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The New York Times has an article today on the pros and cons of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) being attached to products in supply chains and in stores. A couple of highlights.
Tags with the technology known as radio frequency identification, or R.F.I.D., transmit a digital response when contacted by radio signals from scanning devices. Older versions of the technology have been around for decades, but now major manufacturers and retailers and the Defense Department are pushing to speed the development of a new version that could be read by scanners anywhere in the world, making it cheaper and more efficient to track the flow of goods from global suppliers to consumers.
The Defense Department expects to issue a statement in the next few days calling on suppliers to adopt the new version of the technology by 2005. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. made a similar announcement in July when it said it was requiring its top 100 suppliers to place tags with the new technology on cartons and pallets shipped to its stores by the end of 2004.
The Department of Defence. A government mandate for doing business with that part of the government. One doesn’t have to be cynical, here. There are obvious reasons why the DoD needs and wants this technology that have nothing to do with taking away people’s privacy. (It simply allows them to run their logistics better, and potentially to keep track of what is going on on a battlefield). However, these are not the sorts of people I expect to want to put protections in place that safeguard my privacy, either.
Ms. Albrecht and other critics say that companies and government agencies will be able to monitor what people read or where they assemble from radio tags embedded in their books or woven into clothing. Unlike bar codes, which cannot be scanned unless a laser has a direct line of sight to them, the radio tags can be read through walls, and multiple tags can be read in an instant.
“R.F.I.D. certainly has value in the supply chain and in inventory management,” said Beth Given, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. But she added that “there are so many potential issues once it gets beyond the point of sale that consumer protections need to be written into law.”
And thus we once again hit the usual quandry. There are potential benefits, very real ones, in adopting these sorts of technologies. And yet the privacy and surveillance implications are such that if we adopt them we give up a lot of privacy and hand the information to governments and large organisations almost automatically. Once again, what needs to be said is that it is possible to design such technologies so that the benefits are there and the privacy violations are not, or at least so that the privacy violations are transparent and we are informed when they are happening. But to build such safeguards in, these issues have to be discussed at the very beginning, by which I mean right now. And on the whole it isn’t happening. Do I actually expect to see such safeguards put in place. Well, to tell the truth, no.
(Link via slashdot).
ZDNet UK reports the Taiwan government has completed the distribution of 22 million Java-based ID cards to its citizens, in one of Asia’s largest deployments of such cards. The country’s Bureau of National Health Insurance (BNHI) adopted US-based Sun Microsystems’ Java card technology primarily to prevent identity theft, according to a statement from the computing firm.
Each card contains a microprocessor with 32 kilobytes of memory that allows data such as allergy information, emergency contact numbers, medication, and personal insurance to be stored. Daniel Yu, Sun Microsystems Greater China vice president of global sales operations said:
Java card technology allows card issuers to modify the services and applications on the card as the user’s needs change, without incurring additional costs to replace the card.
The distribution of the 22 million health cards started in July last year to replace its original paper-based system was expected to finish by May this year. The cards cost around $2 (£1.21) each.
In an even larger scheme in Thailand, the government plans to issue a Java-based national ID card to all 61 million citizens, according to a report in the Bangkok Post. The card will contain biometric identification, as well as insurance, tax and welfare benefit information. The scheme is expected to be launched later this year.
You just could not make this stuff up. Schools that won’t tell parents their kids have lice because it will hurt their feelings. Fraternities run through re-education camp equivalents for theme parties and such some thin-skinned zealot found offensive. Towns councils threatening to fine parents for allowing their children to play with toy guns… and even advising against allowing them to play in camo-gear. Schools that ban superhero costumes. The list just goes on and on.
It is time for an all out anti-idiot offensive. Parents in idiot-enclave towns and students in moron-managed colleges must set out consciously to seek and destroy the legitimacy of the PC army. No one can take a laughingstock seriously, so we must laugh at them and share the laughter with our friends, neighbors and classmates.
Public humiliation is a powerful weapon and it is easy to make fools of these people. They have already done the hard work for you.
Harsh satire and extreme exaggeration work nicely. I once ran a guerilla theatre troop in Pittsburgh. We would appear suddenly at an appointed location in downtown or on campus with costume, leaflets and a prepared “theatrical production”. Our theatrical shock tactics were timed such we’d be on our way before anyone thought about it.
It worked well. I only got kicked in the arse once.
You will find a lot of the details on PC gone mad referenced here.
There are those who think the United Nations does a good job of “nation building”. I’m among those who think otherwise and I’m happy to see there are those in “high places” who agree with me:
When foreigners come in with their international solutions to local problems it can create a dependency. For example East Timor is one of the poorest countries in Asia yet the capital is now one of the most expensive cities in Asia, local restaurants are out of reach for most the Timorees and cater to international workers who are paid probably something like 200 times the local average local wage. At the cities main supermarket prices are reportedly on a power with London and New York or take Kosovo a driver shuttling international workers around the capital earns 10 times the salary of the University professor, 4 years after the war the United Nations still run Kosovo by executive fiat. Decisions made by the elected local parliament are invalid without the signature of a U.N. Administrator and still to this day Kosovo ministers have U.N. overseers with the power to approve or disapprove their decisions. Now that’s just a different approach I’m not saying that maybe okay for Kosovo but my interest is to see if we can’t do it in a somewhat different way. Our objective is to encourage Iraqi independence by giving Iraqis more and more responsibility over time for the security and governance of their country.
