TSA Paid $1.4 Million For Randomizer App That Chooses Left Or Right (geek.com) 334
An anonymous reader writes: For those of you who have traveled through U.S. airports in recent years, you may have noticed the Transport Security Administration (TSA) use a Randomizer app to randomly search travelers in the Pre-Check lane. The app randomly chooses whether travelers go left or right in the Pre-Check lane so they can't predict which lane each person is assigned to and can't figure out how to avoid the random checks. Developer Kevin Burke submitted a Freedom of Information Act request asking for details about the app. The documents he received reveals the TSA purchased the Randomizer iPad app for $336,413.59. That's $336,413.59 for an app, which is incredibly simple to make as most programming languages of choice have a randomizing function available to use. What may be even more intriguing is that the contract for the TSA Randomizer app was won by IBM. The total amount paid for the project is actually $1.4 million, but the cost is not broken down in Burke's documents. It's possible IBM supplied all the iPads and training in addition to the app itself.
Panama Papers (Score:5, Funny)
TSA soon to be appearing in the Panama Papers...
Expensive for good reason? (Score:3)
[Tinfoil] It's not a real randomizer app, it's an advanced layered neural network program (IBM...Watson?) that automates racial profiling so that TSA workers are in the clear, they can say the machine made the decision for someone to go through heightened security, "at random." Teaching the program to pick out the right minorities took a lot of work. [/Tinfoil]
That breaks down to... (Score:5, Funny)
$413 dollars in developer time to create the app and $336,000.59 in corporate overhead and bloat, the additional $1,000,000 is just for Evil
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$413 dollars in developer time to create the app and $336,000.59 in corporate overhead and bloat, the additional $1,000,000 is just for Evil
Much more than that. The requirements document was probably several thousand pages and required a dozen rewrites before it finally met specs.
Seriously 85% for interacting with gov't (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, 80%-85% of the bid covers dealing with the US government. Multiple thousand-documents over the course of years, flying back and forth for pointless meetings, and maybe you eventually get paid.
Here are my rates as a developer , for similar software delivered:
Order online, by submitting my order form: $159
Email me and discuss: $500
Meetings to discuss, demo (local businesses): $1,500
Local government bureaucracy: $8,000
Federal government: $400,000
Not similar to the TSA app, similar to each other (Score:2)
The rates I mentioned above for "similar software" meant for software of the kind I write (network security), not the TSA app. For a random left/right app like the TSA wanted, prices would be a bit lower. Not much lower for the federal government though, they'll require a thousand man hours of BS for the simplest application. I used to work at a place that did federal contracts.
Good ol' IBM, cutting out the little guy (Score:2)
I have practical and fool-proof system that requires no electricity or internet connection to operate.
I can sell it to you for about $5 per TSA agent. Actual cost to me is $0. Just tell me where you want me to ship this jar of pennies.
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Just tell me where you want me to ship this jar of pennies.
. . . but didn't IBM's precursor to their Cognitive Computer Platform named Watson beat Gary Kasparov at chess, "Deep Blue", and beat some dork at "Jeopardy", "Deep Cleavage on the assistant", and "Deep Pockets" at pitching pennies . . . ?
So it's probably more than just a random number generator:
"Watson, should this guy go left or right?"
"Warning, Will Robertson . . . Danger! Danger!
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He sources his pennies from the "leave a penny take a penny" cups at stores.... so his cost is zero.
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maybe he found the pennies on the ground, meaning they would come at 0 cost to himself as that isn't a gain or a loss, had he just left them on the ground and really a penny is worthless today, which is why a few countries got rid of the thing to begin with.. And he could just ship a single penny to each TSA agent instead of a whole jar, which would bring the cost down so much that he'd make a healthy profit out of that $5 per agent.
Everything has a cost, even "found" pennies -- you still have to pick it up, look at it to make sure it's really a penny, clean the dirt off it, store it somewhere, inventory it, pack it for shipping, etc.
If you were really going to sell these pennies to TSA as a business, you'd likely be better off getting rolls of pennies from the bank.
Standard C library... (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is whether it is truly random or not. If they spent $1.4M and got a truly random result, fine. It's absurdly pricey, but it works. If they spend $1.4M and got the rand() function, then terrorists might be able to exploit it to escape random searches.
Re:Standard C library... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's really stretching things. If you use something as simple as microseconds on a clock as the seed for your "random" number generation, there's "pretty much" no way you can exploit that short of hacking the device itself. It's not like people are going to stand there with a stopwatch and tell the TSA guy "OK....press the button...Now!"
