IDair, a military contractor, claims that it can image and resolve fingerprints from six meters away. The article goes into a lot of credulous, breathless rhapsody about this, but fails to note that if your fingerprints can be read from 20 feet away, then any crook who wants to be able to impersonate you will find it trivial to do so -- if we allow fingerprints to serve as a form of identification, that is. And of course, you can't change your fingerprints, so once they've leaked onto the net, you're hosed for life. So, basically, as soon as this technology is popular, it will be obsolete.

It's the security of the fingerprint database that concerns privacy experts such as Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "There are so many steps where a (digital) fingerprint can leak," Tien said.

Tien said electronic fingerprints can be like Social Security numbers. He calls them "coat hangers" on which a lot of identifying information can be hung. In other words, with a Social Security number, you can find out many other things about someone. Fingerprints could be same way, he said, and "someone else could use it to pretend to be me."

"Yes, it can be abused," Burcham agreed. "Anything can be abused. The point is, are there restrictions in place to not abuse it?" The answer with IDair is yes, he said. "But what it's going to come down to is: Do you want to go through that door? Do you want to buy something with Amazon?"

IDair's new fingerprint reader captures prints from 6 meters away (via /.)

(Image: Fingerprints, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from pagedooley's photostream)

A lot of people play with their cellphones or read while waiting for something. Jim Gurney, the creator of Dinotopia, paints small watercolors. (See my previous post about Jim's painting of a mud puddle.)

I brought my car to the dealership for a service checkup. The service guy told me it would take about 45 minutes.

He pointed me to a waiting room, which had a coffee machine, some magazines, and a TV set. But I was tired of hearing about Romney and Obama. So I headed onto the sales floor. I found an empty chair next to the snack machine. I laid out my watercolor gear on a desk and got to work.

The hazy daylight streamed in through floor-to-ceiling windows. Clusters of red, white, and blue balloons hung from the ceiling. A sports car sat in the middle of the room, its silver paint mirroring bright highlights from the windows.

The sales people seemed transfixed by their computers. One guy played digital solitaire. They took no notice of me. When I was finished with the painting, I showed it to them. They took photos of it with their cellphones to put on their Facebook pages.

Jim Gurney's 45-minute painting of a car dealership

In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi is his usual incandescent self in reporting on the United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, a bid-rigging trial against brokers at GE Capital, which implicated virtually every bank on Wall Street (and many overseas banks) in a multibillion-dollar municipal bond bid-rigging fraud, a fraud that skimmed a piece of every substantial municipal project in America, from public pools and baseball diamonds to subway stations and housing projects. Bid-rigging, a process perfected by the mafia, has been practiced by the financial sector on a scale never dreamed of by the simple men of the crime syndicates, and the scam is starting to unravel.

The defendants in the case – Dominick Carollo, Steven Goldberg and Peter Grimm – worked for GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric. Along with virtually every major bank and finance company on Wall Street – not just GE, but J.P. Morgan Chase, Bank of America, UBS, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Wachovia and more – these three Wall Street wiseguys spent the past decade taking part in a breathtakingly broad scheme to skim billions of dollars from the coffers of cities and small towns across America. The banks achieved this gigantic rip-off by secretly colluding to rig the public bids on municipal bonds, a business worth $3.7 trillion. By conspiring to lower the interest rates that towns earn on these investments, the banks systematically stole from schools, hospitals, libraries and nursing homes – from "virtually every state, district and territory in the United States," according to one settlement. And they did it so cleverly that the victims never even knew they were being ­cheated. No thumbs were broken, and nobody ended up in a landfill in New Jersey, but money disappeared, lots and lots of it, and its manner of disappearance had a familiar name: organized crime.

