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Earlier, I mentioned that the Australian Federal Budget had set aside “$226 million to further enhance border protection, including new technologies such as ePassports and biometrics, to help border authorities to verify travellers’ identities quickly and reliably.”

At lunch, I got to thinking about cost effective methods of overcoming the failings of biometric identification and authentication available today.

Finger prints – pfft!

Face recognition – bah! Humbug!

Consider this use case:

In the future, instead of issuing passports, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) takes samples of your hair, finger nails, or personal effects and fashions these into a voodoo doll that is stored in their central “credentials repository.” Whenever you present yourself at a border, the immigration official calls up (or uses the no-doubt dripping-with-XML web service of) the “credentials repository.” A DFAT staffer (perhaps even a robot or “secure web service”) stabs the voodoo doll in a random part of the anatomy with a hat pin and the immigration official verifies that the location of your shooting pain matches that of the doll.

Voila! Effigy-Based Identification, Physical Challenge Response, Security Voodoo — I haven’t decided how best to market it yet.

There’s a patent in this. I feel it in my waters.

The Daily Telegraph’s analysis of last night’s budget doesn’t require you to read beyond the first line: “Tax system finally rewards effort — and makes bludgers pay”

There’s dancing in the streets today. Not only do predominantly male wage earners win, but the natural enemy of wage earners – disabled and single mother bludgers – are to be pressured to rejoin the workforce through incentives that include a reduction in benefits!

Ross Gittins in the Herald, like me and (I hope) the rest of Australia, is completely baffled by this budget:

This is actually a ground-breaking, precedent-setting budget: a giveaway budget that comes after the election rather than before. If you didn’t know better, you could wonder whether it presaged a dash to the polls.
[...]
Everybody wins a prize in this budget. Indeed, in the breadth of its largesse, the only people left worse off – by up to $40 a week – are some separated mothers and disabled people.
[...]
This budget falls far short of the rhetoric that preceded it, raising the suspicion that something went badly wrong at the last minute. Mr Howard foretold it would be an “orthodox” budget. Hardly. He predicted we’d be bowled over by the size of the surplus. What, one no bigger than last year’s?

And consider this macho prediction from Mr Costello: “This budget we’re going to build for the future. We have a demographic date with destiny. And we will either approach that date by preparing early and well or … approach it unprepared with the kind of extreme measures that will force upon us.”

Very true. Pity he did so little about it.
[...]
The silly thing about scouring the bottom of the employment barrel is that the Government, for its own ideological reasons, is ignoring a much more fruitful source of recruits to the paid labour force: married mothers.

There’s no ambiguity here, it’s about an ideology that makes work more attractive and welfare less attractive. The only people who will complain are already disenfranchised so they won’t affect polling numbers. The sensibilities of ex-One Nation voters and Howard’s Battlers are better understood today than they were when the member for Ipswitch was rampant.

I’m sure we’re about to gain, though a series of cabinet and treasury leaks, some insight to the popularity contest that led up to this budget. It reeks of being more about shoring up backbencher support for leadership challenges than “preparing early and well.” Or maybe it’s a public sweetener before the Senate becomes a conveyorbelt of ideology wrapped up in legislation.

I noted that there was no mention of oil, natural resources or energy policy. I would have thought that these subjects would deserve funding given current global priorities.

There was one point in the speech when I finally rolled my eyes and said “oh, goody”:

We are also committing $226 million to further enhance border protection, including new technologies such as ePassports and biometrics, to help border authorities to verify travellers’ identities quickly and reliably.

Stand by for homogenisation with US initiatives.

What a strange budget.

Any blog that features Larry David has to be a good blog.

Oh yeah, and there are a few other nobodies there too.

Welcome to the Huffington Post, which, as our motto says, has been delivering news and opinion since, well, a few hours ago. As you look around, you’ll see that our front page features our favorite posts from our group bloggers — including Senator Jon Corzine, Larry David, John Cusack and Walter Cronkite — and the top news headlines of the moment. If you are hungry for more, you can always get your fill at The Blog and the News Wire where fresh posts and news stories are added 24/7. And don’t forget to check out Eat the Press, Harry Shearer’s spicy dish about the media. So come in and make yourself at home.

