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Transportation United Kingdom Privacy Security Software The Almighty Buck Technology

Iris Scans and Fingerprints Could Be Your Ticket On British Rail (silicon.co.uk) 75

Mickeycaskill quotes a report from Silicon.co.uk: Rail passengers could use fingerprints or iris scans to pay for tickets and pass through gates, under plans announced by the UK rail industry. In its current form, the mobile technology is intended to allow passengers to travel without tickets, instead using Bluetooth and geolocation technology to track a passenger's movements and automatically charge their travel account at the end of the day for journeys taken. The Rail Delivery Group (RDG), which represents train operators and Network Rail, said further development could see passengers identified using biometric technology in a way similar to the facial-recognition schemes used at some UK airports to speed up border checks. The RDG said more than 200 research, design and technology projects have been identified to increase the railways' capacity and improve customer service. Other projects include new seat designs that could improve train capacity by up to 30 percent and folding seats that could boost space during peak times, including tables that could fold into seats.
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Iris Scans and Fingerprints Could Be Your Ticket On British Rail

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  • Just like in A Brave New World! I want to be a Beta. Those Alphas work much too hard. I'm happy to be a Beta.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Epsilon-Minus for me, please. Pure happiness in the simplest of things.

      Before Bernard could answer, the lift came to a standstill.
      "Roof!" called a creaking voice.
      The liftman was a small simian creature, dressed in the black tunic of an Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron.
      "Roof!"
      He flung open the gates. The warm glory of afternoon sunlight made him start and blink his eyes. "Oh, roof!" he repeated in a voice of rapture. He was as though suddenly and joyfully awakened from a dark annihilating stupor. "Roof!"
      He smiled up with a kind of doggily expectant adoration into the faces of his passengers. Talking and laughing together, they stepped out into the light. The liftman looked after them.
      "Roof?" he said once more, questioningly.
      Then a bell rang, and from the ceiling of the lift a loud speaker began, very softly and yet very imperiously, to issue its commands.
      "Go down," it said, "go down. Floor Eighteen. Go down, go down. Floor Eighteen. Go down, go "
      The liftman slammed the gates, touched a button and instantly dropped back into the droning twilight of the well, the twilight of his own habitual stupor.

    • I'm puzzled about the fact that they're pitching it as a cost-cutting measure. Won't having to hire people to stand next to the fingerprint readers constantly wiping them with cleaning solution so they continue to function increase rather than decrease costs?
  • With a semen sample, you can even get a free upgrade to first class.
    • a guy goes into a doctor's office for a regular exam.

      the doctor tells the guy, "I'll need to get a blood sample, stool sample, semen sample and urine sample, for today's test."

      guy replies back "here, I'll just give you my underwear and let you sort it all out"

  • by Frosty Piss ( 770223 ) * on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @05:11PM (#53822091)

    Not surprising given the Brits obsession with CCTV and license plate scanners. It will probably be this way everywhere soon. I mean, you don't want to enable TERRORISTS, do you? And think of the children.

    • Expect the 'Yet more big brother' articles from UK to ramp up a few notches after the Brexit, when they will be the law unto themselves to "protect against terrorists". We had a quiet few years after the last labour government finished
      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Expect the 'Yet more big brother' articles from UK to ramp up a few notches after the Brexit, when they will be the law unto themselves to "protect against terrorists". We had a quiet few years after the last labour government finished

        Its not the big brother articles that concern me post brexit. Most Britons will be far more concerned with simply having enough money to put food on the table.

        The pound crashed by 10% overnight after the poll and hasn't even looked like it might be considering even possibly entertaining the idea of potentially thinking about recovery in the last six months. So its fair to say it's going to be down for the long term... and nothing has even happened yet. This will get a lot worse when something does happen

    • With the biometrics, we will all be in this situation.

      The Archbishop is on a train to visit a local church to preside over a Confirmation service. The conductor walks past the compartment (this is the old-style train in England) and calls out, "Tickets, please!"

      As the Archbishop is fumbling for his misplaced ticket, the conductor assures him, "That's quite alright, m'lord. We know who you are."

