[Noisebridge-discuss] Prox Reader

[travis+ml-noisebridge at subspacefield.org]

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 05:54:35PM -0700, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> Notably, the cheapest kind of card is only accepted
> for fare service if you deposit it into a slot, _even though it is an
> RFID card_ and the faregate also has a separate RFID reader that's
> perfectly capable of reading the cheap card.
> ...
> In the scheme of things I think this is quite a bad tradeoff for the
> privacy effects, but I've now experienced the little psychological
> effect a few times so I can understand the perception of greater
> convenience.

Kind of like how when crossing the bay bridge towards the city, there
are multiple cash lanes that narrow into two lanes, and little
divider-posts that prevent you from crossing into the FasTrak lanes,
even though you've already passed the toll booth.  There are no such
dividers between the cash lanes, or between FasTrak lanes - so they're
obviously separating classes of citizens for preferential treatment.

William Gibson's Neuromancer (one of my favorite books) had a future
where cash was illegal, and we're seeing the beginnings.  There was
actually a rumor of a proposal by Department of the Treasury to print
expiration dates on the cash dispensed by ATMs.

Convenience is a big deal to those who don't deal with things and
think about them all the time - and that means you, for 90% of the
things you use every day.  I don't, for example, fix my own cars.  I
just want it to get me places quickly, safely, and in comfort.

At Deja News, we found 90% of people never changed the options when
doing searches, and even fewer used the advanced search page.  So I
had my own search page I wrote that always gave me the maximum number
of results.

I call this "the default effect", and it's obviously quite powerful.

A former employer, Nate Lawson, did research on FasTrak's RFID.  He
has a little hardware mode that enables it for a minute or so after
pressing a button, but he had some issues with power consumption or
unstable delay or something so it's not available yet.
-- 
A Weapon of Mass Construction
My emails do not have attachments; it's a digital signature that your mail
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If you are a spammer, please email john at subspacefield.org to get blacklisted.
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