Mujiha
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ooi choon liang
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Nukes of Hazard

On January 25, 1995, at 9:28 a.m. Moscow time, an aide handed a briefcase to Boris Yeltsin, the President of Russia. A small light near the handle was on, and inside was a screen displaying information indicating that a missile had been launched four minutes earlier from somewhere in the vicinity of the Norwegian Sea, and that it appeared to be headed toward Moscow. Below the screen was a row of buttons. This was the Russian “nuclear football.” By pressing the buttons, Yeltsin could launch an immediate nuclear strike against targets around the world. Russian nuclear missiles, submarines, and bombers were on full alert. Yeltsin had forty-seven hundred nuclear warheads ready to go.

The Chief of the General Staff, General Mikhail Kolesnikov, had a football, too, and he was monitoring the flight of the missile. Radar showed that stages of the rocket were falling away as it ascended, which suggested that it was an intermediate-range missile similar to the Pershing II, the missile deployed by nato across Western Europe. The launch site was also in the most likely corridor for an attack on Moscow by American submarines. Kolesnikov was put on a hot line with Yeltsin, whose prerogative it was to launch a nuclear response. Yeltsin had less than six minutes to make a decision.

The Cold War had been over for four years. Mikhail Gorbachev had resigned on December 25, 1991, and had handed over the football and the launch codes to Yeltsin. The next day, the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence. By 1995, though, Yeltsin’s popularity in the West was in decline; there was tension over plans to expandnato; and Russia was bogged down in a war in Chechnya. In the context of nuclear war, these were minor troubles, but there was also the fact, very much alive in Russian memory, that seven and a half years earlier, in May, 1987, a slightly kooky eighteen-year-old German named Mathias Rust had flown a rented Cessna, an airplane about the size of a Piper Cub, from Helsinki to Moscow and landed it a hundred yards from Red Square. The humiliation had led to a mini-purge of the air-defense leadership. Those people did not want to get burned twice. (...)

But most of the danger that human beings faced from nuclear weapons after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to do with inadvertence—with bombs dropped by mistake, bombers catching on fire or crashing, missiles exploding, and computers miscalculating and people jumping to the wrong conclusion. On most days, the probability of a nuclear explosion happening by accident was far greater than the probability that someone would deliberately start a war. (...)

A study run by Sandia National Laboratories, which oversees the production and security of American nuclear-weapons systems, discovered that between 1950 and 1968 at least twelve hundred nuclear weapons had been involved in “significant” accidents. Even bombs that worked didn’t work quite as planned. In Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, only 1.38 per cent of the nuclear core, less than a kilogram* of uranium, fissioned (although the bomb killed eighty thousand people). The bomb dropped on Nagasaki, three days later, was a mile off target (and killed forty thousand people). A test of the hydrogen bomb in the Bikini atoll, in 1954, produced a yield of fifteen megatons, three times as great as scientists had predicted, and spread lethal radioactive fallout over hundreds of square miles in the Pacific, some of it affecting American observers miles away from the blast site.

These stories, and many more, can be found in Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control” (Penguin), an excellent journalistic investigation of the efforts made since the first atomic bomb was exploded, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, to put some kind of harness on nuclear weaponry. By a miracle of information management, Schlosser has synthesized a huge archive of material, including government reports, scientific papers, and a substantial historical and polemical literature on nukes, and transformed it into a crisp narrative covering more than fifty years of scientific and political change. And he has interwoven that narrative with a hair-raising, minute-by-minute account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in 1980, which he renders in the manner of a techno-thriller:

Plumb watched the nine-pound socket slip through the narrow gap between the platform and the missile, fall about seventy feet, hit the thrust mount, and then ricochet off the Titan II. It seemed to happen in slow motion. A moment later, fuel sprayed from a hole in the missile like water from a garden hose. 

“Oh man,” Plumb thought. “This is not good.”

“Command and Control” is how nonfiction should be written.