      The Archbishop replies in frustration, "That may be fine for British Rail, but I have no way of knowing wh

  • by StarryEyed ( 2642737 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @05:15PM (#53822127)
    ...that can be stolen with any camera phone! What could possibly go wrong?!
    • by quenda ( 644621 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @06:22PM (#53822599)

      Its worse than that. Fingerprints are not hashable. So when somebody hacks the British Rail database, millions of fingerprints may hit the black market.

      And you know you should never re-use passwords.

      • I have copies of your fingerprints and retina scans I can use at any time.

        Oh wait...

        That is a joke, just in case an authority reads it..

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It's even worse than that. Who wants to be the 903,248th person to touch the fingerprint scanner that day? Bring your own hand sanitizer.

        • They won't be dirtier than door handles, buttons, hand rails and other stuff you touch every day.
          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            I tend to avoid touching those things with the tips of my fingers.

            • How do you push a button without using tips of your fingers ? And even if you only touch things with other parts of your hand, you'll rest your hands on a desk, or touch other things, and spread the bacteria anyway.
              • by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) *

                How do you push a button without using tips of your fingers ?

                Depending on the size and placement of the button, you could use a knuckle, the back of your hand, your elbow....

      • by joboss ( 4453961 )
        I would say they're just particularly hard to hash or encrypt. The unrevokable key problem is more significant in the immediate sense in that once someone scans your biolmetrics...
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Everything.

      We need this to happen so that they will stop pushing this shit as the answer to laziness. ("Oh you can't bring a smartcard or remember a password? Fine, we'll use your measurements then.")

      Sadly this will likely still be the answer for ages once they get targeted DNA resequencing working in adult humans. ("Hey Bill, can you let me in? I'm still waiting for my prints to finish resetting.")

  • Not About Safety (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @05:20PM (#53822173)

    This type of government overreach is intended to track every one of us, everywhere, at all times. The whole point is to crack down on dissent. Every government is moving in this direction.

    This has nothing to do with safety or security. Do nothing and watch your liberty disappear.

    • What dissent? There is no dissent. The government is unifying the people. Theresa May said so, so it must be true!
    • The use of biometrics is to prevent you loaning out your bus pass or rail pass. Even though only 1 person can use it at a time, they want your wife or kid to pay up for their own pass. Of course once they have your biometrics in a government database it would be wasteful not to use it to identify people at anti-government protests.
  • This is a wonderful plan!

    All tracking to our new glorious leader!

  • by newcastlejon ( 1483695 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @05:35PM (#53822279)

    Actually getting on the train isn't where people waste time. It takes ten times as long to find the ticket you need to buy from the dozen or so alternatives with slightly different names and wildly diverging prices (that are all nevertheless exorbitant) as it does to walk through an automated barrier.

    I had to travel from one end of the UK to the other recently and - this still baffles me - it would have cost about a third as much to fly from Newcastle via Paris to Exeter then back again than it would to get an off-peak return ticket for the train. I'd have probably had more leg room to boot. If I still had a passport I'd have been very tempted to accidentally miss my connecting flight. Think about that for a second... an international flight was significantly cheaper and only marginally longer than taking the train. Something about that just seems fundamentally broken.

    And yet, after all this, one still has to have the train actually turn up; in the case of Southern Rail this is not a safe bet. If - and that's a big if - this ticketing system reduces the prices then I'll give it a try but the train companies do not have a good track record (sorry!) when it comes to refraining from bleeding their customers dry. Something similar already works quite well on buses and the Tube so who knows? I'll try to contain my amazement when the whole thing falls flat on its face and people go back to having to use price comparison websites to find a ticket without needing a mortgage to pay for the blasted thing.

    • by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @05:50PM (#53822359) Journal

      They've stopped doing free delivery for tickets ordered online and they've removed discounts for advanced purchase. The result of the latter is that there's no point booking the ticket in advance, so they no longer have any idea how many people are planning on taking any given train (not they they did much with that information anyway). The outcome of the former is that if you buy your ticket online, you have to collect it from a machine, whereas if you buy it on the day then you can collect it from a human or a machine. If you want a shorter queue, don't buy your ticket in advance - in the worst case, the machine queue is shorter and you're no worse off.