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Re:Standard C library... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you use something as simple as microseconds on a clock as the seed for your "random" number generation, there's "pretty much" no way you can exploit that short of hacking the device itself.
You would be surprised in just how many ways random numbers can be screwed up.
First "simple as microseconds on a clock" is good, I have seen quite a bit of "randomized" code seeded with the system time. 15 milisecond resolution is the normal case and often leads to duplicated random sequences. High resolution timers exist and are widely available today, however they have to be actually used to help. Alternatively why use a random number generator if you could just request the microsecond time for each request - the low bits should be rather random.
Second mapping the range of the random number generator to your target range without killing the distribution is often non trivial. C++11 came with a whole library to replace rand() and several presentations on the topic, including how rand() % 2 isn't a 50:50 split when the original range has an uneven amount of values.
Third you often don't want a random selection - a fully random sequence can contain long stretches of only left or only right, which can overburden the affected lane while the other remains empty. Which means you somehow have to enforce the wanted distribution over shorter sequences. A simple solution can be implemented by shuffling a list with the wanted ratio of left/right values and a reshuffle each time the list is used up, games sometimes use this to avoid long loose streaks and prevent long win streaks.
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Since it's random and all; If they keep sending a number of new bad guys through, instead of just one, someone will get in eventually.
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Good luck studying that for weeks when the seed is different for every device and probably resets daily.
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reset the seed hourly based on user input like keys and mouse movement. 100% hackerproof unless the machine is compromised.
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Well, you don't even need a cryptographically secure random number. You just need one that can't be predicted by anyone on that day, which isn't really a tall order. You could do it in any language of your choice, let everyone see the code, and seed the generator with the current time in seconds (or ms or whatever). Still nobody would be able to guess, because they can't predict when you're gonna press that button.
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If you seed the generator before every call, you are doing it very very wrong.
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I'll give you an iPad that gives you a truly random result for only $1 million. It will just feed numbers from https://www.random.org/ [random.org].
Exploit? (Score:2)
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There are only two cases where exploiting the left/right randomization would matter to terrorists
1) They already have a means of getting contraband through the screening on one side but not the other, in which case your system is already broken, since the terrorists already have a 50% chance of getting through screening, even if your RNG is working the way you want.
2) There's a target on the one side but not the other, but if they want to make sure someone hits the target, they can just send a few terrorist
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There is absolutely no need for "true" random (whatever that is, the physical processes called "true random" are actually "we have no clue how it works, but we have a statistical model"). CPRNGs (Cryptographic Pseudo Random Number Generators) are entirely fine for this, because they are not predictable, unless you have the full state. Nobody needs "random" for this application here, non-predictable is entirely fine. As to seeding, a few precisely timed button-presses on start, a seed file from the day befor
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A couple of things to add to the above...
While it's a philosophical matter, I do not know if we even have true random. We have unpredictable pretty well covered and we have some things (like radioactive decay) that aren't yet understood well enough to be predicted. There are suitable sources for unpredictable results but I'm not really sure that we've got true random. I think that, in the few areas where we do have something close, that it's actually a lack of understanding on our part that makes us think t
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They possibly used the rand() function in their billing department.
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A) If IBM discovered a way to make something that is truly random, then $1.4M is not only a bargain, it's revolutionary.
B) IBM didn't make something truly random. They used a psuedo-random number generator (PRNG), the same as the rest of us, and we already have ones that are good enough for advanced cryptography. For a left/right decision, you could seed it with something trivial like the time of day accurate to the ms and have a degree of randomness sufficient to thwart attempts at exploiting the randomnes
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A) Radioactive decay is probably truly random, and you can get generators based on it for a lot less than $1.4M.
C) Assuming random selection with a fixed probability, it doesn't matter whether the terrorists are lined up consecutively or not.
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That cartoon villain level of planning isn't needed at all. There are gaping holes in the TSA security net. They take the "security" out of "security theater"
Seriously, don't you all remember, the 95% ineffective part... http://www.citylab.com/commute... [citylab.com]
Re:Standard C library... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to mention the huge security hole before you hit the TSA checkpoint. Especially if you are in a large airport during a busy time of the year.
TSA: "We spent $14 million to make our security process safer and more effective!"
Terrorists: "That's nice. We think we'll detonate our bombs in this nice, crowded security line. Not only will we kill a lot of people, but then you'll shut down this airport for days wrecking even more havoc on people's travel plans."
