Oyster (for Londoners..)

sufi

lala
standard said:
Detectives also released an image taken the next morning of a black man in a "pork-pie" hat trying to use the solicitor's Oyster card. It is not known if he was involved in the killing.
This was an Evening Stan Billboard headline...
I wonder whether this type of activity is authorised somehwere in the small print of the Oyster application. Obviously tracking down murderers is a worthy mission, but i'd not really be surprised if this tragic case was used to set a precedent of using oyster as a tracking device.
 
sufi said:
This was an Evening Stan Billboard headline...
I wonder whether this type of activity is authorised somehwere in the small print of the Oyster application. Obviously tracking down murderers is a worthy mission, but i'd not really be surprised if this tragic case was used to set a precedent of using oyster as a tracking device.

I assume the Met called LU once they realised the poor fella had been robbed of his valuables, they searched their database for his (quite unusual surname) in minutes and set up some kind of alert. So not tracking really, it was snaring.
 

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
here we go - the first step towards everyone having to carry
an ID-card (all fitted with RFIDs tracking you to the nearest 200m)
all the time (24 hours a day).
There will be more of these small drops of "have to be made compulsury"
over the next few months and then Tony and his cronies
(House of Lords gradually filling up with those who paid their way in)
will point to the overwhelming "evidence" of this need
(no doubt backed by The Sun and all).


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4633822.stm

The Lord Chancellor has said ID cards should be made compulsory if introduced in the UK.

Lord Falconer told the BBC that the only way to get full benefit from the scheme was for people without a passport to carry one.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has said the government backs ID cards and fears over civil liberties are "misplaced".

and here we go some more - convictions to stay on file for 100 years

“We already now have powers to retain DNA and fingerprints that can be taken from everyone arrested for a recordable offence and then detained at a police station, for life. This has brought huge benefits. The old ‘weeding-out’ regime conflicted with these powers.”

Now combine any "recordable offence" with Tony's wish for "justice on the spot" and for new offences (like "thought crime" on terrorism and religion) and soon you will have a huge proportion of the population on the British Isles DNA-fingerprinted.
Later all newborns will be DNA fingerprinted at birth ("for their own and society's best", "to prevent illness", "to look for anti-social behaviour at an early stage").

This is the ultimate aim of the police and the security forces - every citizen DNA-fingerprinted at birth, carrying her 24x7 trackable ID-card with her and society under constant video surveillance. A crimeless society.

What could possibly be wrong with this?
 
Last edited:

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
I wouldn't be surprised if the ID-card scheme would be run from the India ("to save money for the public" - who funded the cards in the first place). So much for "data protection". As I asked myself in a blog post last year - what if the ID card database is hacked or stolen?

How do you then give a new identity to a whole nation of 60m people?
Will "notables" be excluded from the database? Remember a whole host of bodies will be able to use the register once in place.

I am actually not against ID cards in itself. What am hugely against is the amount of data they will hold and the fact that they are fitted with RFIDs and the cluster of laws and technologies being pushed to limit our freedom of speech and movement without being monitored (watch out for those plastic rocks on the pavement ;) ).

So cheers for the House of Lords. For now at least - but slowly filling up with those who oils the Labour party.

20060128: More for Tony's new conservatives: "naming and shaming" is on the up. Not just the latest not-so-liberal democrate, but 29 kerb crawlers done for today. More to come - and expect this practice to be extended to all sorts of crime (cause it will no doubt be a "great success" - surely name&shame websites is the next step?). And finally a tiny little piece on RFIDs in The Times today (hidden away with them called "radio transmitters").
 
Last edited:

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
20060130: dutch biometric passports cracked from 10 meters away (the register)

As the programme reports here, the passport was read remotely and then the security cracked using flaws built into the system, whereupon all of the biometric data could be read.

The crack is attributed to Delft smartcard security specialist Riscure, which here explains that an attack can be executed from around 10 metres and the security broken, revealing date of birth, facial image and fingerprint, in around two hours. Riscure notes that that the speed of the crack is aided by the Dutch passport numbering scheme being sequential.
 

sufi

lala
yeah i heard about an RFID flasher gadget - which you can build by modifying a regular camera flash - will delete any RFID within a certain distance,
obv that's not the same as a hack to read the data, but what we need is the hack to charge up our oysters at home by mobile phone innit? :cool:
 

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
20060203: Hugely inflated ID-theft numbers from Government (Times and most other media).

Ministers included in their total the figure of £395 million as the annual cost of money laundering alone. But the Home Office admits that this figure is only “for illustrative purposes” and that “no figures are currently available on the proportion of money laundering that relies on identity fraud”.

Furthermore, the Government claims that Apacs puts the cost of ID fraud linked to plastic cards at £504 million a year. But a spokeswoman for Apacs said that the real figure was less than £37 million. “The £504 million is the total losses for plastic cards. It is not just identity fraud on cards,” she said. “Within that overall figure there will be some cards stolen in the post, some skimmed or cloned, some lost or stolen.”

and on the passport crack
However, Nicko van Someren, chief technology officer at the security firm nCipher, said: “There is clear evidence that ID cards will open new channels for ID theft even where radio skimming is not possible, because cards that are scanned using an optical reader rather than a radio signal could potentially also have information lifted from them by unscrupulous people.

