Tag: passport
BlackBerry Passport asks: is it hip to be square?
BlackBerry announces new Passport 'phone'
BlackBerry – yes, it still exists – has announced its next new model, the Passport … which looks to be more phablet than smartphone. Company CEO John Chen said on Thursday that the phone was set to launch in September…
$250 kit lets you clone passport RFID chips just by driving past
Chris Paget isn’t a hacker, but he’s got the means to clone the RFID chip in your passport. Think of it as him doing you a favour. Using $250 of off-the-shelf components, Chris built a machine to sniff and clone RFID tags. During a 20-minute drive in downtown San Francisco, he managed to copy two passports completely unbeknownst to their owners.
Paget claims he only built it to show that it’s possible:
“It’s one thing to say that something can be done, it’s another thing completely to actually do it. It’s mainly to defeat the argument that you can’t do it in the real world, that there’s no real-world attack here, that it’s all theoretical.”
For a video of the device in action, click over the jump.
Mobile phones about to become electronic tags – a passport might be required to buy one
If you’re one of those people who likes to get angry about possible privacy invasions, this should get you nicely red-faced until well after lunchtime.
As part of the vague, all-encompassing crackdown on anything to do with “terrorism,” the government is considering adding mobile phones to its national database of who owns what – so you could be asked to hand over your passport in exchange for buying a cheap pay-as-you-go job…