In fact, stripped of all the camouflaging financial verbiage, the crimes the defendants and their co-conspirators committed were virtually indistinguishable from the kind of thuggery practiced for decades by the Mafia, which has long made manipulation of public bids for things like garbage collection and construction contracts a cornerstone of its business. What's more, in the manner of old mob trials, Wall Street's secret machinations were revealed during the Carollo trial through crackling wiretap recordings and the lurid testimony of cooperating witnesses, who came into court with bowed heads, pointing fingers at their accomplices. The new-age gangsters even invented an elaborate code to hide their crimes. Like Elizabethan highway robbers who spoke in thieves' cant, or Italian mobsters who talked about "getting a button man to clip the capo," on tape after tape these Wall Street crooks coughed up phrases like "pull a nickel out" or "get to the right level" or "you're hanging out there" – all code words used to manipulate the interest rates on municipal bonds. The only thing that made this trial different from a typical mob trial was the scale of the crime.

USA v. Carollo involved classic cartel activity: not just one corrupt bank, but many, all acting in careful concert against the public interest. In the years since the economic crash of 2008, we've seen numerous hints that such orchestrated corruption exists. The collapses of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, for instance, both pointed to coordi­nated attacks by powerful banks and hedge funds determined to speed the demise of those firms. In the bankruptcy of Jefferson County, Alabama, we learned that Goldman Sachs accepted a $3 million bribe from J.P. Morgan Chase to permit Chase to serve as the sole provider of toxic swap deals to the rubes running metropolitan Birmingham – "an open-and-shut case of anti-competitive behavior," as one former regulator described it.

The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia (via Naked Capitalism)

The latest episode of the always-excellent Agony Column podcast features an interview with one of science fiction's greatest living writers, Kim Stanley Robinson, discussing his latest novel 2312, a mammoth, epic story of a future built upon realistic and attainable space exploration -- a kind of meditation on life within lightspeed, which is nevertheless extremely personal and close-felt and on human scale.

"...it's a somewhat Utopian situation in space, and still a somewhat grim and screwed up situation on Earth..."

—Kim Stanley Robinson

In the statement above, is Kim Stanley Robinson describing the present or the future? That's not an easy call until you hear it in context. In this case, the future as written in his latest novel '2312' is certainly an outgrowth of the present, and there is more than enough "funhouse mirror" material in the novel to let you know Robinson has a lot to say about how things are here in the present.

It has been almost a year since I last spoke with Robinson and it was ever so kind of him to battle apocalyptic traffic to make it to the Capitola Book Café for a live conversation about his latest novel, '2312.' For a book that is chock-a-block with ambition, it is a really a racing, bracing read; I read most of it in a single day. That should signal readers that Robinson is hitting the sweet spot with both content and pacing. This is big-idea science fiction that doubles as pacey thriller.

Agony Column podcast: Kim Stanley Robinson

MP3

I've been having fun playing a new iOS game called Trivi.al. It reminds me of the wonderful University of Colorado Trivia Bowl I loved so much when I was in high school in Boulder.

Trivi.al is a turn-based iOS game that's all about the challenge to beat your opponent by increasing your own IQ to genius status. Questions cover everything from Chuck Norris to historical events. The cool part is you don't only play against each other, but also against the question since the Elo rating can increase or fall depending on everybody's answers!

Challenge me to a match! My name is happyseamonkey.

Trivi.al

A couple of years ago, Scientific American's Ferris Jabr wrote a really fascinating story about the sign language of science. Along the way, he touched on an issue I'd never thought of before. Turns out, a lot of technical, scientific terms haven't made their way into official sign language vocabulary. At the same time, these words are often far too long to bother fingerspelling. The solution: Translators at scientific conferences invent signs, often on the fly.

Not surprisingly, though, that can get confusing. What if two translators use different signs for the same word? That's why the Scottish Sensory Centre has taken the time to standardize translations of 119 words from the world of physics into British Sign Language. The the new signs will make it easier for Deaf students to understand what they're learning in science class, and make physics more open to them as a career choice.

The glossary builds on existing signs used by the deaf community and on "the visual or metaphorical relationship to what the things are like in real life", explains O'Neill.

The signs also build on one another to help convey the scientific relationships between the terms. The sign for mass, for example, is a fist which is then used as a basis for the sign for density (a hand around the fist) and weight (the hand and fist moving downwards).

Coincidentally, within minutes of spotting this story, I came across another bit of specialized sign language vocabulary. In a tweet, mjrobbins linked to a poster that provides everything you need to know to talk about a man's naughty bits in (I think) British Sign Language.

