10 Aug, 2009
Geek Headline of the Day – Fed’s RFIDiocy pwnd at DefCon
Posted by: Albee In: Geek|News Items
This is funny, because I immediately knew what it meant, making me extremely rare (and geeky). Let’s unpack it a little.
- Fed – the federal government
- RFID – Radio Frequency Identification – a small embedded computer chip that contains information that can be scanned by a multitude of electronic equipment
- -iocy – the blog author’s belief that federal government’s plan to embed identity and security documents with RFID technology is misguided
- pwnd – this was originally a computer gamer term: “To be defeated, especially in an extremely humiliating way”
- at – well, everyone knows what that means
- DefCon – the annual conference of the computer security/hacking community
So, this is funny and ironic, but also very scary – the government wants to put these tags on your passports and drivers licenses, but the security design is so bad that someone can steal your identity and clone your credentials in the time it takes for you to walk through a doorway.
Read the whole thing here: http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=565
Happy Monday.
