anyone want to buy a vintage USB Zip drive?

September 1st, 2009

Build a RAID 6 array for $100/TB

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:36 am

Categories: Disk drives, Infrastructure, RAID, Software

Tags: RAID, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris

Imagine storage that didn’t cost much more than bare drives. High density storage with RAID 6 - double-fault - protection, reasonable bandwidth and web-friendly HTTPS access.

And really, really cheap.

Not your enterprise’s RAID array
Raw disk cost is only 5-10% of an enterprise RAID system’s cost. The rest goes for corporate jets, sales commissions, tradeshows, sheetmetal, 2 Intel x86 mobos, obscene profits and some pale and blinking engineers in a windowless lab who make it work.

But what if you don’t want 4-color brochures or the barely-clad booth babes. What if you just want cheap economical and reliable storage?

You aren’t running the global financial system - what’s left of it anyway - or a 500 person call center. But you want enough redundancy so it will stay up until morning.

Meet the Storage Pod
You aren’t the only one. Backblaze, a new online backup provider, designed the Storage Pod for their own use and are sharing it with everyone. They aren’t selling it - that’s where the build comes from - so they aren’t trying to get rich off you.

Here’s what it looks like:

Here’s an exploded diagram with a simplified BOM:

And then there’s the (free) software. 64-bit Debian Linux, IBM’s open source JFS file system and HTTPS access. Simply stated each file gets a URL. Put a web server in front of it and serve the world - or just your home.

The Storage Bits take
Many applications just need a big bucket that doesn’t cost $5,000/TB. This is it.

You can build it yourself, but it is probably more complex than a high-end gamer system. Download the 3D SolidWorks files and have Protocase build you 1 or 500 of the boxes.

But the density is good, the performance is reasonable, the availability is decent and the price is right. This is a DC-3, not a 747. It is all you need for the right application.

And at $100/TB you can mirror all your data 2 or 3 or 4 times if you need more availability - and still be way less than half the cost of name brand arrays. Get the details from the Backblaze blog.

Comments welcome, of course. BTW, I’m trying out their free trial Mac online backup - at least one of the founders worked at Apple - and I’ll let you know how it goes. I don’t have a business relationship with them either, in case you’re wondering.

August 10th, 2009

Fed's RFIDiocy pwnd at DefCon

Posted by Robin Harris @ 2:17 am

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy, Security

Tags: Federal Reserve Board, RFID, Wireless And Mobility, Security, Biometrics, Robin Harris

NSA spooks gather for a colleague’s retirement party at a bar. What they don’t know is that an RFID scanner is picking them out - and a wireless Bluetooth webcam is taking their picture.

Could that really happen? It already did.

The Feds got a taste of the real world risks of RFID passports and IDs at DefCon, the annual hacker conference. According to Wired:

. . . federal agents at the conference got a scare on Friday when they were told they might have been caught in the sights of an RFID reader.

The reader, connected to a web camera, sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks as they passed a table where the equipment was stationed in full view.

RFIDiots
The goal at DefCon was awareness, not crime. But as organized tech mobs grow it won’t be long before crime - or terrorism - exploits the gaping security holes in RFID.

Chris Paget, the researcher who demo’d drive-by scanning early this year

. . . will be releasing a $50 kit at the end of August that will make reading 125-kHz RFID chips — the kind embedded in employee access cards — trivial. It will include open source software for reading, storing and re-transmitting card data and will also include a software tool to decode the RFID encryption used in car keys for Toyota, BMW and Lexus models. This would allow an attacker to scan an unsuspecting car-owner’s key, decrypt the data and open the car.

RFID Bad Day: you get fired because a bunch of office equipment went missing after someone with your ID entered the office at 1 AM. And when you go to your car, it isn’t there.

Cloning on the fly
Adam Laurie, another researcher and author of the RFIDiot (RFID I/O tool), an open source python library, said

It takes a few milliseconds to read [a chip] and, depending on what equipment I’ve got, doing the cloning can take a minute. I could literally do it on the fly.