See the poster (NSFW, probably)

Read the rest of the story about the new sign language physics vocabulary at New Scientist

In the New York Times, Tim Wu advances a fairly nuanced article about the risks of letting technology companies claim First Amendment protection for the product of their algorithms, something I discussed in a recent column. Tim worries that if an algorithm's product -- such as a page of search results -- are considered protected speech, then it will be more difficult to rein in anticompetitive or privacy-violating commercial activity:

The line can be easily drawn: as a general rule, nonhuman or automated choices should not be granted the full protection of the First Amendment, and often should not be considered “speech” at all. (Where a human does make a specific choice about specific content, the question is different.)

Defenders of Google’s position have argued that since humans programmed the computers that are “speaking,” the computers have speech rights as if by digital inheritance. But the fact that a programmer has the First Amendment right to program pretty much anything he likes doesn’t mean his creation is thereby endowed with his constitutional rights. Doctor Frankenstein’s monster could walk and talk, but that didn’t qualify him to vote in the doctor’s place.

Computers make trillions of invisible decisions each day; the possibility that each decision could be protected speech should give us pause. To Google’s credit, while it has claimed First Amendment rights for its search results, it has never formally asserted that it has the constitutional right to ignore privacy or antitrust laws. As a nation we must hesitate before allowing the higher principles of the Bill of Rights to become little more than lowly tools of commercial advantage. To give computers the rights intended for humans is to elevate our machines above ourselves.

I think that this is a valuable addition to the debate, but I don't wholly agree. There is clearly a difference between choosing what to say and designing an algorithm that speaks on your behalf, but programmers can and do make expressive choices when they write code. A camera isn't a human eye, but rather, a machine that translates the eye and the brain behind it into a mechanical object, and yet photos are still entitled to protection. A programmer sits down at a powerful machine and makes a bunch of choices that prefigure its output, and can, in so doing, design algorithms that express political messages (for example, algorithms that automatically parse elected officials' public utterances and rank them for subjective measures like clarity and truthfulness), artistic choices (algorithms that use human judgment to perform guided iterations through aesthetic options to produce beauty) and other forms of speech that are normally afforded the highest level of First Amendment protections.

That is not to say that algorithms can't produce illegal speech -- anticompetitive speech, fraudulent speech -- but I think the right way to address this is to punish the bad speech, not to deny that it is speech altogether.

And while we're on the subject, why shouldn't Frankenstein's Monster get a vote all on its own -- not a proxy for the doctor, but in its own right?

Free Speech for Computers? (via /.)

(Image: Frankenstein Face Vector, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from vectorportal's photostream)

It is 83 degrees in Aspen, Colorado—just hot enough that I started dreaming of ice cream as soon as I stepped off the plane.

Now, if I do find some ice cream and give myself a brain freeze while woolfing it down, I will have a better understanding of what that nasty cold-food headache is and how to combat it, thanks to this Scientific American video.

One of the things I like best about the video: Learning that, despite the ubiquity of the brain freeze, it's still not 100% clear what causes it. In particular, there are several competing theories to explain why putting cold things in your mouth would make your forehead hurt. Nifty!

Video Link

Entry #20 in the Mondo 2000 History Project is R.U. Sirius' entertaining essays about his horrible belladonna experience in 1968.

It was early in the summer of 1968. Myself and my friends had heard stories about people taking this drug, Asthamador, that you could buy in the drug store that contained belladonna. Someone described spending the entire night picking bugs off of his skin. Nothing speaks to the weird reality of being fifteen than this fact – we all agreed that this sounded really cool! We decided to get some of this belladonna and take it that Saturday night for the Ronnie Dio (yes, that Ronnie Dio) and the Electric Elves show in downtown Binghamton, New York. Dio was our biggest local star.

