Re: OT: Smartcards and Physical Security [Was: Re: Backport of the integer overflow in the brk system call]
On Thu, Dec 04, 2003 at 12:20:57AM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
>
> How about including your full name somewhere in your posts too then?
> I find it a bit off-putting to discuss security with someone who's
> obscuring their identity.
Ha Ha Ha what a joke. I don't want to be googled for all eternity.
Let me tell you a story about a job I had one time: I worked for a guy
(in his basement -- don't ask) who bought your personal credit card data
and other publicly available information. He would pay about $10,000 or
$15,000 for lists of ~100,000-200,000 people's data. My job was to
datamine it under criteria like: Give me all the people who make
between $50,000-$80,000 /yr, own a boat, live within 15 miles of certain
area, and used their Visa more than 10 times on the boat within the last
6 months. We'd rank order the data, apply the filter, and maybe get
10,000 good names, which he would sell for about $140,000 to a home
alarm company, who would then call you during dinner. [1]
Another job I had was for a drug testing company. My job was to write
the report processing system which would say "You Person X have Tested
Positive for Drugs A, B, and C and you are fucked." At one point in
1994 I had 40,000 people's drug test results on my 486SX-50. Just for
grins I did a group by query, grouping drug frequency by a company's SIC
industry code, and sorting in descending order. The most frequent
people to test positive for drugs are construction workers, marijuana
and cocaine. The next most frequent are school employees (probably bus
drivers) testing positive for alcohol. Everything else was kind of
evenly distributed.
And you wonder why I am concerned with my identity!!!
[1] I finally told the guy to go pound sand. I said: "You'd be more
useful to society if you just grow corn or something." Doing that type
of work made me want to slit my wrists.
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