I’m not a security person and I don’t know what I’m talking about. Stories about children’s Social Security numbers being stolen and used without detection until they come of age and other similar tales are legion, and the problem is almost always Social Security numbers lying around unsecured at some service provider or company.
What if instead of using a single number, you protected a private SSN key, signed a token with it, and provided your public key and the token to whoever it is who thinks they need SSN verification? If you’re applying for a loan, you would send the bank this signed token, and they could verify your identity with your public key. Then if your bank was hacked, they don’t actually have your private SSN or the ability to generate new tokens with the information they’re storing. I guess you’d have to make sure that whatever was signed with the private key was unique to that institution though, so that the exact same signed token wouldn’t be accepted by someone else.
People may still leave their private SSN lying around, but it seems it would be significantly more secure than the current system of spreading it among a large number of organizations, where you are vulnerable to the security practices of the weakest link.
Problems: everyone needs a computer, so it’s not as accessible to the general public. Could you make the private key a physical object and have some kind of cheap handheld device for signing a hardware token the bank / doctor / etc sent you, which you would then send back? You’d have to guard against counterfeit signature devices, but maybe the SS administration could send a trusted signature device with your physical SSN key?
Now maybe there are issues with something like this when the service provider is trying to use your SSN to query 3rd parties. For instance, a bank wants your SSN so they can turn around and query credit reporting agencies, so your signed token from the bank wouldn’t mean anything to the third party. However, the bank could get the unique token from the credit reporting agency, and hand it to you to sign, then hand it back to the agency for the credit history perhaps?
I’m not sure how workable something like this would be, but it certainly seems like there must be some scheme which would work better than the current system.
Here’s the rest of the pictures from the rest of our Sugar Cube QR Code experiment at the A2 Mini Maker Faire. I enlisted the help of a number of 3-10 year olds to glue sugar cubes onto an (almost) properly sized template, and managed to end up with a scannable code! Ed Vielmetti and Jamie Lausch and I then piled a number of additional cubes on top to make a 3D city scape that was still scannable in it’s final form.
This was a proof-of-concept hatched this week to illustrated making QR codes from mixed media. If you are interested in doing something similar, we are organizing an event partnership between a2geeks and North Quad to hold a QR code art show called NQRT in October. Open submissions for QR code scannable art made of things. More details to follow, still in the planning stages. Follow @nqrt for details and developments.
Update: Jamie and Matt from SI did a great job printing the template! What other materials do you think would work?
Since Jerzy Drozd‘s talk at Ignite 5 I’ve been looking on and off for some kind of comic to get into that doesn’t involve tights. Fortunately there’s a lot to choose from, and this past Sunday at AADL I stumbled across Oishinbo – Japanese Cuisine. I’m in love.
If you fondly remember Morimoto angrily yelling “HE IS NOT A CHEF!!!” at Bobby Flay at the original Iron Chef USA special event after he stood on his cutting board, then this is the comic for you. It has it all. The over-wrought characters, the mild sexism, and the fanatical attention to culinary detail. We’re talking about making the perfect rice by picking out the malformed grains with tweezers.
The main characters Yamoaka and Kurita (later his wife – hilarious!) are in charge of the Ultimate Menu project at Tozai News. They have to explore the true nature of Japanese cuisine for the paper. However, at every turn they are confronted by Kaibara Yuzan, Yamoaka’s father and rival (!). “IT’S A SICK JOKE THAT SOMEONE WHO DOES NOT EVEN UNDERSTAND THAT BASIC CONCEPT HAS BEEN PUT IN CHARGE OF THE ULTIMATE MENU. YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO BE TALKING ABOUT FOOD!”
It’s great, and there’s a whole series exploring different aspects of food.
A full inventory of the Egyptian Museum has found that looters escaped with 18 items during the anti-government unrest, including two gilded wooden statues of famed boy king Tutankhamun, the antiquities chief said Sunday.
I can’t help but think of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, where mathic monasteries preserve knowledge for millenia while skyscrapers rise and fall outside the walls. I think we need to take a long view on museum design and design them more like bunkers.
I’m not saying they should be remote and inaccessible to the public, but that they should be designed in a way that makes it possible to lock them down in the event of civil unrest or other catastrophe. What is the mean time between riots in any given city? Even if it is 100 years, if you’re storing 4000 year old artifacts you have to be able to survive these rare events or eventually there won’t be any artifacts left. That means no glass ceilings.
Even if your museum is situated somewhere that seems stable and safe, can I ask you what a safe location looks like on a 500 year time scale? Even if you’re the Royal Ontario Museum in civilized Toronto, how long until there’s a Stanley Cup riot that gets out of hand? OK, true, that’s probably more of a 1000 year timescale.
It occurred to me while at a UMS performance whether anyone has ever studied the geographical distribution of standing ovations. Where are they most likely? Ann Arbor is not a traditional major arts center but it does get some decent performances coming through town.
So in places far from major arts centers, are audiences more likely to give a standing ovation because they really appreciate seeing a reasonably good performance? Or are they more stingy with them than New York because they don’t want to seem like provincials that will applaud anything?
I had stashed some Galileoscopes at the end of last year, primarily for youngsters, and just put the one I kept together last weekend. It’s been cloudy all week, but finally tonight it’s clear, and it works really well for $25, mounted on a standard camera tripod. It has a 25x and a 50x lens configuration.
