e-Passport has limited life

As my readers know, I don't much like e-Passports. I don't understand what their benefit is supposed to be, and I certainly don't want people scanning my passport remotely, without my knowing. Today it has been revealed that the chip in the passport (10-year validity) has only a 2-year life. An article in The Register also claims the chip is too small to hold the necessary data and operating system to support two fingerprints. What a surprise.

WriteToMyBlog revisited

Back in October I mentioned WriteToMyBlog. I didn't try out for very long as I moved my blog to the new (Beta) version of Blogger which wasn't supported. However, WriteToMyBlog has been substantially updated and now supports the new Blogger so I thought I'd give it a try.

The word processor continues to be good; more featured than Blogger's or Goffice's (at least last tme I checked it out). The Flickr feature appears to work - sorry but the only useful photo I have on Flickr is the one of the rfid polluted passport. I've used this before, but why not again? I don't have any video I want to insert (yet) but there seems to be the facility to insert a YouTube video.

So, how well did it work?

Good experience but the fomating was wrong. There was a pop-up message from WriteToMyBlog as I posted saying the "convert line breaks" formatting option set to "no". When I go in a do that. this post looks great, but all the others look dreadful. I'm not going to re-edit them all by hand, so until I find a way over this hurdle I'll stick to Blogger or Goffice.

More on rfid passports (ePassports) [and DVDs]

Today I saw an article on the BBC web site which made we glad that I've bought my anti-RFID passport holder. The disclosures in the article confirm what I've always thought, the rfid chip does nothing significant to increase security and does something significant to reduce security. Now, I may be wrong, I don't understand enough about the cryptography used (they do use some cryptography, don't they?), but it is possible that while it is relatively easy to clone a passport, it may be difficult to create a new one from scratch. To clone, all that is needed is to copy the (encrypted?) chip, to create a new one you may need to do the encryption and you might not have the key. Does anyone know? Maybe there is method behind this scheme, rather than the madness of increased costs and decreased security.

So what has this to do with DVDs? When I had the CSS scheme first described to me, I couldn't understand what it was good for. Clearly it didn't prevent cloning a DVD - if you clone all the digital content you have a clone of the DVD. A serious fraudster - one with a pressing plant - shouldn't have a problem in mass producing fake DVDs. Then I realised; the mechanism was there to enforce the licencing policy. To play back the DVD you need the algorithm. To get the algorithm you need to sign a licence. Provided CSS is patent protected you have a case against anyone producing a player which doesn't confirm to your licencing terms. If it's made by a licencee, they're in breach of their licence; if it's made by a non-licencee, they're in breach of your patent.