For as long as anyone can remember, the United States government has wallowed in fear mongering. Now there’s actually a real legitimate threat to the national health, and many people, especially the young, aren’t listening to warnings.
Russian hackers, and also hackers from former Soviet republics that are not Russia whom we lump with their Russian counterparts partly for convenience and mostly out of geographic ignorance, are trying to hack into your stuff.
No one knows why. What’s in it for them? What are they going to do? Steal your negative bank balance? Bring it on, fuckers!
I mean, for some reason, we are supposed to be really upset and scared when Target, or Bank of America, or the U.S. government, or whatever gets hacked and our precious “data” gets taken. Even though, if someone uses your credit card, nothing happens. You call them. They take off the charges. (If they’re total jerks, they can charge you a whopping $50 per card. Whatevs.)
Yeah, you have to call them, but hey, while you’re on the phone with them anyway, maybe you can give them a hard time about the 25.24 percent “penalty charge” interest rate they’re charging you despite the fact that this ain’t Weimar Germany.
I say, screw it: Give your credit card number out to random bums! Tell them not to use it in any stores with cameras, though — which there aren’t any. Never mind.
Anyway, the latest development/fad on the trying-to-keep-Russian-hackers-out-of-your-personal-crap front is biometric identification: using your fingerprints (like on the iPhone), iris scans (like in creepy dystopian movies and at passport control at American airports) and voice recognition in lieu of a password.
Pretty smart! Fingerprints are pretty much unique, except for evil identical twins. (Don’t bother, evil fraternal twins.) Ditto for iris scans — not the flower, stupid — and voice recognition. If it’s your face, or fingerprint, or eye, then that’s you and not some Russian hacker. Right?
Maybe not.
It’s not impossible to imagine some mash-up of the 1997 movie “Face/Off,” in which John Travolta and some other guy who looks like Nick Cage get their faces switched and stuff happens, and the even older TV show “Mission Impossible,” which constantly deployed form-fitting face masks, as a way to foil biometric face ID technology. Take that, NSA with your real-time tracking of our heads via ubiquitous street surveillance cameras!
On the eye front, what if the Russians take a cue from the 1980s street gang the Westies, who controlled the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in Manhattan? Guys kept getting killed, and the prints on the murder weapons always suggested the same suspect — biggest gangster serial killer ever! Turned out the fingerprints belonged to a dude who’d been killed himself.
A clever boss kept the dead guy’s arm in the freezer and used it to apply his fingerprints to any gun used by his crew.
What if a Russian hacker stole your eye? Or hacked into your computer camera —yes, they can do that — and created a 3-D scan of your orb on a 3-D printer?
Fingerprints, it turns out, are actually an incredibly shitty form of security. “Hackers have already made dummy fingerprints — using pictures of people’s hands available online — to swipe into the iPhone 6 scanner,” reports NPR.
Tech investor David Cowan says: “Either a password or a biometric can be stolen. But only the password can be changed. Once your fingerprint is stolen, it’s stolen forever, and you’re stuck.”
Well, not exactly. You could cancel that fingerprint, and use one of your other nine. But we take Cowan’s point: Best to stick with the classic “123456″ and “PASSWORD” passwords.