Re:Standard C library... (Score:5, Insightful)
Terrorists: "That's nice. We think we'll detonate our bombs in this nice, crowded security line. Not only will we kill a lot of people, but then you'll shut down this airport for days wrecking even more havoc on people's travel plans."
Always wondered why terrorist chose airports why not a church/synagogue packed with people on a Sunday/Saturday and zero security its easy pickings, then it would be Christians and truly a religious war but they attack airports sporting events concerts, symbols of western affluence. sort of answered my own question its not really about religion is it.
Maybe (Score:3, Insightful)
"as most programming languages of choice have a randomizing function available to use"
You mean has a psudo-random function that is not that hard to predict.
Casino Level Randomization is a little harder.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Informative)
A little harder, yes, but not by much.
I work on regulated casino software. And we use the Mersenne Twister [wikipedia.org] rather than any sort of dedicated randomization hardware.
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Interesting. Do you encrypt the output or put it through a keyed hash? Or are you using little enough randomness that attacks become too hard? I would have expected a CPRNG being the minimal requirement, though.
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Informative)
Some casinos are using actual quantum RNGs. For $1k I can get a USB RNG that emits one photon at a time and a polarized mirror with a perfect 50% chance to go through or reflect off of. 4Mbit/s of RNG. For $35 you can get a pretty strong opensource USB RNG that uses a combination of several quantum level electric, electro-thermal, and EM noise. http://www.bitbabbler.org/ [bitbabbler.org]
All nondeterministic RNGs are quantum in nature. All physical things are.
What people mean by quantum RNG is actually that they are isolating a single quantum event from all the others. So it has a nice distribution. Only this does not happen. As far as I've been able to ascertain (and it's my job to know) all quantum RNGs are measuring the sum of multiple events and so getting a binomial distribution that then needs a traditional entropy extraction algorithm to get to data with nondeterminism, a uniform distribution and something close to 100% Renye min entropy. This is therefore no different to normal RNGs except there's a smaller number of things in the core nondeterministic process.
For $0 extra, you can use the RNG in your computer. They're pretty good these days.
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Look at reverse-breakdown noise in a storage oscilloscope with bandwidth > 100MHz. Individual tunneling events are visible as you get a randomized saw-tooth. True, that are not individual electrons tunneling, but individual avalanches caused by individual electrons tunneling. A bit similar to what a photo-multiplier or a Geiger-Mueller tube gives you, but a _lot_ cheaper.
As to getting a good distribution, no physical system can do that. That is why anybody competent feeds the noise to a CPRNG instead of
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The $1k thing is for idiots. Unless they do whitening, it _will_ have bias. Reverse-breakdown noise feeding a CPRNG is by far enough.
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Even if there's a bias, they can eliminate it by taking two readings and then reacting as follows:
Left-Left => Ditch the result and try again
Left-Right => Direct the user left
Right-Left => Direct the user right
Right-Right => Ditch the result and try again
This should even out any bias and leave you with a 50-50 result.
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And if you do that, you get higher-order non-random behavior. Seriously, it is known how to do this right.
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You have not. You may have misunderstood how those TRNGs worked though.
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Reset the seed to the millisecond the button was pressed each time it's pressed. Its breakable, but if you can bribe the guard to time it exactly, you can also bribe him to simply put you in one line regardless of what the app says. If you can't bribe the guard, good luck syncing the device's time and trying to social engineer the guy to press the button at an exact moment.
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Depends on the language. Some use MT19997 and that is pretty good and still fast (not directly suitable for crypto though). And as soon as you have a crypto-library, you will get a CPRNG that is a lot better than what is needed here even if it is pretty bad, because of the low number of bits used.
Training? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Training? (Score:5, Funny)
That was surprising? Have you seen a TSA agent recently?
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The TSA employees first needed to be trained to understand "left" and "right".
Re:Training? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's possible IBM supplied all the iPads and training in addition to the app itself.
I know it is fun and easy to criticize the TSA, and I am in favor of replacing them entirely with any of a dozen different possibilities. That said, there is a big difference between developing an app and supplying hardware and doing testing and training. I could build the app but I have no idea what the cost would be to test it sufficiently to meet government standards, then train the staff to use them, then equip the staff with hardware to use it. The cost of the app could literally be $0 and still top $1 million after the testing, training and equipment costs.
