And so, the claim season undergoes an energetic start...

We must've handled about a dozen folks today who called with complaints of one kind or another regarding packages sent prior to Christmas. Fortunately, nobody had taken "obnoxious" or "stupid" pills prior to calling - or if they did, the dosages were comparatively small - so the conversations were civil... at least as far as clients were concerned. Poor Brady had the devil's own time trying to nail down FedEx Ground's policy with regard to leaving packages with and without signatures (conclusion: there is no consistent policy), and was told three times in the course of the day by the FedEx or UPS rep with whom he was speaking that he could expect a callback within an hour with more information, only to end the day with a perfect zero-for-three score.

As for myself, my throat did a passable imitation - by the timbre and modulation of voice passing through it - of a malevolent djinn in search of a baseball bat to apply liberally about my head and shoulders. I moved slowly at the store, and managed somehow to make it to 4 pm, at which point Galina took me home and I out-and-out slept for nearly two hours. Feht says this crap I have has 1-2 days more to run, which means I'll be over it at just about the time Natalie goes home. Fortuntately, nobody called to bug me with any translation work, which I'll describe as "good" only from the perspective of not unduly complicating my life at a time when I find it difficult to breathe.

I watched the pilot of Firefly with Natalie last night and enjoyed it again. I look forward to watching Serenity on DVD, and find it encouraging that the DVD remains #1 for yet another period of time on the Amazon list of best-sellers.

Speaking of Natalie, she is out with her friend Kiu (who, together with her husband, run the Chinese restaurant on this end of town) to see Chronicles of Narnia. I hope she has fun.

Moi, I am off to rub some feet!

Cheers...

It can't happen here?

On the heels of an announcment of comprehensive tracking of automobile movements in England (for law-enforcement purposes, naturally) comes this article that gives a high-level overview of some of the schemes being hatched on this side of The Pond.

However, author Declan McCullagh is simply not paranoid enough in his thinking, in my view.

Primo, any auto-tracking system that interacts with GPS wouldn't be of much use if it couldn't actually verify who is driving the car, wouldn't you agree? Tie a car to a driver to a GPS system, and not only can one scratch any petty itch that might occur to a bureaucrat intent on building an empire (crime prevention, enforcement of motor vehicle laws, sale of marketing data to the private sector), you pretty much also close a hole that currently exists in the nation's public transportation system, i.e., the ability of people to move from place to place in an automobile in a largely anonymous fashion.

Close this hole, and you would win big brownie points by giving the public the impression that terrorists can no longer move with impunity among the population, despite the unfortunate side effect of further marginalizing those people who have found themselves on "no fly" lists simply because they share a common name with a Bad Person™ somewhere in the world. Those who today cannot fly without loads of hassle would, in a brave new GPS-ed world of the future, no longer be able to move about by car too well, either.

(But I am probably being unfair with that last observation. Something will eventually be done about the false positives in the government's database, else it might occur to scum like al-Zarqawi to order their henchmen to simply change their names to "John Armstrong," "Mike Smith," or something equally innocuous just to get such names added to the "no fly" list and really gum up the works.)

One item of particluar interest in the CNET story:

A report prepared by a Transportation Department-funded program in Washington state says the GPS bugs must be made "tamper proof" and the vehicle should be disabled if the bugs are disconnected.

"This can be achieved by building in connections to the vehicle ignition circuit so that failure to receive a moving GPS signal after some default period of vehicle operation indicates attempts to defeat the GPS antenna," the report says.

It doesn't mention the worrisome scenario of someone driving a vehicle with a broken GPS bug--and an engine that suddenly quits half an hour later.

Yeah, just the thing you want to have happen during a medical emergency, or something equally life-threatening. But the major threat, in my opinion, would not be a busted GPS bug. It would sooner be some kind of attack designed to take out GPS satellites, either physically or virtually.

The physical scenario is probably something the military is prepared for, kinda. I think it'd be devilishly hard to covertly position kinetic energy weapons next to all the satellites in the GPS constellation, but what about a deliberate coordinated attack? We gonna respond with nukes if, say, the Koreans manage to muster enough missiles to take out our GPS and turn any area that adopts this "tamper proof" nonsense into a parking lot?

Or how about simply jamming the heck out of the broadcast GPS signal? I suppose you could make the GPS receivers in cars resistant to jamming, but that'd only make them more expensive, no?

In the end, I am probably spouting technical gibberish, but it just seems to me that making the operability of all motor vehicles in an area rely upon a single point of failure (the GPS system) is a marvelously dumn idea with exactly the kind of appeal that makes it so attractive to non-technical bureaucrats.

Cheers...