Schlosser is known for two popular books, “Fast Food Nation,” published in 2001, and “Reefer Madness,” an investigative report on black markets in marijuana, pornography, and illegal immigrants that came out in 2003. Readers of those books, and of Schlosser’s occasional writings in The Nation, are likely to associate him with progressive politics. They may be surprised to learn that, insofar as “Command and Control” has any heroes, those heroes are Curtis LeMay, Robert McNamara, and Ronald Reagan (plus an Air Force sergeant named Jeff Kennedy, who was involved in responding to the wounded missile in the Arkansas silo). Those men understood the risks of just having these things on the planet, and they tried to keep them from blowing up in our faces.

by Louis Menard, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Shout

Sarah Jarosz

No Communication No Love (by mutablend)
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Earl Horter, Still Life. 1939.
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Fried Mozzarella, Basil & Nectarine Stacks with Balsamic Glaze

Fried Mozzarella, Basil & Nectarine Stacks with Balsamic Glaze

Cook time: 5 mins total time: 15 mins yield: 4 stacks

Ingredients

4 large nectarines or peaches, sliced into rounds
12 large basil leaves
12 ounces fresh mozzarella, sliced into 8 thick round slices
1 cup panko bread crumbs
1/4 cup flour
1/3 cup parmesan cheese, grated
2 eggs, beaten
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
Balsamic Glaze
1/2 cup balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon brown sugar (optional)

Instructions

1. Add vinegar and brown sugar, if using, to a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce to a very low simmer and cook for 10-15 minutes, until liquid reduces by about half and is slightly syrupy. Remove from heat, pour vinegar in a bowl or glass to pour, and set aside to cool and thicken.
2. In a large bowl, combine panko, flour, parmesan, salt, pepper and cayenne, mixing thoroughly to combine. In a small bowl, lightly beat the eggs. Take each slice of fresh mozzarella and coat it in the beaten egg, then dredge it through the bread crumb mix, pressing on both sides to adhere. Repeat with the remaining slices.
3. Heat a large skillet over high heat. Add 1 teaspoon of olive oil and sear both sides of the nectarines for 1 to minutes until just warmed, but still somewhat firm. Alternately you can also grill the nectarines directly on the grill. Keep the nectarines warm.
4. Add the remaining olive oil to the skillet and when hot, fry coated mozzarella, turning carefully once or twice, until golden and cheese starts to melt but still retains its shape, about 1 minute on each side. Drain on paper towels.
5. To assemble, place one nectarine to a plate, top with 1 slice of fried mozzarella and then a basil leaf. Repeat the layer one more time and finish with a nectarine. Garish with basil and freshly grated pepper. Drizzle on the balsamic glaze.

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A woman surveys a treacherous mountain pass in the Pyrenees of France, 1956. Justin Locke, National Geographic.
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Buy a House, Make Your Payments, Then Discover You've Been Foreclosed On Without Your Knowledge

A few months ago, Ceith and Louise Sinclair of Altadena, California, were told that their home had been sold. It was the first time they’d heard that it was for sale.

Their mortgage servicer, Nationstar, foreclosed on them without their knowledge, and sold the house to an investment company. If it wasn’t for the Sinclairs going to a local ABC affiliate and describing their horror story, they would have been thrown out on the street, despite never missing a mortgage payment. It’s impossible to know how many homeowners who didn’t get the media to pick up their tale have dealt with a similar catastrophe, and eventually lost their home.

As finance writer Barry Ritholtz has explained, home purchases involve a series of precise safeguards, designed to protect property rights and prevent situations where borrowers who are perfect on their payments get evicted. “In a nation of laws, contract and property rights, there is no room for errors,” Ritholtz writes. “The only way these errors could have occurred is if several people involved in the process committed criminal fraud.”

Any observer of the mortgage industry since 2009 is no stranger to foreclosure fraud, and the fact that virtually nobody has paid the price for this crime. But the case of the Sinclairs involves a new player in that rotten game: Nationstar. Unheralded just a few years ago, the firm, owned by a private equity behemoth, has been buying up the rights to service mortgages, accepting monthly payments and distributing the proceeds to the owners of the loan, taking a little off the top for itself.