Someone else pointed out this is typical clickbait. It's got a shocking headline but then scant details on what actually caused the scenario. If they'd instead said "TSA has IBM develop an app that IBM contributed for free in exchange for exclusive rights to train staff for $10/hr each on how to handle customer service. Additionally, IBM will supply sufficient devices to have a minimum of two for each airport line at 5% profit per device" then the headline wouldn't generate nearly so much interest and the criticisms would be much better founded.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that the bureaucracy that guides the TSA spent far more than is reasonable. I just didn't see enough details in TFA to assume that is actually the case. Does *anyone* have a breakdown on what kind of training, what kind of testing, what kind of devices were purchased?
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Presumably the app takes inputs like lanes open, pre-check lanes open, historical information on speed of processing each lane, etc, to decide how many people get assigned to the pre-check lane. And training the supervisors to upload all that data is a major cost, right?
I do see the ipad on a nice ruggedized stand/enclosure, and I'd imagine the 1M non-development costs include those units.
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The TSA's employees need training on an app that randomly tells people to go left or right?
The app was the easy part. The expensive part was being able to answer "Do you mean my right or your right?" every time they tell someone which line to get in. Anti-violence training is expensive.
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The TSA's employees need training on an app that randomly tells people to go left or right?
The app was the easy part. The expensive part was being able to answer "Do you mean my right or your right?" every time they tell someone which line to get in. Anti-violence training is expensive.
Hehe... I hadn't thought of that problem.
Nice nonsensical article. (Score:5, Insightful)
ZOMG $1.4M for an app that randomizes a single bit!!! (*)
* Note that it may have actually been $1.4M for hardware, training, and app.
Seriously, how fucking asinine are these clickbait articles getting? If you can decisively say that they charged $300k+ or $1.4M+ for an app that simple, do so. Otherwise you're just full of shit.
When Mr. Trump says fraud and waste .... (Score:4, Interesting)
He means precisely instances like that. One needs to find a more idiotic view: the app tells TSA person which way to show the finger. If anybody wants an example of fraud, waste and abuse: this is it. We could listen ad nauseum to TSA explanations, saying that app needs to be secure, or that they have to follow the procedures, or they needed many licenses.... blah blah blah
The point is that if airport security would be private that kind of nonsense would not exist by definition. Now it is public money that were spent.
This is not the only software that uses random function. There is another software that randomly selects passengers for additional screening. Here is how Israel does it, does it for free and very effectively: they let the screening agents to pick and choose any passenger that they want or have a hunch. So fare they are very effective in preventing bad dudes in boarding their planes.
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Except this is America, and the TSA seems to pick from the bottom of the barrel, so your plan would just result in extra 'screening' for all the hot chicks? If you think that's absurd, see how good a job they did picking who to run through the body scanners.
Re:When Mr. Trump says fraud and waste .... (Score:4, Insightful)
He means precisely instances like that.
The problem is, that what he proposes, is more of this... He proposes that more of the country should be privatised, because "businesses can do it much more efficiently".
The correct solution here was not to get any business involved at all, because as soon as you do that, they try and make a (huge) profit out of it. The correct solution was instead to get a software engineering intern on the government's payroll to write this app in one day.
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When Mr. Trump says fraud and waste, he means not the kind where he's making a profit.
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Yeah but errr... they're not private. What's your argument? We should privatise? OR we should do it like Israel? To do it like Israel will cost billions of dollars of public money because... the Israelis hire they're smart people and give them a great deal of training. Your average TSA grunt is so dumb they would have died off before reaching breed
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That is a good one. To present a better statistical gymnastic, comparable to the one done at similar type of organizations as TSA, you better say the following:
there is approximately one billion (almost) travelers per year. 1.4 million divided by one billion, only makes less than 0.1 cent per passenger per year.
Keep dividing and you will always find a way to justify a waste.
The point is that such app was completely unnecessary to begin with. The second point is that this is just a tip of an iceberg.
iPad has a camera (Score:2)
Tricky... (Score:2)
This is one of those things that sounds like it could be tricky to actually get right. Still they could just do what that secret service does when choose travel options for the President; you flip a coin with one agent calling it in air and the other doing the flipping. Seems reasonable free from exploits.
FWIW I don't think this about cryptographically secure random and more about a system that by design can't be hacked and such that you'd need to bribe an entire team to get through the line you want.
What if the NIST were involved? (Score:2)
Sounds about right (Score:2)
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This.