I find myself in violent agreement with SecDef Rumsfeld yet again.
I believe this is not the last story of this sort we will see coming out of Brussels:
[Robert McCoy] has worked for the European Union for more than 30 years. His friends regard him as an upright and loyal bureaucrat, keen to uphold the EU’s name against its critics, whether in Brussels or back home in Britain.
Yet Robert McCoy must steel himself before he walks the corridors of his own EU institution. If he is lucky, senior colleagues at the glass and concrete headquarters of the Committee of the Regions – a Brussels talking-shop for local government representatives, set up under the Maastricht Treaty – merely ignore him, turning their heads ostentatiously as he passes.
If not, he may be on the receiving end of abuse. “Gestapo! Gestapo!” angry fellow workers once taunted him. One manager spat on the floor as he walked by, friends say.
As the Telegraph reports Mr McCoy’s offence – as it was apparently regarded by some EU staff and politicians – was to stumble upon, investigate and then seek to correct a series of financial irregularities within the Committee of the Regions (CoR), whose annual budget is €38 million (£27 million).
Last week, Romano Prodi and Neil Kinnock insisted that since EU commissioners were ignorant of Eurostat’s problems until this year, they could not be held responsible for what happened earlier. The frauds, and the culture that permitted them, were a one-off and had long since ended, Mr Prodi assured MEPs during a tense closed-door meeting in Strasbourg on Thursday.
In a devastating letter to a senior MEP, seen by The Telegraph, Mr McCoy details his three-year campaign to stamp out suspected fraud within the CoR, and his vain attempts to persuade senior managers to summon outside expertise to investigate the problems.
His inside account, and documents obtained by members of the European Parliament’s budgetary control committee, reveals an approach by some EU officials which helps explain how at least ?3 million (£2 million) could disappear from the coffers of an organisation like Eurostat without anyone noticing – or complaining.
I felt that I had repeatedly hit a brick wall in my efforts to do my job. I have nowhere else to turn, having exhausted all administrative and political avenues available to me within the CoR.
After Mr McCoy sought the official attendance sheets to make a spot check on the signatures, the Secretary General angrily rebuked him. “Robert, I am very displeased with this affair,” Mr Falcone wrote in an e-mail which has circulated among MEPs. “The Financial Controller is not the police.” One can only speculate why the officials in charge reacted with hostility rather than reward his for a job well done. McCoy comments:
We now know that there have been huge problems at Eurostat over many years, caused by the same kind of culture that I have encountered at the CoR. Who knows how many other EU institutions are similarly affected?
A rather late and rude awakening for Mr McCoy. The rot goes to the heart of the institution, there can be no perestroika.
David Carr got the general gist of news today in his post on Goodfellas government and their audacity to charge your for wanting to do things as well as for not wanting to do them anymore because the government made them too expensive. Apart from drafting regulations in the style ‘damned if you do, damn if you don’t’, the anal bureaucratic busybodies have been, well, busy putting the local council taxes up.
The council tax is the amount local governments are allowed to raise on top of the ‘grants’ (i.e. taxpayers money) they receive from the central government. The modern and fair NuLabour government has for the last five years increased the council tax by between 3 and 4 percent above the rate of inflation. It has also ‘redistributed wealth’ away from the South of England to the North, where most Labour supporters reside. The South may be richer than the North but its local governments are no less greedy and are making up the ‘shortfall’ by increasing taxed by about 15 percent.
This is leaving many pensioners on the verge of poverty and they are getting angry. Tony Fowle does not look much like a revolutionary, more like the kind of grandfather that he actually is: a retired finance manager with a love of steam railways, an ex-National Serviceman who proudly wears his RAF tie. Yet this week he is organising a march in Bornemouth where the Labour Party’s annual conference is taking place:
If the Government doesn’t listen, there’s going to be a mass rebellion. In 1994 my council tax bill was £507.50. Now it’s £1,166.30. I’ve had enough. Every pensioner has had enough. Yes, I might withhold payment. Yes, I’m prepared to go to court. I’m fighting for those applying for benefits because they can’t afford these council tax hikes. I am a law-abiding citizen. I have never disobeyed anybody in my life. It is really upsetting me that these kind of actions are needed now.
Leaving aside our views on government taxation and its distribution, local or otherwise, this is portentous. The British are not a protesting people and the fact that large number of pensioners across the country are willing to engage in civil disobedience is verging on absurd. Imagine your favourite auntie dragging herself away from her tea doilies in order to march in protest to the government…
Nevertheless, this is the generation that remembers the times when collective effort meant something and I just hope they will mobilise with the same determination they had some 50 years ago.
Art criticism is something about which I only rarely touch on when something particularly interests me. But in today’s Sunday Telegraph (print version only), Ian Hislop has written an interesting piece called Now I’ll be labelled a pervert on how playwright Andrew Lloyd Webber has been scorned and derided by the British ArtCrit set because he has the temerity to not just collect Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, but to actually exhibit them to the public.