Mr. Paget even demo’d a wired doorframe that collects RFID data as people walk through it. Handy, eh?

The Storage Bits take
Perhaps now that federal security gurus have been pwnd the RFID threat will get some serious attention. Like, maybe this isn’t such a great idea, attention.

Maybe that will be enough to start the wheels turning, but with hundreds of millions of dollars already spent on this stupidity, I’m afraid that someone, somewhere, will have to die before citizens figure out that this is a real, increasing and unnecessary risk.

The technology for reading, hacking and cloning RFID tags will only get better. The mass production machinery behind the tags can’t keep up with the security threats.

The time to end this nonsense is now. There are perfectly usable non-RF storage technologies - like 3D barcodes - that can safely store data in hard to crack, hard to hack formats.

Comments welcome, of course.

July 31st, 2009

Telcos: stop wasting our time & money!

Posted by Robin Harris @ 1:30 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Marketing

Tags: Message, Telecommunications Company, Verizon Communications Inc., David Pogue, Telecom & Utilities, Telecommunications, Robin Harris

The NYTimes’ David Pogue suggests that its time for the telcos to give up their lucrative and time wasting instructions:

At the tone, please record your message. When you have finished recording, you may hang up, or press 1 for more options. To leave a callback number, press 5.

Since the advent of answering machines 30 years ago, is there anyone in America who doesn’t know how to leave a message after the beep? Maybe your cousin Tarzan, just in from the Congo, but he’ll get it after a couple of tries.

Have you ever left a call back number? Me neither. With Caller ID you either don’t need to or you put it in the message.

How about a numeric page? Who uses pagers anymore?

Delivery options? “Yeah, can you send a pizza with that? Pepperoni, extra cheese.”

Thank goodness they tell us to hang up after we’ve finished. In other countries, where telcos are government run, they don’t - and people wander around all day, cellphones on their ears, wondering what to do next.

It’s the money, stupid. YOUR money.
As David points out:

If Verizon’s 70 million customers leave or check messages twice a weekday, Verizon rakes in about $620 million a year. That’s your money. And your time: three hours of your time a year. . . .

That probably covers their annual lobbying budget at the Ebay on the Potomac and all the little state Ebays from Albany to Austin to Sacramento. You think crushing net neutrality comes cheap?

David has helpfully provided a list of links where you can complain.
Verizon: Post a complaint here.
* AT&T: Send e-mail to: customerissues@attnews.us.
* Sprint: Post a complaint here
* T-Mobile: Post a complaint here.

Keep it clean and on point: this needs to stop, NOW!

The Storage Bits take
If there is anyone left in America who believes that free markets always respond to customers and not their corporate overlords, please think about this the next time you’re listening to the “beep” message:

The telcos have done this deliberately to drive up their sales, never mind the inconvenience and cost to consumers. Corporations act on their own interests, not yours. If those interests happen to be congruent, oh joy. If not, you lose.

Courteous comments welcome, of course.

July 29th, 2009

Dead-Finger Tech: Panasonic HD front projector

Posted by Robin Harris @ 11:43 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Marketing

Tags: Panasonic, Movie, Tirion, Projectors, Hardware, Components, Robin Harris

I like my toys. Dual monitors on a quad-core, 12 GB Mac Pro. Blackmagic Intensity Pro HDMI capture card. 4 TB of local disk, including my favorite, a 300 GB WD 10k Velociraptor system disk. Logitech Trackman Wheel and a Microsoft Natural Keyboard Elite.

Canon HV20 and Kodak Zi6 HD camcorders. Final Cut Studio and Shake. External 4 drive eSATA RAID. Contour Shuttle Pro2. Lexar Professional card reader. iSight Firewire webcam.

Scansnap sheet-fed scanner. Olympus LS-10 digital audio recorder. Microphones. iPhone, natch. Etymotic earphones. Wacom tablet. Gitzo carbon fiber tripod with Manfrotto fluid head. Teleprompter.