You can see the moon quite well, and looking at Jupiter I could also easily make out the four Galilean satellites, three of them lined up very uniformly on the right (lens flip). I came in to take a look at Stellarium to see what it should look like, and realized that Uranus was right there, just to the upper left of Jupiter. This is an unusually close alignment. I’ve never had a good telescope, and this $25 piece of plastic didn’t seem good enough either, but given how easy it would be to locate with the close landmark of Jupiter I ran back outside to take a look. Accounting for the lens flip, I could make out a faintly blue point just at the edge of the field, if Jupiter was still in the field (see below). Later checking on Stellarium indicated Uranus was a little over 1 degree from Jupiter, and the Gallileoscope 25X field of view is 1.25 degrees, so I’m quite sure that was it.
Not bad for a $25 scope. And they’re still available – a great and inexpensive way to introduce a young person to astronomy. Also, putting it together is a good learning experience in itself.
The Japanese space program is doing some cool shit in the way of interplanetary spacecraft, and I have to hand it to them. I’m primarily impressed by their sheer ambition, launching bleeding edge missions that the more conservative NASA would tend to work their way up to. With previous interplanetary experience consisting of a couple probes to Halley’s Comet in the 80s and the Nozomi Mars orbiter in the 90s, JAXA launched Hayabusa seven years ago, on a sample collection mission to asteroid Itokawa.
This was the first attempted asteroid sample return mission by any nation. It was also powered by electric ion propulsion, a still fairly new technology that provides a long (years) but light push with little fuel mass compared to chemical rockets, and could autonomously navigate. After reaching the asteroid in 2005, it commenced trying to capture a sample, but here is where things started going wrong.
There were a couple brief landings but it didn’t seem that the pellet gun fired to cause debris to be captured. Also, a separate mini-lander called MINERVA was released too far from the surface. (Again – trying a lot of new things on one mission. And the mini-lander seems straight out of some Anime plot) Due to some malfunctions, getting the probe back to Earth has taken 5 years of Apollo 13 style engineering improvisation. Failing attitude control gyros were compensated for by angling the solar panels to surf the solar wind. Intermittent functioning of the 4 ion engines required constant navigational changes and (somehow) re-routing of components from two of the engines to allow operation of one.
All this resulted in the successful re-entry of the sample return capsule on Sunday. In the great video below, the capsule is at lower right, while the rest of the spacecraft is disintegrating behind it. Now we wait to find out if there was actually any sample dust inside.
As if that we’re impressive enough, JAXA just launched a solar sail demonstrator mission called IKAROS which has unfurled it’s sail successfully. This is the first functioning solar sail to be deployed – which relies on the radiation pressure of sunlight to provide propulsion. Solar panels are integrated into the sail, as well as variable reflectance patches for steering (this is crazy). And if that’s not enough for you, IKAROS released a small camera module to grab the below image of itself, relayed back to IKAROS wirelessly.
Ann Arbor is sprouting some great dedicated third places which have got off the ground recently or are in the works in the near future, that you may not be aware of.
Annarbor.com just did a story on the Blue House, across from the stadium. It’s a handmade studio that recently opened and is a dedicated space for crafters and it also offers workshops on things like block printing and knitting.
The AHA! Shop (All Hands Active) is a space for makers at Digital Ops on Liberty that hosts a regular Thursday night build night. Fun crew that skews more towards electronics and art.
Finally, my spies indicate that a co-operative bike shop space is likely to get off the ground downtown, featuring tools and advice for maintaining your bike.
It’s good to see some permanent spaces established around town to provide continuity between the various events that get people out and involved in doing things like the Mini Maker Faire and Ignite. Speaking of which, the call to makers is open for the coming Mini Maker Faire in June.
Let me take you back to an era before computer control of all aspects of spaceflight was considered necessary. It’s the early 70s, and although additional flights after Apollo 17 were eventually canceled, there were at the time plans afoot for longer duration stays on the lunar surface. However, a longer stay entailed an increased risk that the LEM ascent engine would not ignite when the time came to return to orbit.
What would the two surface-bound astronauts do? Would they wait for a rescue mission? No. They would unstow a wire-frame with small thrusters and collapsible fuel bladders from the LEM.
They would then transfer the ascent stage fuel to these bladders, and climb onto a perch on top, with life support supplied only by their space suits. They would then ignite their small rockets, and arc into the sky, guided to a rendevous with the command module only by an attitude indicator, a clock, and a list of desired pitches and times.
Once the pitch and time sequence was complete and they were in orbit, they would sit tight and pray they matched the checklist close enough that the CSM could find them before they ran out of oxygen.
It seems impossible that such a guts-only scenario would come up in the future. Imagine riding from the surface to an orbital rendezvous on essentially a jetpack, holding a joystick and a stopwatch.
I love this.
Or more accurately – it *is* water. Every exoplanet report that reaches the traditional media tends to be exaggerated to feed the desire for an exciting story, and I think the net result is that the typical dispassionate observer may have concluded several times by now that earth like planets have been found. For example, the findings that Gliese 581d and e may or may not be in the ‘habitable zone’ of their star triggered similar earth-like stories. Now this new discovery of a 6.5 Earth mass ball of hot ice is throwing similar keywords.
However my favorite part of the article is this:
<blockquote>a planet 2.7 times bigger than Earth, circling a dim red star called GJ 1214, just 40 light-years away in the constellation Ophiuchus.</blockquote>
Yes, it’s *only* 40 light-years away, we can just stroll over there. And how to decide whether to use the mass or radius when reporting how much “bigger” it is? Let’s use the smaller number to increase the earth-like excitement!
