"There's a reason you don't wear your Social Security number across your T-shirt," Albrecht says, "and beaming out your new, national RFID number in a 30-foot radius would be far worse."

There are no federal laws against the surreptitious skimming of Americans' RFID numbers, so it won't be long before people seek to profit from this, says Bruce Schneier, an author and chief security officer at BT, the British telecommunications operator.

Data brokers that compile computer dossiers on millions of individuals from public records, credit applications and other sources "will certainly maintain databases of RFID numbers and associated people," he says. "They'd do a disservice to their stockholders if they didn't."

Or put simply, everyone knows that this is scary beyond reason and we need to do something now BEFORE it's a problem.

Here is some more information from the source article:

In its October 2005 Federal Register notice, the State Department reassured Americans that the e-passport's chip — the ISO 14443 tag — would emit radio waves only within a 4-inch radius, making it tougher to hack.

Technologists in Israel and England, however, soon found otherwise. In May 2006, at the University of Tel Aviv, researchers cobbled together $110 worth of parts from hobbyists kits and directly skimmed an encrypted tag from several feet away. At the University of Cambridge, a student showed that a transmission between an e-passport and a legitimate reader could be intercepted from 160 feet.

The article also mentions a video that shows the results of his experiment. I was able to find it HERE.

Lifelock was sued by Experian for placing fraud alerts for anyone and everyone when the alerts are supposed to be set by individuals themselves and only when they feel they are at risk for ID theft. While I think the whole fraud alert system is bogus and it doesn't really matter if you set one or not, I can't help but snicker that the courts ruled that the practice of a 3rd party company setting them for customers (like Lifelock does) is not legal.

Considering that the first 2 bullet points on Lifelock's "what we do" page is "set fraud alerts" and "set them again after they expire", their list of what you supposedly get for the money you pay is going to look quite anemic indeed.

I understand that using a word like rape to describe companies that take data from people against their will is a bit coarse, but it's exactly how I feel. I found out this weekend that a friend of mine had his and his wife's fingerprints taken from them by Seaworld before they were allowed to go into the park.

Though you might say "He could have just left", he had already bought a two-day pass for him and his family and invested a significant amount of time and money in the trip. Besides, no one should have to be treated like a criminal just because a theme park is concerned about a few dishonest people who are sharing passes. They could just as easily print their photos on every person's pass which would be even more efficient without the privacy issue.

I can't stand the trends that some of these places are setting and I hope they don't get away with it. If we're lucky, the ACLU or state of California are already looking into this issue.

While playing online games like World of Warcraft and similar, you find advertisements for people who will get you rare items or in-game money (gold) for a fee. These so-called "gold-farmers" are often employed in different countries like China.

Well, China took note and passed a ban on gold farming based on the idea that the economy of large online games could affect the real economy negatively.

Whatever the reason, I think that getting rid of the farmers will have a positive effect on the games themselves and I hope we see more of this in the future.

According to CNET, Firefox 3.5 is twice as fast as Firefox 3 which puts it above most of the browsers on the market (right behind Google's Chrome browser).