80mm rich-field refractor with 2″ eyepiece and star diagonal. 10×40 binoculars. Tirion’s Sky Atlas 2000 and Vehrenberg’s Atlas of Deep Sky Splendors. A dark sky Arizona mountain town to enjoy them in.

Oppo Digital DVD and Sony Blu-ray players. Outlaw Audio receiver. Dynaudio speakers. Home-built 120″ screen. 1,000 DVDs. No cable, no landline.

Did I mention I like my toys?

And the winner is . . .
I like them all and love several of them. But my dead-finger tech choice is one I never would have guessed a year ago: my Panasonic PT-AX-200U front projector.

The picture quality is superb - as good as the local movie theater if memory serves. Dozens of people have come over for the Friday night movie and all have been impressed.

Size matters
It isn’t just the quality though - it is the sheer size of the screen. My prior 50″ plasma was excellent, but I see them now and they just seem puny.

I don’t think I could go back to a small screen. Even a 50″ big screen.

The downsides
It isn’t perfect, but the negatives don’t affect me as much as they might others.

• Dark room. Movies don’t start until it is late twilight because brightness kills the theater experience for me. No daylight saving time in Arizona, so movies start at 8 pm even in June. The picture is watchable with ambient light, but I want the movie theater experience. If you can’t darken the room it may not be for you.
• Costly lamp replacement. The powerful lamp that gives the 2000 lumen beam is only expected to last 2000 hours. Some get less. At $350 for a replacement it isn’t cheap - especially since the street price for the projector is only $1k.
• Size and weight. At 10 lbs. it isn’t light, nor is it small except when compared to a TV. But it is a lot greener.

The Storage Bits take
How we interact with our stored data is almost as important as the data itself. A large, high-quality HD image makes it easy and enjoyable to interact with video content.

In the latest James Bond movie, MI6 is equipped with table and wall-sized touch screens. They have the right idea. Size matters.

Perhaps my next monitor will be a 30 incher.

Comments welcome, of course. BTW, I bought it. Panasonic markets them through their business division, not home entertainment, because at $1,000 they are cheaper and bigger than most displays.

July 19th, 2009

Elvis, your e-passport is ready!

Posted by Robin Harris @ 10:42 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy, Security

Tags: E-passport, Passport, Chip, Hacker, E-passport Chip Business, RFID, Wireless And Mobility, Security, Biometrics, Robin Harris

E-passports not only threaten your personal safety traveling, the RFID chips are easy to clone and fake. How easy? Here’s the picture of Elvis Presley’s e-passport:

The photo is taken from a passport scanner at a Dutch airport - no alarms or errors. But let’s look on the bright side: some salesman is making millions and some former bureaucrats have cushy gigs with RFID consultants.

Feel better now?

The Hacker’s Choice, that gen’d up the Elvis passport chip, tells you how to do it. The fake e-passport chip business is just starting: get in on the ground floor!

But wait: it gets better!
In theory the RFID passports improve security - uh-huh - and are faster to process. The first is laughable; the second not much better. Why?

The e-passport still has to be opened to confirm that what the chips says is also what the printed passport says. How is that faster?

What is faster are the new RFID chipped ID cards for border crossings: they broadcast their unencrypted info for 10 meters or more. Wow!

And you know the nifty key Speed Pass that buys gas? They’ve been hacked too.

But for the larcenous nothing beats RFID credit cards. They can be hacked for $8 from a foot or more away.

The Storage Bits take
RFID are great for their original application: tracking goods in a warehouse. But they are horribly insecure for financial and identity applications.

There may be some workarounds. If the immigration agent’s terminal queried a central database that brought up a 2nd photo not on the passport, then we could be fairly certain that it wasn’t a forgery.

Another alternative: optical - not radio - data storage and encryption. A bar code scanner on a microscope could read tiny barcodes embedded in your photo - a concept not unlike the Dataglyphs developed at Xerox PARC.