Having consented to display his collection at the Royal Academy last week, Webber was duly given a good kicking by the critics, who lined up rubbish both the pictures and their owner. The pieces ranged from the hysterical, in the case of Brian Sewell1, to the merely critical, in the case of the critic of this newspaper.
[…]
What appears to really annoy a lot of the critics is the literalism of the paintings: the idea that there is a story or a message, or even something as vulgar as a moral in the artwork, rather than just an impression or a mood or an emotion. Brian Sewell says that Webber has “a literal eye” and that this “has nothing to do with Art”. Nothing at all? This seems rather harsh
1= free registration required
And for me, therein lies the rub. Most art critics hate literal art because literal art can be understood by anyone who takes the time to learn a bit about the context within which the art was created. Now I am not someone who thinks ‘modern art’ is an oxymoron but it is true than much of what passes for art these days is so obscure that it requires an ArtCrit, such as Sewell or Saatchi, to give it some meaning. I guess what I am really saying is that much of what the likes of Tracy Emin does is so devoid of intrinsic meaning that only a professional arbiter of artistic values and taste can tell us poor muggles what the hell it means. No wonder art critics love ‘cutting edge’ modern art!
And now for some art you might be able to figure out for yourself…
“Business bad? fuck you, pay me. Oh, you had a fire? fuck you, pay me. Place got hit by lightning, huh? fuck you, pay me!”
Some of our officials have become so self-important that they not only charge through the nose for imposing their regulations upon us, they even want to charge those who can no longer afford their attentions. Last year I reported on the Scottish care home which, when it was forced to close by the cost of regulations imposed by social services, then received a bill for £510 from the same department for giving the owner permission to go out of business.
A similar problem has been presented to John Swain, whose metal finishing firm Anopol employs 30 people in Birmingham. Some years ago, as a service to other metal finishing companies who used his chemicals, he offered to accept their used chemicals back for storage in holding tanks and safe, environmentally-responsible disposal. Under EC directive 91/156, however, he then had to acquire a waste management licence, for which he had to pay the Environment Agency £3,897 a year.
This helped to make Mr Swain’s service uneconomical, so he told the agency that he wished to surrender his licence. He would continue to use the tanks for his own waste chemicals, but could no longer assist his customers. The agency sent him an eight-page questionnaire and a bill for £2,427 as a “surrender fee”.
This isn’t ‘government’, it’s Goodfellas!
Today’s entry from Mark Steyn surveys the incompetence and general fecklessness of big gubmint and the quasigovernmental NGOs, in terms to warm any libertarian’s heart.
One of the reasons I’m in favor of small government is because there’s hardly anything the government doesn’t do worse than anybody else who wants to give it a go. Usually when I make this observation, I’m thinking of, say, Britain’s late unlamented nationalized car industry. But when the government of a G7 nation can’t run a small marijuana sideline as well as a college student with a window box, that seems to set an entirely new standard for official underperformance. Big government goes to pot, in every sense.
. . .
[E]very do-gooding cause eventually floats free of whatever good it was trying to do and becomes a self-perpetuating business all of its own. The racism industry, for example, is now so large and lucrative and employs so many highly remunerated people from the Rev. Jesse Jackson down that it has a far greater interest than the Klu Klux Klan in maintaining racism.
. . .
The humanitarian touring circuit is now the oldest established permanent floating crap game. Regions such as West Africa, where there’s no pretense anything will ever get better, or the Balkans, which are maintained by the U.N. as the global equivalent of a slum housing project, suit the aid agencies perfectly: There’s never not a need for them. But in Iraq they’ve decided they’re not interested in staying to see the electric grid back up to capacity and the water system improved if it’s an American administration at the helm. The Big Consciences have made a political decision: that it’s not in their interest for the Bush crowd to succeed, and that calculation outweighs any concern they might have for the Iraqi people.
Nothing to argue with there, but go read the whole thing.
With that, I am off for a week or so to hunt for the noble mule deer in the wilds of southern Wyoming. Complete written report on my return.
Italy has just had a major blackout.
Let’s see now… USA, UK, Italy… I wonder if Spain has had one yet? Each blackout has a prosaic explanation, but taken all at once this rash of failures flags these blackouts unusual in a statistical sense if nought else.
You cannot train an army over night. You certainly cannot instantly ingrain alien concepts like “human rights” into rebuilt remnants of Iraq’s security forces. It takes time but we are now seeing results.
Iraq’s own forces are now controlling the Iran-Iraq border. Congratulations to them, and congratulations to the fine people who trained them.
With solid foundations in place, we will now be seeing Iraqi’s take over their own security at an accelerating pace.
I’m sure we’ve got a few closet Martians out there. You know who you are. Last month during the opposition were you standing out in the back garden every night staring up at that bright red dot with something akin to homesickness? Then have I got the t-shirt for you! This new fashion delight from Kim Poor is just the ticket!
Also, Kim’s a great guy and has a lot of other fine space art on sale. It’s worth a click or two just to see the artwork.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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