They are the “safest ever”, according to the Government. But the Daily Mail reveals today how easily a person’s identity can be stolen from new biometric passports.

A shocking security gap allows the personal details and photograph in any electronic passport to be copied from the outside of the envelope in which it is delivered to homes.

The passport holder is none the wiser when it arrives because the white envelope has not been tampered with or opened.

Using a simple gadget built from parts bought on the Internet, it took the Mail less than four hours to copy the details from one passport.

It had been delivered in the normal way by national courier company Secure Mail Services to a young woman in Islington, North London.

With her permission we took away the envelope containing her passport and never opened it.

By the end of the afternoon, we had stolen enough information from the passport’s electronic chip – including the woman’s photograph – to be able to clone an identical document if we had wished.

More significantly, we had the details which would allow a fraudster, people trafficker or illegal immigrant to set up a new life in Britain.

The criminal could open a bank account, claim state benefits and undertake a myriad financial and legal transactions in someone else’s name.

This revelation will prove a major embarrassment to ministers. Since their introduction a year ago, more than four million biometric travel documents have been delivered by courier.

And I have no sympathy for any of them.

All of them were warned well in advance about the dangers of these passports, and yet, they all lined up for them like sheep.

The Government believes this is the safest way of sending out passports. But this may be an illusion.

It is an illusion, and you have just proved it!

Each of these passports is now an ID transmitter that silently puts your information out there to whoever wants it.

The passports are dispatched in white envelopes which are easily recognisable from the distinctive lettering and figures on the outside.

This is not the worst of it. Anyone carrying one of these ID transmitting passports around can have their information snarfed as they walk down the street. A smart snarfler will put antennae near the entrances of banks (or anywhere else that people regularly show their passports) and then sit back and watch the data roll in. They will not even have to be there. All they need to do is set up a system that phones home when it collects a batch of passports. Cheap laptops in a small box could do it with ease.

There is no identity check on the person signing for the passport when it arrives. In multi-occupancy flats they can be handed to anyone at the address. Thousands have already gone missing.

That is irrelevant, since the data can be snarfed in transit or no matter where it is, wether the right person receives it or not.

We began our investigation by asking Elizabeth Wood, a 33-year old web designer, to apply for a new biometric passport.

She telephoned the Identity and Passport Service on Monday, February 12.

Because she wanted the passport quickly, she was asked to go to the IPS office in Victoria, Central London, the following afternoon.

If she had not requested the fasttrack service, the passport would normally have been sent out without a face-to-face interview.

And now we have the sneaky advocation for the interrogation centres that HMG is setting up.

The next day Miss Wood met an official for ten minutes. The details on her application form were verified using two forms of ID – normally a household bill and a bank statement. Her photograph was also examined.

Miss Wood paid 91 for the fasttrack delivery and was told her passport would be sent to her home by secure courier in exactly seven days.

That is as it should be. Getting a passport is a RIGHT. It is used only to tell governments of other countries that you are a British Citizen entitled to protections afforded to such people. Far too much weight is given to passports and identity documents like driving licenses.

In fact, it took just four days, arriving when Miss Wood was in the shower. Her boyfriend went to the door and signed for the document. He was able to do so without showing any form of identity to the courier, who did not ask for Miss Wood.

This is also perfectly acceptable. If her passport goes missing, she will report it to the Passport Office and then they will cancel that passport number, meaning that it will become worthless. That is why it is ok for her boyfriend to collect the passport for her. A passport is not some magic book that confers UlTimAte PoWer to its holder. Get a grip you idiots!

But there is another gaping hole in security. At first glance the new biometric passport looks much like the traditional one.

The only clue on the outside of the document that it contains an electronic chip is a small gold square on the front.

Inside the passport there is a laminated page containing the holder’s picture, passport number, name, nationality, sex, signature, date and place of birth and the document’s issue and expiry date.

At the bottom of this page are two lines of printed numbers and letters which can be read by a computer when the passport is swiped through a special machine by immigration officials. It is called the Machine Readable Zone.