The day of the show, bottle of asthmador in my hand, we walked down to the neighborhood store and bought drinks to wash down the medicine. I bought a Coke, and I can’t remember what the other guys bought, but the Coke would turn out to be important. We went into the alley behind the small grocery store where teens sometimes would hang out and smoke cigarettes. Finding it empty, we prepared to take our medicine. None of us really knew anything about dosage, so we just went with what we had, a tablespoon that my friend and upstairs neighbor Dave Waffle had grabbed out of his kitchen. I went first. I gulped down the tablespoon of asthmador, washing it down with the Coke. You do not know the meaning of the word bitter unless you’ve done this. It was like swallowing Satan’s fetid bowels, which should have given me a clue as to the kind of experience that was to follow. I vomited some of it, but still managed to keep most of it down. After watching me, the rest of the gang decided to take only half a tablespoon. I learned an invaluable lesson in drug experimentation that would stay with me for life: never go first.

The Belladonna Shaman (Mondo 2000 History Project Entry #20)

On Tuesday June 26, 2012, Heritage Auctions is hosting a reception and preview of its upcoming illustration art auction featuring The Jerry Weist Collection of science fiction and fantasy art, pin-up, pulp and paperback art, and classic golden age/mainstream illustration art. Above: Gil Elvgren's "Skirting the Issue" (1956). Below: Wally Wood's "Mars is Heaven!" complete 8-page story, Weird Science #18 (EC Comics) (1953).

Incredibly, this is not an old ad encouraging you to nag your doc for a barbiturates prescription, but rather, a WWII-era Dupont anti-freeze ad.

Zerone and Zerex

The US Olympic Committee has apologized for describing the knitters' Ravelympics as "denigrating" to real athletes. Ravelympics are an activity on Ravelry, a community for knitters, in which members compete to complete knitting projects while watching Olympic events, producing hybrids like the "afghan marathon" and "scarf hockey." The Olympic Committee, worried that they will have a hard time raising millions for giant, evil companies like Dow Chemicals if knitters are allowed to share patterns that include the Olympic rings, sent a grossly insulting legal threat to the knitters of Ravelry:

We believe using the name "Ravelympics" for a competition that involves an afghan marathon, scarf hockey and sweater triathlon, among others, tends to denigrate the true nature of the Olympic Games. In a sense, it is disrespectful to our country's finest athletes and fails to recognize or appreciate their hard work.

After a lot of hue and cry, the USOC said sorry, and suggested that knitters could give away the stuff they make to the USOC.

Jun 21 Statement from USOC Spokesperson Patrick Sandusky (Thanks, Gladys!)

While doing some construction work, residents of the Liucunbu village in China's Shaanxi province came across a fake vagina that they, um, mistakenly identified as a lingzhi mushroom, legendary in Chinese medicine for its reportedy super-powerful healing and anti-aging properties. It's not clear whether the villagers really thought the sex toy was a mushroom or not, but in any case they called in an Xi'an TV news reporter who bought into the magic mushroom story. She produced a story about the discovery that actually aired. You can view that here. The following day, the TV program apologized for their error, claiming that "(the) reporter was still very young and unwise to the ways of the world." But that wasn't the end of this terrific tale. Now, a street vendor is selling artificial vaginas as the mushrooms for as much as US$2,800. As you can see from the above news report, he's even playing the original Xi'an TV news piece at his stall. When questioned by one Doubting Thomas, the vendor simply said, "It's on the news. How can it be fake?"

"ZOMG! Enterprising street seller now passing off artificial vajayjays as taisui mushrooms!" (Shanghaiist)

""Mystery mushroom" which leaves Xi'an villagers befuddled turns out to be artificial vajayjay" (Shanghaiist)

James Losey sez,

The Open Internet Tools Project (OpenITP) is a collection of open source projects that help build a truly unfettered internet -- private, anonymous and resistant to control. In the week before HOPE in New York City, OpenITP has partnered with FreedomBox, InformSec and ISOC-NY to host a circumvention tools hackfest. OpenITP's James Vasile writes:

"We've got four days to plan, code and learn! If you want to hack on anti-censorship or anti-surveillance tools, bring your project, bring your skills and bring your friends. This event will be focused on writing code and solving design problems. We won't have any long presentations (there will be enough of those at HOPE), though we will have lightning talks and will give away a door prize or two."

Circumvention Tools Hackfest in NYC before HOPE