The larger point is that RFID passports, drivers licenses, credit cards and other identity documents are a Bad Idea. We KNOW that techno-criminals are ripping off people on the web. Why won’t these same people move on to RFID when the economics make sense?

And when there are hundreds of millions RFID documents circulating, we won’t be able to issue a patch and fix the hole in a few weeks. No, these holes will be open for years. Good luck with that.

Comments welcome, of course. Want another view? The Economist magazine offers Why chips in passports and ID cards are a stupid idea. OK, it isn’t so different, but worth a read.

July 4th, 2009

Modern threats to American liberty

Posted by Robin Harris @ 4:55 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Public policy, Security

Tags: Withdrawal, Tender, Transportation Security Administration, ATM, Storage, Internet, Networking, Hardware, Robin Harris

Cash, currency and coins, is a store of value. In the US, “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” Carry too much of it though and you are marked for suspicion (per the Wall Street Journal]:

Steven Bierfeldt, treasurer for the Campaign for Liberty, a political organization launched from Ron Paul’s presidential run, was detained at the St. Louis airport because he was carrying $4,700 in a lock box. . . . TSA screeners quizzed him about the cash, . . . then summoned local police and threatened him with arrest because he responded to their questions with a question of his own: What were his rights and could TSA legally require him to answer?

How about former Senator Bob Dole who habitually carried a wad of $100 bills? When federal regulators spotted his large cash withdrawals his bank filed “suspicious activity reports” questioning whether he might have violated federal laws against money laundering.

Multi-millionaire New York Governor Elliot Spitzer’s large cash withdrawals led a shadowy anti-corruption unit to his use of a prostitute - and to his resignation. As if a multi-millionaire is a likely candidate for money-laundering or bribery - but he did anger a lot of bankers. Hmm-m.

As money launderers see automated cash-tracking programs follow ever smaller sums, they open more accounts and make even smaller cash transactions. Which brings the breath of suspicion closer to all of us.

Where does it stop?

Not legal tender
Oh, and you know those lines about “legal tender for all debts, public and private” on our currency? Scratch that.

The Denver-area E-470 toll road is going entirely cashless - requiring drivers to use transponders - or pay higher fees when a bill arrives in the mail. That follows the Dallas-area President George Bush Turnpike’s earlier abandonment of a cash lane.

Another thought: divorce lawyers and others are accessing electronic toll road records. It isn’t just the Internet where you have no privacy.

California has anonymous FasTrak accounts. Top it up with cash - oops! you’re toast, buddy! - and away you go.

The Storage Bits take
As we enjoy this 4th of July, where Tom Jefferson once lauded those “. . . for opposing with manly firmness. . . .” invasions on the right of the people, let us remember that many Americans would not sign a petition with the text of the Bill of Rights. Too radical.

Your laptop can be seized for no reason when entering the US and its contents freely searched for - well, anything. Just as carrying a large amount of cash is now suspicious, a 64 GB thumb drive could soon make you a suspect.

Social totalitarians want to control our bodies and our lives, invading doctor’s offices, churches, ATMs and toll booths. Cheap massive storage makes it possible. Only patriotic Americans - liberal and conservative - insisting on their rights stand in the way.

It would be nice if social totalitarians on the Supreme Court would take to heart the original intent of the 9th Amendment:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by corporations the people.

In the meantime, for Steven Bierfeldt, who resisted the TSA’s illegal questioning, and the ACLU and others who defended him, 3 cheers.

Courteous comments welcome, of course. Update: A reader wrote in to ask why I had included a struck-out word in the 9th Amendment. Was it an accident or ??? My response:

“Corporations - legally, immortal “persons” capable of amassing great wealth and power - were not part of the American landscape in 1776 or in 1789. We as a people have ceded vast powers to corporations with very little debate on their role in American life. That is, in my view, a threat to liberty almost as grave as that presented by an unaccountable government.” End update.