USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010923.0833 (On Screen): Larry Ellison is now certifiably insane -- or stupid, or evil, or self-aggrandizing, or deluded. For all the bad things that people say about Bill Gates, no-one has ever accused him of wanting to rule the world. (Wanting to own it, yes, but not of wanting to rule it.) But Ellison wants everyone in the US to carry a smart card which identifies them and which accesses an entry in an (Oracle!) database which encodes their thumbprint. To get on an airline (or to do damned near anything else) you'd have to swipe your card and then press your thumb onto a glass square.

Forget, for the moment, the idea that this makes the most restrictive police state imaginable easy to implement. Forget all those niggling details like the Bill of Rights. That stuff doesn't matter. This system is waaaay over the top technologically speaking. First, computer-recognition of thumb-prints is sophisticated but hardly error free; what happens to someone when the ID system issues a false negative? What happens if they have a cut on their thumb? Or ink marks? What about amputees? When a system gets used millions of times per day, a false negative rate of .001% is too high, and there's no way it's going to be even that low.

What happens when some happy hacker breaks into the ID system and starts playing with the records? His high school teacher flunked him out of English, so our friend breaks into the system and hax0rs the teacher's record so that his thumbprint no longer matches.

What do we do in case of a telecommunications breakdown? How many redundant database systems will there be and where will they be located? How will they be connected to the phone system? What means will all those independent terminals use to reach the database, and will they be secure? If anything in the last two years has been demonstrated by the internet, it's that nearly any system ultimately has holes in it, and the only truly secure computer is one which isn't connected to anything else. But by its nature, this system has to be broadly connected; is it even possible for such a system to be as secure as this would need to be?

Oh, and then there's the issue of software bugs. Do we really trust Oracle to implement this mother? Ellison also offers to give this software to the US for free, but will maintenance be free? And what happens if Oracle goes OOB? (discuss)