On the back of the page is a tiny computer chip, surrounded by a coil of copper-coloured wire. This is a Radio Frequency Identification microchip, which can be read using radio waves.

Encoded on the passport’s RFID chip are three important files. One contains an electronic copy of the printed information on the passport’s photo page; the second holds the electronic image of the holder’s photo. The third is a security device which checks that the previous two files are not accessed and altered.

In order to get into the files, the computer needs an “electronic key”. This is the 24-digit code printed on the bottom line of the passport’s Machine Readable Zone. It is called the “MRZ key number”.

When an immigration official checks the passport by swiping it through his machine, it reveals the key which is then used to open up the electronic data on the microchip.

And this is the error that my system overcomes.

The official checks that the photograph and information printed on the passport match the details on the chip and the holder is allowed to pass in, or out, of the country.

The Government says the biometric chips are protected by “an advanced digital encryption technique”. In other words, without the MRZ key code it is impossible to steal the passport holder’s details if you do not have their travel document.

Yet it took us no time at all to unravel the crucial code, using a relatively simple computer software programme and a scanning device.

There is no extra utility in using RFID in a passport. This is simply vendor pushed garbage. A printed paper cryptographic public key system is far more secure than any RFID system.

The Mail was helped by computer security consultant Adam Laurie, who advises public bodies and private companies on combating IT fraud. He discovered glaring weaknesses in the biometric passport’s security system.

The first flaw is that a hacker can try to access the chip as many times as he likes until he cracks the MRZ code. This is different to putting a pin number into a bank machine, where the security system refuses access after three wrong combinations are entered.

The second is that there are easily identifiable recurring patterns in the MRZ key codes issued. For example, the passport holder’s date of birth always features, as does the passport’s expiry date, which is ten years after the issue date.

These are schoolboy howlers. PGP signed documents do not have this vulnerability. The problem with PGP is that it costs nothing and vendors cant make a killing out of it.

The Mail is not publishing full details of Miss Wood’s passport to protect her. We know exactly how Mr Laurie cracked the MRZ code but we are not going to reveal the process for security reasons.

Crucially, he only needed one new piece of information – Miss Wood’s date of birth.

In under two hours, the Mail had found this by checking the electoral roll, birth records and looking at genealogical sites on the Internet.

Miss Wood’s photo page soon popped up on Mr Laurie’s laptop screen. He had not needed to see her actual passport – the white envelope containing it remained unopened on the desk.

And RFID passports make all of this much easier.

Crucially, some banks, including the Post Office, no longer require to see a full passport as proof of identity from a new customer opening an account. They ask for a photocopy of the photo page to be sent in the post instead.

This is not crucial. Opening a bank account is simply a service. Its your money. If you put your money in a shoe box under your bed or in a bank it makes no difference. You should be able to identify yourself by whatever means you like if it is YOUR money in YOUR account. Ahhhh journalists!.

Miss Wood’s photo page could easily be copied and used for this purpose. Mr Laurie said: “I used public information and equipment that is legal. The software took me three days to write. It is incredibly easy to thieve data from the passports. It could be put onto another chip and implanted in a blank passport.”

Phil Booth, national co-ordinator of NO2ID, a group pressing the Government to abandon plans for identity cards, witnessed our experiment.

“This shows how easy it is to steal a person’s identity from the new passport without the innocent owner even knowing,” he said.

“The Government has repeatedly said this information is secure. You have just shown that it is not.”

AND SO?

And so, “you should not on any account carry one of these passports. You should not be interrogated in one of the new centres. Period”. THAT IS WHAT YOU NEEDED TO SAY!

Last night a Home Office spokesman said: “We do not believe it would be possible to successfully forge a new passport by doing this.

“The security around the UK passport chip prevents anyone changing or deleting any of the data or information on the chip, which is what is required to successfully forge a passport.”

