Biometrics Boom
WaPo – This will not play out well:
“When you’re talking about credentialing the federal workforce and contractors, you’re talking about maybe 10 million people. When you’re talking first responders, you’re at 20, 30 or 40 million people,” said Thomas Greco, a vice president at Herndon-based Cybertrust Inc. “But when you’re talking credentialing all registered drivers in the United States, you’re up to hundreds of millions of people. Nobody is losing sight of that.”
Even in the most competant hands this can spiral out of control – but in a large and very inefficient bureaucracy this is more than likely. The system will likely prove to be a nuisance (the first generation tech never operates at 100%) and will be cracked (the bad guys are smarter than the good guys because they are faster). These will cause the feedback loops to compound upon themselves – the systems not working so we will try to fix it, repeatedly – to a point where it ossifies into something able to be governed by a gigantic bureaucracy. A primary indicator- the background check system is utterly backlogged but remains a vital component of getting one of the new ID’s.
An inflexible ID system created and enforced by linear thinkers treating an open subsystem (part of the global platform) as a closed one is an absolute nogo – and a major part of the nation state’s doom loop.
$9.2 Billion on Secrecy
UPI – According to the Information Security Oversight Office the US Government spent $9.2 Billion on attempting to keep information secret –
That represents a 13 percent rise over the previous year, and the soaring expense fell disproportionately on the private sector, where the costs to government contractors and other companies of meeting government-mandated security standards nearly doubled.
While this figure includes…
…the direct costs of deciding which information should be classified, and all the associated expenditure — the system of personnel clearances, office security systems, special computer networks and other facilities — incurred by both the government and industry…
…it doesn’t include the CIA.
Thanks Mark
Mark Safranski (better known as Zenpundit) has some kind words for me. Mark provides quality writing on a variety of topics and serves as a great hub to find more great sites.
Minority Report Interface
Very very cool technology. (10 minute youtube video about a great working prototype of the interface seen in the movie.) For some reason it almost seems reminscent of GO Corp. way back in the early 90s. Hopefully not.
Malware Costs 7.8 Billion
Newsfactor – I maintain my own machines and many of those of people I’m close to. This number is probably not all that off target.
Consumers paid as much $7.8 billion over two years to repair or replace computers that got infected with viruses and spyware, a Consumer Reports survey found.
That figure was down from a similar survey a year ago. Still, it suggests that people are paying large sums to cope with the flood of malicious viruses and other programs that can slow computers or render them inoperable.
It’s gotten so bad recently that I’ve actively considered moving over to a non-Intel Apple; I’m not that attached to Windows.