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E-Passports: Snazzy but Useless?

Fancy new electronic passports: good for when you lose them, but not all that secure, it turns out. A German security consultant has hacked the RIFD chip inside the passports about to come into use in Europe and the U.S.--and it only took him two weeks to do it. Using computer programs and passport readers which are not only legal to buy for the average citizen but readily available, he showed Wired how the passport could be manipulated to display data cloned from a different passport.

Gus Hosein, a visiting fellow in information systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science and senior fellow at Privacy International, a U.K.-based group that opposes the use of RFID chips in passports, explains it this way:

Is this what the best and the brightest of the world could come up with? Or is this what happens when you do policy laundering and you get a bunch of bureaucrats making decisions about technologies they don't understand?"

Ouch.  Physical inspections of the passport could thwart this kind of hacking, but still, maybe going back to the drawing board on this one is a good idea. We want a new picture anyway.

[Image via lilit/Flickr]

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·   Hackers Clone E-Passports

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Pictures of You

When it comes to buying trinkets for friends and family on vacation, we can be exceedingly lazy. The only thing that we like to do less, in fact, is buying postcards and writing them. They seemed like a quaint thing to do, before the popularity of cell phones and email, but now it seems positively anachronistic.

Mobycards takes cell phone technology and applies it in a nifty way to the postcard tradition. Users take a picture with their camera phone and send it with a text message to the Mobycards phone number. For about $5, mobycards will send the picture as a postcard, with your text on the back, to your friends.

See, thanks to technology, you can annoy your friends with vacation photos far more easily than ever before. O brave new world, with such gizmos in it!

[Image via lschoen/Flickr]