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Reuters reports that the recent Microsoft Zune player (the competition portable MP3 player to the iPod) has a built in royalty fee that goes straight to Universal (one of the worlds largest music companies).

Slashdot's coverage quotes Universal Music's Doug Morris as saying the following:

These devices are just repositories for stolen music, and they all know it. So it's time to get paid for it.

Yeesh.

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There was a recent case in Boston where a man was asked for his driver's license before being seated at IHOP. Apparently some gizmo thought it would be a great idea to prevent "dine and dashing". According to the article, the security person already had about 40 IDs on the desk by the time the subject of this article came in.

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Katherine Albrecht, the world's leading RFID privacy expert and co-author of the book Spychips - How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID writes:

Former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson is considering a run for president in 2008…

As head of Health of Health and Human Services, Thompson oversaw the scandal-ridden FDA when it approved the VeriChip as a medical device. Shortly after leaving his cabinet post, he joined the board of the VeriChip Corporation and wasted no time in using his clout to promote the company's glass encapsulated RFID tags.

These tags are injected into human flesh to uniquely number and identify people. He also suggested implanting military personnel with the chips to replace dog tags.

Thompson has an option on more than 150,000 shares of VeriChip stock. Right now those options aren't worth much. Security flaws and public squeamishness have hurt the company's sales, resulting in losses of millions of dollars.

Even if he remains chip-free as we hope, the American people should still be wary of him.

If you spend millions to deploy an encryption system, maybe you should make sure it's robust first?

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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 unprecedented 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 a foreigner while you travel. 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.

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The Center For Democracy and Technology recently said in their newsletter:

The "lame duck" 109th Congress will return to Washington November 13 to take care of unfinished business before it finally ends. Among the bills President Bush has said he'd like to see passed is the NSA Domestic Spying bill. In addition, there is an effort afoot to slip into some other bill (probably a spending bill) a provision that would give the telecom companies immunity from liability for any unlawful assistance they have given to the government since 9/11.

What they're talking about is the bill that was introduced to congress backed by Bush that would not only NOT challenge the spying, but would in some forms legalize and expand the power to spy on Americans without a warrant. Fortunately, many major news outlets think that's not likely including the Baltimore Sun:

Republicans for months have known that no bill accomplishing Bush's goal could get filibuster-proof support from 60 senators. Sealing off any hope was what Democratic leader Harry Reid put on his lame-duck to-do list. The warrantless domestic surveillance bill was conspicuous in its absence.

Our most fundamental right as American citizens is being denied in Maryland. I went to the polls to vote today and explained that I wanted to vote, but would only use a paper ballot. While the check-in people suggested a "provisional ballot", the supervisor nixed that and showed me this nice large sign.

Barred from voting in Maryland

Why did I insist on a paper ballot? Perhaps it's because of the Princeton University Study proving the lousy security of this system (with instructional video).

For example, an attacker who gets physical access to a machine or its removable memory card for as little as one minute could install malicious code; malicious code on a machine could steal votes undetectably, modifying all records, logs, and counters to be consistent with the fraudulent vote count it creates. An attacker could also create malicious code that spreads automatically and silently from machine to machine during normal election activities — a voting-machine virus. We have constructed working demonstrations of these attacks in our lab.

Or it could be because of this study done by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law

All of the most commonly purchased electronic voting systems have significant security and reliability vulnerabilities. All three systems are equally vulnerable to an attack involving the insertion of corrupt software or other software attack programs designed to take over a voting machine.

If you protest the e-voting, be prepared to give up your right to vote.

But that aside, forget studies and look at our own state's history:

As reported by the Baltimore Sun many poll workers did not show up for work this morning and when they did they many had no idea how to operate new voting technology called "e-poll books" which are a necessary part of the voting process in Maryland and many other Diebold states. The workers were not trained to use that technology because Diebold did not provide the technology to the state until it was too late to properly train the pollworkers.

It's clear that the e-voting system is unstable and NOT READY. The accounting and security, both hardware and software is heavily suspect and it's much safer to rely on the traditional method of voting rather than on the video-poker-like machines they forced on us. But if you try, you may be barred from voting as I was.