What they need to demonstrate now is that this too is a lie. But then again, it doesn’t matter how many times you do this sort of exercise; if people are going to line up to get these passports, then there is nothing that you can do about it. Four million have already been issued. Its bad news.

Americans do not have to be fingerprinted or interrogated to get new passports, which have RFID people who care are being instructed to use a hammer to destroy the RFID chip. The passport is not invalidated if the chip is broken, so there is no reason for you not to hammer your passport, and roll it back to an acceptable document.

I wonder why they did not issue an instruction to the four million holders of bad UK passports to hammer the chips so that they do not work?

It beggars belief.

Gmail is still letting ‘obvious’ spam through, i.e. spam with the word ‘viagra’ in the body or the subject. Here is a screen-grab of the the inbox of the account that I am using for testing. Yuck!

When these messages were subsequently collected with Thunderbird, out of the 86 messages collected from the filtered POP mail, the baysian filtering caught 64 spams, 20 spams were not caught and two emails were legitimate.

On all my Gmail accounts where the email is sent directly to an @gmail.com address, the spam filtering is near flawless and I rarely see a spam message. On this account however, the email is collected from a POP3 account to test wether or not gmail’s world-famous spam filtering can be used to eliminate spam from a dirty POP account.

Amazingly, Gmail is failing to catch spam that Thunderbird’s baysian filtering picks up easily; what can we infer about how Gmail’s spam filtering works by this? There are 1397 spams that Gmail has caught from this POP gathered mail, so it is working on some level…very interesting!

I decided to test Google’s new feature that allows you to collect your POP3 mail with Gmail.

The spam filtering of Gmail is second to none, and works perfectly on all my Gmail accounts, so its a no brainer to give it a try; not only would you get superior spam filtering when you collect your POP3 email with Gmail, but you also get SSL connections thrown in so that you can retrieve your email securely with your laptop when you are out and about.

At least thats the theory.

After setting it all up, I noticed that spam filtering is very broken when you collect your POP3 email with gmail. It lets through anything and everything, including spam with the word ‘viagra’ in the subject.

Take a look at this screengrab for an example of how horribly wrong it is.

As you can see, there are 624 messages in the spam folder, so it is partially working, but in my other Gmail accounts, the messages that have made it into this inbox do not appear.

You can also see that some of the messages have ‘PENIS’ and ‘Cialis’ in the subject. Egads. That is insane. Even Baysian filtering in Thunderbird picks that crap up.

I sent Google a report. No news yet.

Any programmers at a loose end?

SplitScreen:
SplitScreen is a Firefox add-on that enables you to pull down a page separator from the scroll bar (as in OpenOffice, Acrobat, etc.). You are now able to have two different parts of a long webpage in view at any one time – useful for viewing multiple forum posts or footnotes in academic essays.

OpenLight:
OpenLight is an OS X utility which allows you to add ‘Spotlight Comments’ metadata to files while they are open. OpenLight is activated on login and accessed as an ‘in focus’ floating palette or a Menu Bar item, this avoids the need to return to the Finder and ‘Get Info’ on a file before adding comments.
The OpenLight floating palette can be toggled to show comments for the current working file or open files in all applications, allowing easy copy/pasting of comments.
Openlight also adds an input field to the ‘Save’ dialog box so comments can be added at the same time as saving the file.

Dotted!

BBQ has an (shock) article by a named author on The Great Satan’s lust to be able to destroy everything:

The declassified document is called “Information Operations Roadmap”. It was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

[…]

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.

All these are engaged in information operations. […]

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military’s psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.

“Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience,” it reads.

“Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public,” it goes on. […]

“In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States – even though they were directed abroad,” says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive. […]

Late last year, it emerged that the Pentagon had paid a private company, the Lincoln Group, to plant hundreds of stories in Iraqi newspapers. The stories – all supportive of US policy – were written by military personnel and then placed in Iraqi publications.

And websites that appeared to be information sites on the politics of Africa and the Balkans were found to be run by the Pentagon. […]

When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone.

It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system.

