The woman also was quoted as saying that the broker gave her the special tape with someone else’s fingerprints on, and that she slipped past the biometric recognition system by holding her taped index fingers over the scanner.
According to an analysis by the bureau, regular adhesive tape does not work, as the scanner fails to read any prints. The results have led the immigration bureau to suspect that the woman might have used a special tape bearing someone else’s fingerprints.
Although the bureau detained the woman at an immigration facility for further questioning, she did not provide information that pinpointed what the tape is made of or the South Korean broker before she was deported again in mid-September.
The bureau has compiled a report based on her statements and submitted it to the Justice Ministry. The report says it is conceivable such tape exists and that the South Korean broker might have helped a considerable number of foreigners enter Japan using it.
According to the ministry, the immigration section at Aomori Airport kept images of the woman’s fingerprints, but they were imperfect and did not match the genuine fingerprints of the woman.
This is a little confusing. Was the print database incomplete and therefore her real prints would have allowed her through anyway, or was a fake set of prints on tape the key to getting through immigration? I suspect the latter is more important since tape has to have provided a valid set of prints or she would have failed entry. Although, this assumes she really had tape on her fingers when she went through immigration. Is that a certainty? The story says her testimony is what led police to believe this tape exists. Since she was not caught in the act and is a known liar perhaps she made the whole thing up. More details hopefully will emerge when/if she tries again.
I had to bite my tongue as I read about “a stunning rise in pirate assaults” in a new AP article about a New US-led naval force to battle Somali pirates. The rise in piracy was not only tracked and I would argue predictable (as I argued back in January of 2006!), but it also followed the intentional disintegration of the situation in Somalia by US and Ethiopian intervention. Correlation? I think there is ample reason to see causation. Notice how the AP article concludes:
The flagship, the USS San Antonio, is an amphibious ship capable of bringing hundreds of Marines ashore.
This is the type of action needed to truly rattle the pirates, said Noel Choong, head of the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center.
“Right now there is no major deterrent,” he said. “The military maybe chases away the pirates, but they regroup and come back for another attack on another ship. Piracy will continue until their networks and bases are hit.”
In other words, they found a convenient place to build networks and bases — a set of vulnerabilities they could exploit. It is hard not to get into hindsight mode, but the suggestion that stability and security in Somalia will cut down the piracy is surely a way of questioning the tactics that undermined the formation of a popular government. I guess the question is whether the cost of piracy and related activity, such as the Mumbai attacks, is higher or lower than if the US had allowed a hostile but potentially stable Islamic state to form?
Ok, maybe I’m a little too excited about the next generation of storage, but CES 2009 has revealed a SanDisk Solid State Drive that promises a reasonable leap in laptop technology:
The SanDisk G3 SSDs are more than five times faster than the fastest 7,200 RPM HDDs and more than twice as fast as SSDs shipping in 2008, clocking in at 40,000 RPM and anticipated sequential performance of 200MB/s read and 140MB/s write.
The G3 SSDs provide a Longterm Data Endurance (LDE) of 160 terabytes written (TBW) for the 240GB version, sufficient for over 100 years of typical user usage.
Throw one of these in a dying laptop and watch the amazing benefits. Awesome for energy consumption as well as speed. On the other hand, these of course represent a new level of threat as dumping and running with massive amounts of data will be so much easier…
A skier at Colorado’s luxury Vail ski resort was left suffering from a double case of exposure after a freak accident left him dangling upside down and pantless from a ski lift.
Freak accident? One too many beers the night before? How would you test for someone falling through a chair? Needless to say there were plenty of people nearby to take out their cameras and document the situation…poor guy.
The story is that he was suspended only by his right ski, and it took more than fifteen minutes to reverse the lift and disentangle him before he could put his pants back on.
