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Wired: New Fingerprint Tech Could Mean Never Losing Your Keys Again. Or, put another way: “New Fingerprint Tech Could Mean Never Being Able To Change Your Locks Again.”

Fingerprint recognition came into wide use in forensic investigations in the early 20th century. Ever since, sci-fi writers and scientists have dreamed of using the unique skin contours on our fingertips to tell our machines we really are who we say we are. The problem is that the number of errors has just been too high.

The article breathlessly continues, extolling the new technology, but judders awkwardly to a halt at the privacy discussion. You can almost hear the sneering tone as they describe the tinfoil-hat Butlerian-jihading naysayers:

No story about biometrics is complete without mentioning privacy concerns. As they say in business, if you can measure it, you can manage it. And not everyone wants to be managed, especially if the government or a big corporation has the calipers.

This is a part of the right argument, but presented in the wrong way. It’s not that “not everyone wants to be managed.” I’m not trying to stay off “the grid” or anything—I use credit cards, I like advertising, I have a blog—but an increase in the use of biometrics for authentication still scares the pants off me.

The real problem is always this: how would you revoke that token if it were compromised? Passwords can be changed; door locks can be re-keyed. What about your fingerprints?

(US residents: Think about how damaging it is to have your Social Security number stolen. This is much, much worse.)

I noticed this afternoon that I’ve been silently banned from my favorite shiny-things-on-the-intertubes website, reddit.

Last night I came across something that I thought the programming.reddit.com crowd would enjoy: The Future of Vim on the Mac, a survey of the fractured state of the Mac OS X Vim port. There are lots of OS X geeks and vim geeks on Reddit, so it seemed a natural thing to post. +1 Informative.

This morning I went to check programming.reddit (to see if my article had spurred any discussion), and didn’t see it in the first couple of pages of “hot” stories. Not so hot a topic, I guess. I went to my list of links and comments to see what the score was: zero. OK, nobody cares.

On a whim I decided to dig through the list of all programming articles by date to see what other stuff came up around the same time. After all, if my story lost the popularity contest, it lost to something else, right?

It’s not there.

I skimmed back about 10 pages before satisfying myself that it was simply nowhere to be found. So I deleted the link from Reddit and re-posted it. About an hour later, its score is still at 0 (didn’t these things originally start at +1?) and it’s still not anywhere on the site. Not hot, not new, “rising” or “all.” Zilch.

As you can see, I posted a handful of other links (submitted both to programming and reddit proper) to see if I could get anything to show. The answer, friends, is no.

Any other members of the reddit silent minority out there? No? Just me?

In fact, the tragedy is that Amazon could have built this store 10 years ago — the music labels simply wouldn’t allow it. What’s happened now is that the music label executives — at least at Universal and EMI — have finally gotten it through their thick skulls that it’s the iPod that drives iTunes sales, not the other way around. Apple’s FairPlay DRM isn’t (at least primarily) some sort of lock-in scheme to force people to buy iPods; FairPlay was a requirement stipulated by the labels, without which they would not have allowed Apple to sell their music at all.

By the way, if you install the amazonmp3 downloader, you get a free Apples in Stereo song to (a) test that the downloader works correctly, and (b) force you to walk through the process of buying an amazonmp3 track for the first time. Objective (b) is enormously effective in lowering any residual cognitive barriers to buying tracks over the Web (as opposed to the iTMS). Minor gripe with the process: Even though the track is free, Amazon will demand that you supply a credit card and billing address (presumably this is because the amazonmp3 store is US-only at the moment, as enforced by those bits of info).

Over on erinmak: Between the Rockets and a hard place.

Officially, I’m offended by this. I like how Adelman’s going to “try” to get some basketball knowledge into our pretty little heads. [...] As a fan, it’s hard to pass up.

Time for another forgotten classic from the vast Again With the Comics archives. Here we present Dostoyevsky Comics, originally printed in Drawn and Quarterly #3 (2000), and currently out-of-print, as far as I know. Crime and Punishment, originally written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, was brilliantly adapted here by R. Sikoryak, as seen through a Dick Sprang Batman filter. This marriage of Classic Russian Literature and the Caped Crusader of Gotham also serves as further proof, if any were needed, that everything is better with Batman.

“The first thing you have to do when remediating a gas station,” the daughter of an environmental lawyer said to me, “is take out the underground gas tanks.”

I think it looks like a hatch out of “Lost.” Or a breaching sandworm.

[taken at the defunct Conoco, San Jacinto at Alabama]

(With apologies to the Fireball.)