“Strategy should be based on the premise that the Department [of Defense] will ‘fight the net’ as it would an enemy weapons system,” it reads.

The slogan “fight the net” appears several times throughout the roadmap. […]

And, in a grand finale, the document recommends that the United States should seek the ability to “provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum”.

US forces should be able to “disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum”.

Consider that for a moment.

The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.

Are these plans the pipe dreams of self-aggrandising bureaucrats? Or are they real?

The fact that the “Information Operations Roadmap” is approved by the Secretary of Defense suggests that these plans are taken very seriously indeed in the Pentagon.

And that the scale and grandeur of the digital revolution is matched only by the US military’s ambitions for it.

[…]

The article. The paper.

Now you know for sure that the worldwide ID / Biometric Net project is being cast in these terms by the Pentagon. Mark My Mords™ the documents exist.

This document states clearly that everyone other than those at the Pentagon is the enemy. ‘The Mass’, in the Baudrillard sense, is the enemy. YOU are the enemy.

But you know this!

A programmer colleague writes:

Civil Disobediance is the only answer. On a rather predictable note the eye scanning has been dropped as all the machines run Windows and keep crashing ! Laughably the Uk has based it’s whole IT policy on MS Software so none of it is likely to ever work properly, however I am ready to resist.

This is very insightful. If the Linux advocates had been more successful in convincing HMG to adopt GNU / Linux / Open Source, these absurd, immoral and draconian projects would be more likely to succeed, since the infrastructure would be robust.

A rare instance where its a good thing that Linux is not being adopted.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/spaceguide/skyatnight/proginfo.shtml

The Sky at Night.

For whenever you have a spare 20 minutes, discover a beautiful little part of the universe.

Someone with very good ears writes:

Hi,

Just thought I would write in on the off-chance that no-one has noticed this, though I’m sure someone must have done already.

I was thinking that the normal 3 note tone when you misdial a number or leave the ‘phone off the hook sounded, to my ear, identical to how the “Three Note Oddity” ( tcp_d1_12_three_note_odditiy_irdial.mp3 ) would sound if it was upped by an octave and played at double the speed.

I decided to stick the two into a wave editor, with the Irdial 3 note oddity in the left channel, and the telephone message in the right, and it turns out that the 3 notes are exactly the same.

I have no idea what it means, but it just seemed like a cool co-incidence. :-)

I’ve attached an mp3 (with the ‘phone notes slowed down by 50% and shifted down an octave to match the Irdial)
The ‘phone error in this is from the Telewest system, been a while since I’ve heard BT’s but from memory I think the tones are the same.

Mark

The never-ending strangeness of Numbers Stations; a constant source of pleasure.

Druidstreet. Easy on the i.

He is some man, I would love make music on this machine

MOG

Sort of like a social-networking version of LastFM, without the awesome radio angle. It purports to “link people together” by the contents of their music folder, but this is also something LastFM does (though in a slightly different way). Regardless, I’m trying this out. Sucking is a definitely possibility.
Unfortunately the little database-builder app that it comes with is SLOW, and will probably take 50 hours to scour my 12000+ files. Why the hell does it have to use Gracenote? Just check the ID3 tags! This is not off to a good start.

Observations, criticisms, etc definitely required.

In the morning of 2006-05-31 the Swedish National Criminal Police showed a search warrant to Rix|Port80 personnell. The warrant was valid for all datacentres of Rix|Port80 and was directed at The Pirate Bay. The allegation was breach of copy-right law, alternatively assisting breach of copy-right law.

“The necessity for securing technical evidence for the existance (sic) of a web-service which is fully official, the legality of which has been under public debate for years and whose principals are public persons giving regular press interviews, could not be explained,” said the statement.

“Asked for other reasoning behind the choice to take down a site, without knowing wether (sic) it is illegal or not, the officers explained that this is normal.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5036268.stm

…

Who is behind this? You can bet your last Krona that it isn’t Swedish police or the Swedish government directly. So that leaves external (and most probably) commercial interests directing the activity of a domestic justice system in the complete absence of any legally substantiated wrongdoing.

