Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

First, sheer idiocy. A lot of people don't lock their smartphones, a lot of those that do use only a four digit PIN. On my iPhone, I've enabled alphanumeric pass codes. If you're only using four numbers, you've limited your phone to 10,000 possible combinations. I'm assuming Android phones can be set to wipe themselves after X number of failed attempts to enter the correct passcode, but again, that assumes it's enabled. If you take those same four characters and enable alphanumeric passcodes (numbers and letters and punctuation), you greatly increase that number. Using just numbers and letters, not even shifted case, those four characters go from ten raised to the 4th power to 36 raised to the 4th, or 1.68 million combinations. Add in lower case and all of the punctuation symbols on the standard keyboard, and it goes to 96 to the 4th, or 78 million combinations. Add just one digit to your passcode and the number of possible combinations jumps to 7.34 billion.

Motorola wants to simplify that. There's a new tech coming along called Near Field Communications, or NFC. Mostly you see it in these frequent buyer fobs at gas stations where you wave a little piece of plastic at the pump and it charges it to your card. Well, you can do that with certain phones and certain vendors. Motorola has developed a device called the Skip, which you'd clip on to your belt or whatever, and to unlock your phone you'd touch it to the device and *poof*, your phone is unlocked.

So now when you're being robbed, people will also tear random items off of your clothing. And if you're arrested, your fob will be seized and the police will say the phone was unlocked so they had a little stroll, rather than having to get a warrant to search a locked phone.

This is a really stupid idea, and I don't see it lasting long. But I could be wrong. You get three to a set, so they're anticipating you losing them.

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/83663

"Jerry Thomas" worked for the Newark Liberty International Airport, supervised 30 security guards whose duties included inspecting trucks on the tarmac, and had access to all areas of the building. Unfortunately this Jerry Thomas was also a convicted criminal who was killed in NYC in 1992.

He probably got away with it because he was using the ID for nine years before 9/11, so he was already trusted. But the question to me is: how was a convicted criminal able to get a job as a security guard, then supervisor, at an airport?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/airport-security-id-theft/

This is SO not a good idea in SO many ways.

First, they say they're using a Mach 3+ intercepter designed for low-altitude, high-speed aircraft. Not the profile of a jumbo jet or a Cessna, which questions their effectiveness. Second, London has multiple airports around and IN London, you gonna shut those down during the Olympics? I think not. Third, does England have news helicopters? What about a helicopter loaded with Sarin or Mustard Gas? Shouldn't be too difficult to steal a news chopper.

Definitely not thought through very well. But it's posturing, 'to make the people feel safer'. It won't increase safety because it can't be used: London has a very high population density, so anywhere you shoot down an aircraft you're going to have casualties comparable to if the aircraft had completed its attack run. The missiles are designed to stop high-speed jets: what, France is going to attack again? As far as I know, Al Qaeda's and the Taliban's F-18 and F-111 fleets haven't been doing too well of late.

*sigh*

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17884897

I'm not entirely clear why they think this. There's a huge number of problems involved in the concept of surgically-implanting a bomb inside a person: surgeon skill, infection issues, toxicity of explosives, how to detonate, the dampening effect of water mass on explosives, etc. So from the top, the difficulties of doing this in a third-world country would be very difficult to overcome.

Aircraft defense still boils down to: x-ray everything that goes on to the plane to prevent Locherbie attacks and lock the cockpit door. Everyone knows that a hijacked plane now represent potential mass death, so there's nothing to lose to attack a hijacker. DHS still constantly talks about the terrorist attacks that they've stopped that they can't talk about, yet you never hear about the TSA stopping mad bombers at the security checkpoints.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/body-bombs-are-a-good-sign-dhs-insider-claims/

Design proposals are being accepted for devices that would scan your shoes while you wear them. Remember the fluoroscopes in shoe stores in years gone by? Lots of shoe store employees got cancer.

When is DHS/TSA going to figure out that a device/protocol that addresses Threat X is invariably worthless against Threat Y?

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/next-step-for-airport-security-scanners-for-your-shoes/

After 9/11, if you were going to fly and didn't have ID or didn't want to present it, you could submit to a more detailed search and you would still be allowed to fly. Or at least you could do that at airports where the TSA people actually knew the rules rather than made them up on the spot. Well, that's now a thing of the past. Now if you don't have identification, you don't fly. Apparently it's part of a new program to try to profile dangerous people rather than dangerous items, because, after all, terrorists would have such difficulty getting identification.

Don't you feel safer already? I know I do. [/sarcasm]

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/tsa-nixes-flyin.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9962760-46.html?tag=nefd.top

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/10/0057202