Heck any large organization comes with a very high decision tax. Some underling effed something in the past, so going forward VP level authority is needed to do anything that affects more than your part of the office. VP's are just as error prone and even more risk adverse, not to mention busy as hell. So pre-meeting meetings are held, consultants are brought in to provide unbiased opinions, lawyers have to be consulted since it crosses state lines, and finally the finance department will lose the d
Rules and Regulations (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you selling it to the federal government? [YES]
Is a random number generator used in the product? [YES]
Is the product intended for a security application? [YES]
Requirement: The Random Number Generator be CAVS certified to SP800-90A and the module within which is operates be FIPS140-2 certified.
That's $100,000 before you've got out of bed, to meet the government procurement requirements.
Why am I working for a living? (Score:3)
$1.4 million just to flip a coin? (Score:2)
Come on now, what could go wrong? Well, OK
http://www.footballzebras.com/... [footballzebras.com]
In this thread... (Score:2)
In this thread you will find out why it is unusual to find a software developer that can start a successful software development business.
SchrÃdinger's cat (Score:3)
Build a device with a small radioisotope source, detector, poison vial and cat. Calibrate the source to provide a 50% probability of a particle emission for the average passenger rate. Open the box and check the cat. Cat alive: Right lane. Cat dead: Left lane, reset vial, replace the cat and proceed.
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Dear slashdot.
Please fix foreign characters.
TSA ended the program (Score:2)
The TSA ended the managed inclusion [travelmarketreport.com] program for which this app was built and deployed.
They ended it when a notorious felon [dhs.gov]was allowed to go through the pre-check line.
Dear TSA send me my $1.3 million please (Score:2)
#include
#include
int main(int ac, char* av[])
{
srand(time(NULL));
while( 1 )
printf("%s\n", (rand() RAND_MAX/2) ? "Left" : "Right" );
}
assuming is Publically Financed Software (Score:2)
This is in no way random (Score:2)
Or if they insist on an iPad, at least use the camera to determine someone is there and then say l
It makes sense if you call them by the right name (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Obviously they had to pay a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
I honestly could see it being in the low five-figures to develop such an application, but that money would mostly be applied to figuring out how to design the user-interface of the application such that it best-fits with how the TSA is *supposed* to operate, and in beta-testing to confirm that it does what it's supposed to do and that any untrained TSA agent down to the junior-assistant-trainee who breathes with his mouth open could use it and understand it, but mid-six-figures is pretty ridiculous.
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I know you're being silly on purpose, but would a true randomizing device really be necessary?
I have a $0.01 alternative to this randomizer app.... Flip a fair coin. Designate one side of the penny Heads, and the other side tails....
Also, even if they have 50,000 pre-check lanes, the total cost is still only $500.
Re:Obviously they had to pay a lot (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently read "Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things" to my eight year old. One of the (many) interesting substories involved "fair coins." Lauren's money isn't taken in Userland because her quarters can't be guaranteed as fair. However, someone points out that you can make any coin a fair coin by flipping it twice. If both flips result in the same side, you ignore it and flip two more times. If the two flips have differing sides, you take the first side.
In other words:
Heads-Heads or Tails-Tails = Flip again.
Heads-Tails = Heads
Tails-Heads = Tails
Even if there's a bias towards one side, it will be cancelled out and the flip would be fair.
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Why? Let's say it's the probability is 0.7 of head, 0.3 of tails. The probability of head-heads is 0.7*0.7. The probability of tails-tails is 0.3*0.3. The probability of heads-tails is 0.7*0.3. The probability of tails-heads is 0.3*0.7. 0.3*0.7 = 0.7*0.3, so the probability of heads-tails is equal to the probability of tails-heads.
This assumes that the coin tosses are independent.
Re:Obviously they had to pay a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
"IMO the gaps between the rationals are small enough that it doesn't matter if you can prove this for irrationals"
Excuse me, but your opinion is wrong. Rational numbers are said to be sparse in the real number space. For the argument see "Lebesgue Measure." As for why there are more irrational numbers than rational numbers see "Cantor's diagonal argument".
Your reasoning is however correct. If P(HEADS) = p, P(TAILS) = (1-p). The probability for coin tosses are:
HH = p*p
HT = p(1-p)
TH = (1-p)p
TT = (1-p)(1-p)
Eliminating HH and TT leaves HT and TH at p(1-p) probability. There's no assumption on p being rational or not. However the further you are from p=0.5, the longer it takes to get a "valid" flip.
Re:Obviously they had to pay a lot (Score:5, Funny)
the actual passenger-facing software was really cheap. what was expensive to develop and install is the cameras and computer detection algorithms to tell if the person is white, black or brown.