Sweden, I am ashamed of you.

…

Regarding the internet-savvyness of record labels, this interesting piece from the Grauniad sheds some light.

The (seemingly much more beautiful) DS Lite is going to be released in a month in the UK. This may mark a long awaited return to thumb joggling! And on my own console, ha!!!

Nintendo will release the DS Lite in the UK on 23 June, the videogames pioneer said today. The redesigned handheld console will set British buyers back £100. It will cost €150 (£102) in continental Europe, the company added.

Taking a lead from Apple’s iPod, Nintendo said the DS Lite will be available at launch in two colours: glossy black and shiny white.

…
Reg

GnuPG does not detect injection of unsigned data
================================================
(released 2006-03-09, CVE-2006-0049)

Summary
=======

In the aftermath of the false positive signature verfication bug
(announced 2006-02-15) more thorough testing of the fix has been done
and another vulnerability has been detected.

[…]

Impact:
=======

Signature verification of non-detached signatures may give a positive
result but when extracting the signed data, this data may be prepended
or appended with extra data not covered by the signature. Thus it is
possible for an attacker to take any signed message and inject extra
arbitrary data.

Detached signatures (a separate signature file) are not affected.

All versions of gnupg prior to 1.4.2.2 are affected.

[…]

GPG [announce]

Those of you using earlier versions of GPG will no doubt want to upgrade.

The Guardian has a new ‘group blog’ , called “comment is free”. Instant impressions:

• It is very Guardian-like
• It is very newspaper-like; Its editors pick what is to be given front page prominence (like they know better than the readers what is or is not interesting). That is so 2005/Slashdot. The users decide what is cool and what is not cool.
• It is not blog like
• Its stuck to the left
• It is set in three columns
• No user feedback, other than comments, ie no moderation of stories or comments or user tagging

Read the introduction:

Welcome to Comment is free, the first collective comment blog by a British newspaper website. It will incorporate all the regular Guardian and Observer main commentators, many blogging for the first time, who will be joined by a host of outside contributors – politicians, academics, writers, scientists, activists and of course existing bloggers to debate, argue and occasionally agree on the issues of the day.

Why are we launching it now? Because it’s obvious to us that our major competition for opinion and debate is moving online, and unless we move with it, we’re failing our journalists and future generations of readers. […]

Translation; everyone is getting their news from the blogosphere. They are reading our stories and then spinning them. We are losing influence. The Empire must strike back.

We need to expand and deepen the debate which takes place every day in our newspapers and for which we have an unrivalled reputation. We need to ensure that the Guardian and Observer remain at the heart of the liveliest liberal-left discourse (although we’ll continue our long tradition of carrying voices from across the political spectrum). How? Not only by doing so much more than we can in print, and much more immediately, but by putting our own writers where their real rivals are. Readers, too, need to be at the heart of the conversation, and much more engaged than print allows. […]

The debate is already deepened, thanks to the blogosphere. The fact that it has taken The Guardian so long to do this proves that brontosaurus media is on the way out. Now, had they cloned Digg, this would be an entirely different matter, they might have had their Jurrasic Park style second chance at life, but they did not, and they have missed the next phase of news aggregation, without good reason either. “Readers, too, need to be at the heart of the conversation” Un oh, dinosaur speak spilling out.

Comments will only be allowed with a valid e-mail address and registration, to try and keep the standard of the debate as high as possible.

Why? If the readers are to be at the heart of this mythical paleo babble “conversation” why should we obey this absurd command when we can set up our own blog in 5 minutes and then publish and be read? If everyone wants to read rants, let them, and if not, let the readers moderate themselvs. Editors no longer have a job; this is what the tectonic shift is all about, and its frighetening the shit out of these people.