      The fees are weird. It's sometimes cheaper to buy a ticket that goes one stop further than you need (often a lot cheaper) and just get off early. You're allowed to break your trip with most ticket classes, so this is only ever a problem for returns (where if you don't start at the correct point, they can complain).

      The rolling stock is often completely inappropriate to task. For example, the trains to Stansted Airport have a tiny luggage rack at the end of each carriage. Apparently they think that most people going to the airport won't have any checked luggage. If they'd ever been on one of the trains, they'd know this is entirely wrong.

      I guess there's a reason that 70% of the British public are in favour of nationalising the railways.

      • Re-nationalising.

        It's not so much the new rolling stock (when it gets delivered, a happy little clusterfuck in itself), with vastly inferior seats (but look, charging points for your stuff! Never mind that there's no tables any more and it can't connect to anything because the signal is so dire; why is the Clapham Triangle still a thing?), nor even the piss-poor uptake in new drivers so the existing have to work far more overtime to provide the alleged standard service.

        What annoys customers is that the oper

      • by mjwx ( 966435 )

        I guess there's a reason that 70% of the British public are in favour of nationalising the railways.

        I doubt it's that high (prob numbers from the Guardian). However if the plan was to corpotise the rail network, I think it would be closer to 90%. Corportisation allows government ownership whilst freeing the organisation from govt bureaucracy. Similar to what happens with the BBC, government acts as a shareholder, they can choose who is in charge but gets little say in how the business can run. Its the best of both worlds, private sector efficiency without the requirements to increase profit year on year.

    • by mikael ( 484 )

      The problem is that there are so many commuters traveling by train into and out of London that they try and get the load spread through off-peak hours through pricing. And people are commuting from outside of London because of the problems of gang crime and that housing in safe areas is unaffordable - much of the brownfield sites are having huge apartment developments which are simply sold off to international investors in the Far East and Russia

      So if you try and take a train from Liverpool (West Coast) at

      • So if you try and take a train from Liverpool (West Coast) at 8am to Folkestone (East Coast, through London) at 3pm, they figure "oh, you are going through London at peak hours, we better charge you".

        This, at least, makes sense. Often this isn't what happens though, and a ticket that goes via London is half the price of one that just does the through-London part. Of course, if you buy the cheaper ticket and then try to use it for only half of the trip, they'll object...

      • Plenty of places on the mainland you can buy a ticket on the train too if you get on at a small unstaffed station, though if you get on at a big station with ample ticket buying facilities then they may fine you.

  • by Master Moose ( 1243274 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @05:37PM (#53822287) Homepage

    I would like my methods of payment and my physical being to be as separate as possible.

    It is invasive enough at the moment that public transport wants to 'force' traceable and easily tracked methods of payment in the name of autonomy and convenience (see Data Collection) and while I doubt they have very little interest in my specific transactions or movements - this doesn't sit easy with me.

    Again, my underwear drawer is clean - this doesn't mean I want to give everyone permission to look through it.

    • It is invasive enough at the moment...

      oh, so you're going to be one those people that say anal probes are "too invasive", aren't you? ;)

  • or they could just supply an app for your phone or let you use your credit card as your ticket.
    • by zlives ( 2009072 )

      but that only solves the monetary issue, not the tracking bit. i am just glad they are not requiring anal probes.

      • by azaana ( 1444353 )
        Unlike now where you tell them I'm going from A to B?
        • by zlives ( 2009072 )

          "you" is what they are trying to fix, this you could be a cash buyer that bought a ticket for some one else. the anal probe tech makes sure its your ass on the seat.

    • There's already a contactless card, similar to Oyster, called the Key. Unfortunately, you can't keep both in the same place or you get charged on both in certain regions...

      • i expect to see a lot of eyeless and fingerless people staggering around rail stations, screaming.

        well.. a few more than you'd usually see...