“A bank worker, for example, or a nightclub bouncer scanning your card to check you are over 18 could get your home address. How many women would want that?”

Hang around for more spin from your Government.
 
Last edited:

ambrose

Well-known member
if oystercard data is being used by TfL thwen it will be used to track trip data - assess popularity of routes, demand for services and this can be used to assess things that hinge on patronage for example - eg is increasing bus frequency on this service justified?

as for numberplate recognition, well for starters trafficmaster are already reading yr numberplates - you see those blue posts with what look like CCTV on along a-roads/motorways? thats trafficmasters network, which tracks vehicle speeds to assess congestion levels.
 

mms

sometimes
rewch said:
that story is very disturbing... especially the comments about revelations... thank you for the link though...

my mate rekons he can replicate the tech on an oyster card, he just needs peopleto go in on the gear need to do it with him.

on the other hand i won't buy one of these cards out of principal that i don't care for anyone i don't know to know my weareabouts more then they need to cos it's not their business.

my g/f got a letter from the debt collecting people the other day - to this address,wrong postcode (first fault)
it said she owed them money for a trip to hitchen on the 6th of jan where she didn't check in her oyster card.(a place she's never been)
Any attempts to contact them by phone lead to an answering machine,(they''ve never called her back about any message she's left) or end up just automatically ringing off .
some strange hell that.
 

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
so within a few years we will all be (passively) radio tracked by being forced to get and carry ID cards. ID cards which will probably enable our IDs to
be stolen out of thin air. The hackers are already on the case -
http://cq.cx/proxmarkii.pl

As far as I know, it is not possible to buy a device like the one that I have described above, and an instrument like this is practically essential for anyone experimenting with the latest generation of transponders. If anyone is interested in doing low-level work with RFID tags, then you could presumably save some time by starting with the platform that I have built. I do have many extra bare boards. At some point I intend to freely distribute the schematics, layout, and software, but there is a lot that must first be cleaned up. I will see.

As an example of the capabilities of this device, I go through the steps involved in cloning a Verichip. This is the same sort of process that would be required to clone any kind of ID-only tag. For a bidirectional (e.g multipage or anticollision) tag, the process would be similar but more complex.
 
Last edited:

Rambler

Awanturnik
mms said:
my g/f got a letter from the debt collecting people the other day - to this address,wrong postcode (first fault)
it said she owed them money for a trip to hitchen on the 6th of jan where she didn't check in her oyster card.(a place she's never been)
Any attempts to contact them by phone lead to an answering machine,(they''ve never called her back about any message she's left) or end up just automatically ringing off .
some strange hell that.

That just sounds like a scam to me, nothing to do with London Underground.
 
O

Omaar

Guest
Cellphone could crack RFID tags, says cryptographer

SAN JOSE — A well known cryptographer has applied power analysis techniques to crack passwords for the most popular brand of RFID tags.

Adi Shamir, professor of computer science at the Weizmann Institute, reported his work in a high-profile panel discussion at the RSA Conference here. Separately, Ron Rivest, who co-developed the RSA algorithms with Shamir, used the stage of the annual panel to call for an industry effort to create a next-generation hashing algorithm to replace today’s SHA-1.

In recent weeks, Shamir used a directional antenna and digital oscilloscope to monitor power use by RFID tags while they were being read. Patterns in power use could be analyzed to determine when the tag received correct and incorrect password bits, he said.

"The reflected signals contain a lot of information," Shamir said. "We can see the point where the chip is unhappy if a wrong bit is sent and consumes more power from the environment…to write a note to RAM that it has received a bad bit and to ignore the rest of the string," he added.

"I haven’t tested all RFID tags, but we did test the biggest brand and it is totally unprotected," Shamir said. Using this approach, "a cellphone has all the ingredients you need to conduct an attack and compromise all the RFID tags in the vicinity," he added.

Full Article
 

tryptych

waiting for a time
Police using Oyster to track criminals

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1730002,00.html

"Police hunting criminals are increasingly seeking information from electronically stored travel records, such as those created by users of the popular Oyster card in London.
Figures disclosed today show a huge leap in police requests to Transport for London, which operates the Oyster cards used to travel on buses, trains and the underground.

Just seven information requests were made by police in the whole of 2004, compared with 61 requests made in January this year alone.

Overall, police have requested to see journey information 243 times, and been given it 229 times, according to figures obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request, the Press Association reported."
 

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
and there's crime cameras used to catch traffic offenders

CCTV cameras designed to prevent robbery and other street crime are being used to penalise drivers who commit minor traffic offences.

Motorists have been handed £100 fines after being caught on film double parking, making illegal U-turns or driving through no-entry signs.

One CCTV camera in a residential street in Camden, north London, has resulted in more than 2,500 tickets being issued since it was installed last year as part of a pilot project. Its victims include residents who have briefly pulled over to unload shopping.

The Camden pilot will soon be rolled out across other London boroughs and councils throughout the country will be granted similar powers from 2008.
 
Top