Please tell us what you think. Post your comments below or email us at comment.is.free@guardian.co.uk.

or how about “post on your own blog and link to us” heh, of course not, because they are for centralized control of thought and agenda, the top of the pyramid being the grand poohbah editor. Posting to your own blog means accepting that other blogs are the equal of any Guardian Blog, diminishing their importance, which is happening quite nicely and naturally wether or not they like it.

Some of the comments on this post are interesting, the first saying “just what is your job Ms editor” the others saying that they dont like their location being attached to their names The editor, finally weighed in with an apology for not commenting on the comments with this amazing text:

Hello again – apologies for not coming back earlier to answer some of your points but it’s been a bit busy today.

Say what? You just launch a new blog, you are the ‘editor’ and you leave your keyboard while the comments are flooding in? You have to pay attention to your blog if you are going to rul0rz it, and to not be there in the first few hours, I mean, honestly, do you KNOW anything about what you are doing?

My role as editor. The central role, as with any editor, is to try and make the site the most lively, diverse, engaging, surprising comment site around.

You arent needed for that. Look at Digg. Be like Digg. Or die. The users make the site lively, they provide the diversity (which is not true diversity if there is a black crow school marm hovering over everyone making sure you dont say ‘Fuck’) they also provide the surprising comment. All of that has nothing to do with editors.

We (the team) will try and ensure that we have a broad range of opinion and that means doing some direct commissioning of particular people on particular subjects, while encouraging a wide range of contributors to blog as and when they want on whatever subject they want. I won’t be doing what I’ve spent my life as an editor on the paper doing – close copy editing and going back and forth to writers working with them to change their pieces, improve their pieces or think about arguments they haven’t thought about. The nature of the blog is that we will have to try and let go a bit and let peple say what they want within the bounds of libel and the constraints of our blogging guidelines.

Pointless. Either let go and destroy the death star, or be a newspaper, not some half assed hybrid snore-fest. We have everywhere else to read; why should we read anything with even the slightest bit of control imposed upon it?

Commenting on pieces taken from the paper: this is something we’ll introduce as soon as possible. It’s purely a technical issue, and we’re keen that everything that appears on the site can be commented on.

Computer illiterates!

Comments: yes, we’ll keep a close eye on these.

WHY? You are not responsible for the comments that users make, if you are legally in the UK, then you need to spin off the blogs to a company in another jurisdiction whose job it is to run the your free speech wing, insulating you from prosecution. You simply cannot do this in the blogosphere, because we will go and read something else, where people are totally free to express themselvs, on the exact same stories, even stories from your own newspaper. This is pretty basic.

We hope registration will help keep up the standard of the debate, but we’ll watch for the ususal libel issues or breaches of our talk policy code.

What a monumental waste of resources; indeed someone has already asked the question:

Does this mean we are finally going to be allowed to comment on the Jowell-Mills saga, or are you going to close down that debate like you did on the Newsblog?

And there you have it. It will be stillborn in terms of doing something really groundbreaking and worth a repeat visit.

Discussions with authors about their articles. I’m encouraging our contributors to re-blog on the reaction to their articles and comment on the comment. Some will, some won’t, and I’m not insisting on it.

‘I’m not insisting on it’. Brava!

‘re-blog’?? ‘conversations’?? ‘upper-positive plates‘??

When Digg launches its ‘other than tech news’ site, it will be very interesting to see how it gets taken up. I have to say that my first impressions of Newsvine were a little dampened. It is completely beautiful design wise, modern, fast etc, but I found that the blogs that people are wrting there interfere with my search for news.

I use blogs to read the facts about news, and for the most part I use news sites to collect the stories initially; bloggers dont have the resources to get many stories together in one place, and so in my mind, I keep these two resources separate; people with the means to gather thousands of stories, and people with a free reign to tell the absolute truth on any subject. Where these two liquids meet in an emulsion is where the interesting things are happening, and what I need is a tool to navigate that emulsion, like Digg.