  • by U8MyData ( 1281010 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @05:51PM (#53822379)
    Really, the only thing left for those who are not incarcerated is, "Just give us a sample of your DNA. We already have everything else." I wonder long term what kind of effect this will have on humankind. If you develop a sense that nothing you do is private, then you become nothing more than a slave to those who have access to the data mine. These agencies have access to so much information, you must now assume that they know more about you than you. I have also wondered who audits this data and can they guarantee authenticity and integrity?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    The problem with rail in Britain is not the lack of iris scans and other biometrics, but the lack of electric traction. They replaced coal with diesel after WW2 and got stuck there ever since. They decided the catenary costs too much and only realized a few showcase electrification projects. They are now paying the price several-fold for their short-sightedness.

    > technology projects have been identified to increase the railways' capacity

    The most effective technology to increase a railway's capacity (thro

    • by mikael ( 484 )

      In London, services are always being canceled when it rains because the flooding plays havoc with the substations and electric lines. You should see the sparks coming off the wheels - it's like they have stuck fireworks under the carriages.

    • There are two types of electrification in UK: third rail (the tube has double third rail) and overhead. There's even a line where the stock uses both so has shoes and pantographs (Thameslink). Electrification been around for over a century.

    • The problem with rail in Britain is not the lack of iris scans and other biometrics, but the lack of electric traction.

      No that's utter crap. Southern Rail are fully electrified in London and they're still utterly shite. Th problem is that the government is wildly incompetent and seems incapable of running a rail system. Oh also, the Tories basically hate Londoners because they never vote Tory, so they seem to be enjoying fucking over people who always don't vote for them.

      So actually the problem is that they

    • piss-poor pariahs of Europe like Romania and Hungary hung up a lot of catenary and are now reaping the benefits every day.

      Probably paid for by EU grants.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        > Probably paid for by EU grants.

        Uh? Hungary has been electrifying railways at the national grid frequency (50Hz AC) since 1932, the first in the world to do so. At that time there was no EU or UN around, but the silly League of Nations.

        Romania has been electrifiying since the early 1960s, back then the lunatic communist dictator Nicolaie Caucescu was in power (he was put to musketry in 1989). That time EU was known as the European Coal and Steel Alliance, which consisted of only about 7 free world count

  • by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Tuesday February 07, 2017 @06:02PM (#53822451)

    and iris scans are an improvement, but there is something better (faster, cheaper, less abuse potential)...

    Using fingerprints and allowing third-parties and governments to have access to that data is unacceptable. Not only because the government should have no need to track what people are doing but because the gov should not have fingerprint registration data (which will be horribly abused) . Once you give this data to the government (or big business), it will NEVER be erased or restricted, regardless of claims or laws- it will go into huge databases and shared between all agencies and used however they want for as long as they want. Even worse, with every crime investigation, you will be searched without probable cause.

    There is only one safer and practical biometric I know of- that is deep vein palm scan. That registration data cannot be readily abused. It can't be latently collected like DNA, fingerprints, and face recognition can. You have to know you are registering/enrolling when it happens. You don't leave evidence of it all over the place. When you go to use it, you know you are using it every time. And on top of all that, it is accurate, fast, reliable, sanitary, unchanging, live-sensing, and cheap. If you must participate in a biometric, this is the one you should insist on using.

    Example: http://www.m2sys.com/palm-vein... [m2sys.com]
    More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Regardless, we also need to realize that IT IS NOT EVERYONE'S BUSINESS WHAT WE ALL DO. The first step in securing freedom is privacy. When you are tracked, you are losing your freedom, whether you realize it or not. Anonymous purchasing and traveling should be a right, not a harassment.

  • Pressurizing the carriages will make the passengers smaller, so they can be stacked closer together.
  • Really? Northern Rail have recently introduced new paper tickets ahead of barriers that can read them. Consequently they have to have staff stood next to the barriers to check the tickets visually and swipe passengers through. Only recently have we got updated barriers at Bradford Interchange. I can't imagine them being able to introduce any modern system in an effective, efficient manner. The invest in new ticket machines would be crazy too.

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