Found on Slashdot, this article explains how writing fake reviews about your own book or hotel to boost its rating will become illegal in the UK and perhaps all of Europe. This practice is very similar to the fake blogs that marketers made in the United States recently. I don’t really know why they had to specifically illegalize this… Wasn’t it already fraud? Well, at least they’re paying attention. Tags: UK

New RFID passports are supposed to make identity theft more difficult and to make it easier to spot fake passports like the ones used by the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks.

First, making the data remotely secretly readable without every possessing or otherwise coming into contact with the passport hardly makes it more secure against identity theft. Second, it's hard to make fake documents, but easy to fake 1's and 0's. Last I checked your electrons look just like mine.

Besides the very obvious flaws in this idea, all it would take for the "secure passports" to turn into a nightmare of unprecendented proportions would be for the encryption to be broken. Oops, it's been done… and in under 48 hours of effort.

In the article, they mostly talk about the dangers of cloning passports, but I submit that the real danger is being easily, quickly, and remotely identified as an American travelling abroad. Either way, they said it best in their final paragraph:

It may be that at some point in the future the government will accept that putting RFID chips in to passports is ill-conceived and unnecessary. Until then, the only people likely to embrace this kind of technology are those with mischief in mind.

Tags: Passports, Physical Security, RFID, UK