2006-12-20
shop for body parts

By Yaz @ 17:40 [ use ]
chooseyourhead

Still thinking about cyborgs, body, machine, bio~... this image created by Erik Vervroegen for Sony Playstation is striking! Found via NEXT NATURE!!! Some idea about what it is:

Q: Can you give a few examples of next nature?
A: Yes, here are some examples.
Example 1: Products that grow in its own packaging (see how to grow an orangina bottle).
Example 2: Lots of people play games. That’s culture. But when some people start living in games and even manage to earn an income within a virtual world. Then it becomes next nature.
Example 3: The use of domestic robots is rapidly increasing. People don’t have time to look after their smart alarm clocks, toasters and vacuum cleaners anymore. They will have to organize themselves.
Example 4: The Enologix company of Sonoma, California, makes software that predicts how a wine will rate in reviews even before it is made. In order to achieve the high rating, winemakers invest in processes rooted not in agriculture but in biochemical information. Wine making becomes an information science.
Example 5: In cities like Los Angeles, it is almost impossible to live without a car.
Example 6: The global economy is such a complex system we are unable to control it. Of course people try to influence it, but we cannot completely control it. It’s a next nature phenomenon.

I have found also the post virtual missing limb.

2006-12-20
cloning e-passports

By Yaz @ 04:08 [ know ]
Apparently it takes fives minutes for someone to acquire your identity! the BBC article ePassports 'at risk' from cloning by David Reid is quite alarming...
So how did they do it?

The chip inside the ePassport is a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chip of the type poised to replace the barcode in supermarkets.

The good thing about RFID chips is that they emit radio signals that can be read at a short distance by an electronic reader.

But this is also the bad thing about them because, as Lukas demonstrated to me, he can easily download the data from his passport using an RFID reader he got for 200 Euros on eBay.

Lukas is less forthcoming about where he got what is called the Golden Reader Tool, it is the software used by border police and it allows him to read the chip on his ePassport, including the photo.

Now for the clever bit. Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport's data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip.

Using a standard off-the-shelf component you can just buy at a component store you can have a cloned ePassport in less than five minutes.