** Update: “…has to be a good blog”

I’m taking that back. Blogs are best at being a “narrow-cast” medium, such that you can target a niche audience (just like BS doesn’t) who only subscibes on stuff they like. The Huffington Post seems to be an anti-blog. By that I mean that it has a whole slew of different writers on different topics, news, humour, irony all mixed in together… so in retrospect I should have written “The Huffington Post! Caveat emptor!” — as they have some writers I really enjoy reading, but there’s so much dreck that it has become very hard to read.

Via Bruce Schneier’s Blog a very good essay on background and repercussions of the ChoicePoint debacle.

The Five Most Shocking Things About the ChoicePoint Debacle – By Sarah D. Scalet

Maybe it was the fact that this wasn’t a hack. Personal information of nearly 145,000 people wasn’t stolen from ChoicePoint. In fact, the company sold the information to inadequately vetted bogus businesses—this when the company itself helps other businesses verify creds.
[...]
Or maybe it was this last twisted bit of irony: ChoicePoint chairman and CEO Derek V. Smith had recently written two books about how individuals can protect themselves in the information age.
[...]
Chapman feels fortunate not to count herself among the 750 people who ChoicePoint says have already become victims of identity theft due to the security breach. But she’s seething about the fact that her information was inadequately protected by a company she’d never done business with. She’s also mad about how difficult it was for her to sign up for the free credit monitoring service that ChoicePoint is giving all the victims for one year—not that she thinks one year is long enough.

“I’m going to have to watch my back for the rest of my life,” she says. “I’m angry that my rights as a citizen have been violated. I’m angry that a company is out there selling my personal information for monetary gain. Yes, I’m angry. I’m very angry. And I hope to heavens that everybody who’s involved in this is just as angry as I am.”
[...]
[The Choicepoint CSO] Baich returned our call. Sounding upbeat, he said that he was trying to convince his public relations department to let him set the record straight. “They need to let this happen,” he said. “Look, I’m the chief information security officer. Fraud doesn’t relate to me.”

In a past life I worked on planes. Big sharp ones with fins, gills and pointy blowy-uppy stuff – as it’s known in the trade. I follow defense a little. This post is a summary of something that I think should be much more widely talked about.

In June 2002 the Australian government decided it wanted to repeat the experience of the tortuous budgetary and project slippage experience of the F-111 by signing up to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) development program and ordering 100 for an esitmated US$ 4.5 billion.

The JSF is to be developed to meet the needs of 8 nations. Sounds easy enough, right?

To quote DefenseTech blog:

…And a report last month, from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that the program was so complicated as to be “unexecutable.”

Is Australia worried? The new chief of the ADF should be:

A high profile invites greater scrutiny and Houston can expect plenty of parliamentary and media focus on the Joint Strike Fighter project. With a price tag of up to $15 billion, it is the biggest spending program in Australian history, at least twice as large as the Snowy Mountains scheme.

As chief of air force, he was the driving force to buy the Joint Strike Fighter and retire early the F-111 long-range strike jets, leaving the military operating for at least two years without either plane. It’s arguably the most important, and risky, strategic decision the military has taken in decades as air combat supremacy in the region remains a core objective.

There is the potential for this project to go horribly wrong on two flanks. The Joint Strike Fighter is still in its design phase and will almost certainly be hit by cost overruns and delays, widening the so-called “capability gap” between the retirement of the F-111s and the delivery of the 100 strike fighters beyond two years.

Yow – two years. They are working on contingency plans (cruise missiles launched from P3 Orions!?), but it sounds like two years is going to be a massive underestimate.

The Government? Peter Costello sounds on top of things:

Mr Costello conceded that Australia’s new generation fighter, the Joint Strike Fighter or JSF, would probably run over budget.

“All previous experience in defence purchases tells us that they very rarely come in at a lesser cost.”

It would be a good idea to stop laughing at New Zealand’s armed forces from now on. We’ll need all the composure we can muster.