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I know you're being silly on purpose, but would a true randomizing device really be necessary? Human traffic patterns already have such a random element to them that even if one somehow could reliably predict the next number in the software algorithm, there are so many other factors that can't be controlled that it's still essentially random anyway.
Small airport, obscure time there might not be much of a line. That said, if you look at the real requirements then no. All that's required is:
a) Some form of initial seed so it's not the same left-right pattern every time you turn it on
b) A non-predictable outcome, a slight bias like 55% right, 45% left is pretty much irrelevant
Any kind of low quality seed and PRNG would do that, even the ones we'd generally consider flawed or broken. You could have the operator press the button a few times with a minimum
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> Human traffic patterns already have such a random element to them
You'd think so. It's not. Neither vehicular nor pedestrian traffic is random. There is order to that chaos, it's just not easy to find and the herd is easily spooked.
I lack the time and energy to get into the gritty details but I've gone into this quite a bit in the past. Feel free to scrounge through my posting history if you want. I modeled traffic (vehicular and pedestrian) and I'm pretty sure that it is chaotic but not truly random.
It
Re:Obviously they had to pay a lot (Score:4, Funny)
What happens when ISIS uses one of the well-known DNS holes to redirect http://www.yesnogenerator.com/ [yesnogenerator.com] to a site that returns the answer that they want? You just let 5 terrorists get through security.
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I have a system that is:
- Analog
- Does not require electricity
- Durable
- Ambidextrous
- Gender neutral
- Made in the USA
It is called a flipping a US quarter. For $1.2M dollars, I will provide 1 case of 2000 quarters and a training video on how to flip coins.
Training video here: http://putlocker.is/watch-goin... [putlocker.is]
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I have a system that is:
- Analog
- Does not require electricity
- Durable
- Ambidextrous
- Gender neutral
- Made in the USA
Training video here: http://putlocker.is/watch-goin... [putlocker.is]
Dear Mr. Sexconker,
We are in receipt of your case of 2000 (two thousand) manually operated analog cupronickel randomization discs. We admire the evident durability and domestic origin of your product, and initial testing proves that the sequence of flips is suitably random. In addition, we are confident that your training video can be developed into a course that our agents will be able to complete in about six months.
Unfortunately, your product does n
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I'm happy to compete, because I have a system that is more effective, easier to use, as well as cheaper. My solution only costs $1.1 million, and I will furnish 10,000 coins. Instead of bulky, heavy quarters my system uses a copper-plated zinc coin that is both smaller and lighter than a quarter, resulting in less physical strain in the workforce. The obverse depicts the profile of a man, while the reverse is of a rectangular building which cannot be confused with the obverse. In addition, my system con
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You two best race to the patent office!
Re:Why do you need an iPad and an app? (Score:5, Informative)
A simple micro-controller, a button, and two LEDs would work just as well for just a few bucks.
A die [wikipedia.org] (singular of "dice") would work just as well, and would handle up to 6 checkpoints.
Amazon [amazon.com] has them, 100 for $2.79.
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> A die would work just as well, and would handle up to 6 checkpoints.
Screw that, just hand out a set of polyhedral dice. You can trivially generate 1 or 2, 1-3, 1-4, 1-6, 1-8, 1-10, 1-12, 1-20, or 1-100, and that's without getting cute with rerolls or bases that aren't 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Not that you should need a link- this is slashdot, you know D&D.
Re: (Score:3)
Presumably Pre-Check fliers get a saving throw?
Re: (Score:2)
I actually wonder why they need any randomization behavior here at all. Why not just switch between lanes in a round-robin fashion (i.e. for two lanes, 1-2-1-2-1-2-...)? Statistically speaking, this should produce the same distribution as a randomizer, so the effect on the queues would be the same, no?
Re: (Score:2)
Okay, that makes more sense now, thank you.
Re: (Score:2)
I hope you aren't suggesting that we entrust our security and a lives to just random chance are you??
We need very sophisticated, very complicated and most importantly very expensive systems to determine which line I need to stand in in order for my loved ones and I to be truly safe.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:2)
...they used a die. [snopes.com]
Re: (Score:3)
I roll to dodge the Rapiscan line. *1* Rats.
Ok. I roll to dodge to pass the scan without any anomalies. *2* Failed.
Ok, so anomalies are found. I roll to protect against the TSA pat-down. *1* Failed.
Re: (Score:3)
To be fair, can you imagine flipping a coin and flawlessly catching it thousands of times per day?
Re: (Score:2)
> What, how to press the "flip coin" button?
Several million to design a physical UI so you really feel like you are flipping the coin?
Re: (Score:2)