Newsvine tries to mix oil and water; news sources and blog writers. There is no distinction between the two in that site, and so to me, it is a mess; ‘News Type: Opinion’ is an example of this mess. An opinion is not a news type. Opinions are opinions and news is news; oil is oil and water is water. Digg gets the balance just right, the users set the agenda, control what gets seen, can say whatever they like, and you get to read the news and the first line of cobweb sweeping comments all in one place. It is extremely simple to use, easy to look at and navigate, and fast to get what you need out of it. Newsvine, though beautiful, is a little labrynthine, the headlines are not given equal weght on each page (there is a big headline, and then lots of smaller – read less signifigant – ones, one story has a photo, and thes su stories do not).

It feels like its energy is spread out too much, wheras on Digg, the energy flows neatly down the page from headline to headline into the comments and back again. You can take it all in, and there is lots of it, and it seems like you never miss anything important, since all the tech sites repeat Digg stories after they have been dugg. This is crucial; I feel like I am keeping up to date when I read Digg, whereas with Newsvine, I feel like I am missing something, and the blogs there only reinforce that feeling, because they are taking up space that should be spent on news source fed articles.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Wednesday mocked a $100 laptop computer for developing countries being developed with the backing of rival Google Inc. (GOOG.O: Quote, Profile, Research) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The $100 laptop project seeks to provide inexpensive computers to people in developing countries. The computers lack many features found on a typical personal computer, such as a hard disk and software.

“The last thing you want to do for a shared use computer is have it be something without a disk … and with a tiny little screen,” Gates said at the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in suburban Washington.

“Hardware is a small part of the cost” of providing computing capabilities, he said, adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support.

Before his critique, Gates showed off a new “ultra-mobile computer” which runs Microsoft Windows on a seven-inch (17.78-centimeter) touch screen.

Those machines are expected to sell for between $599 and $999, Microsoft said at the product launch last week.

“If you are going to go have people share the computer, get a broadband connection and have somebody there who can help support the user, geez, get a decent computer where you can actually read the text and you’re not sitting there cranking the thing while you’re trying to type,” Gates said.

Gates described the computers as being for shared use, but the project goes under the name “One Laptop per Child.” A representative for the project did not immediately reply to an inquiry seeking comment.

Earlier this year, Google founder Larry Page said his company is backing MIT’s project. He showed a model of the machine that does use a crank as one source of power.

“The laptops … will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data,” according to the project’s Web site. […]

http://today.reuters.com/

Here we see the TRUE face of the ‘philanthropist’ Bill Gates. Here is a man worth billions, but who will not give money to this vital project, simply because they will not use his crippleware OS.

The kernel of true nature of generosity is sacrifice. Giving away money, even in the hundreds of millions is not a sacrifice for Bill Gates, no matter how useful that money is to the recipients.

A sacrifice for Gates would be for him to pump hundreds of millions into the GNU Foundation, to  put his legion of developers at work on bolstering Linux and Open Source – to actually give something away that matters to him, ie, domination of the worlds desktop operating systems.
Gates obviously doesn’t care a damn that millions of children will have internet access on these exxcellent computers, whose screens by the way, whilst being small, are much bigger than the screen of a GameBoy, which takes up the time of millions of children to no good end.

Applications cost nothing when they are licenced under the GPL. This is anathema to Bill Gates. If the price of every child on earth becoming not only literate but computer literate, would it not be an act of greatness, philanthropy, charity and sacrifice for Microsoft to support this project and the free software that is going to be run on it? Or would he rather that all those children remain illiterate, cut off and impoverished, all for the sake of transient market share?

I think the answer is pretty clear. Anyone who is against this project is against literacy, learning and impoverished children.

And that my friends, is pure evil.

And just to correct this article, the laptps will NOT be shipped “without software” , they will also not need a hard disc, since ultra reliable flash drives will do the job of storage, and finally, just what is ‘a huge amount of data’? The smallest flash drives can hold an entire dictionary; if this project can get a laptop into every child’s hands that has an OS, some networking tools and a dictionary, that would be a very cool thing indeed. And of course, when you can get online, the whole internet is your storage medium, so this statement is totally irrelevant to the utility of this device.