Nationstar has racked up an impressively horrible customer service record in its short life, failing to honor prior agreements with borrowers and pursuing illegal foreclosures. The fact that Nationstar and other corrupt companies like it are beginning to corner the market for mortgage servicing should trouble not only homeowners, but the regulators tasked with looking out for them. It didn’t seem possible that a broken mortgage servicing industry could get worse, but it has.

Nationstar is at the forefront of a massive shift in mortgage servicing. In the past few years, the largest servicers were arms of major banks, like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi and Ally Bank. Those were the “big five” servicers sanctioned for an array of fraudulent conduct in the National Mortgage Settlement, which mandated specific standards for servicers to follow, like providing a single point of contact for customers and an end to “dual tracking,” when a servicer offers a trial modification to a borrower and pursues foreclosure at the same time.

The banks realized that they could sell the servicing rights and evade these standards, along with the higher labor costs associated with implementing them. What’s more, they would avoid new, higher capital requirements associated with holding servicing assets, allowing them to give bigger dividends to shareholders and bigger bonuses to executives.

So the big banks started selling off their servicing rights, not to other banks, but to specialty financial services firms like Green Tree, Nationstar, Walter Investment Management and Ocwen, all of whom are in kind of an arms race to become the biggest servicer.

Last October, Ocwen purchased the entire servicing portfolio of Ally Bank, covering about $329 billion in loans. Ocwen has also purchased part of JPMorgan Chase’s servicing, as well as a slice from OneWest Bank; it is attempting to dominate the market.

Nationstar acquired business from Bank of America and Aurora Bank in 2012, and more in 2013. Wells Fargo is poised to sell some servicing rights as well, and Nationstar will surely bid for those rights. As of June 30 of this year, Nationstar has the right to collect on $318 billion worth of home loans—growing three-fold in under two years—and it will seek to add even more in the future. The company, majority owned by the private equity firm Fortress Investment Group, recently raised $1.1 billion in capital to buy up more servicing rights from banks around the country.

This means that homeowners victimized by big-bank servicers, who were supposed to get a commitment to honest treatment as part of the National Mortgage Settlement, instead got their servicing rights sold to companies no longer bound by the terms of that settlement. So homeowners lose all of their protections, and often have to start back at square one with their new servicer. For example, if a borrower was in process on a loan modification with their old servicer, the new servicer can choose to simply not recognize that modification, and demand the full monthly payment under threat of foreclosure. This is a very common practice.

by David Dayen, Alternet |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock.com/iQoncept

Shinichiro Saka, Pearl Fuji 
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Melody Gardot

A Teacher and Her Student

[ed. Gilead, one of my favorite books.]

Marilynne Robinson was my fourth and final workshop instructor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is an intimidating intellectual presence—she once told us that to improve characterization, we should read Descartes. When I asked her to sign my copy of Gilead, she admitted she had recently become fascinated by ancient cuneiform script. But she is also generous and quick to laugh—when she offered to have us to her house for dinner, and I asked if we ought to bring food, she replied, “Or perhaps I will make some loaves and fishes appear!” Then she burst into giggles.

After receiving my MFA this May, I left Iowa believing that there’s no good way to be taught how to write, to tell a story. But there is also no denying that Marilynne has made me a better writer. Her demands are deceptively simple: to be true to human consciousness and to honor the complexities of the mind and its memory. Marilynne has said in other interviews that she doesn’t read much contemporary fiction because it would take too much of her time, but I suspect it’s also because she spends a fair amount of her mental resources on her students.

Our interview was held on one of the last days of the spring semester. The final traces of the bitter winter had disappeared, and light filled the classroom, which now felt empty with just the two of us. My two years at Iowa were over, and I selfishly wanted to stretch the interview for as long as possible.

You recently told the class you had discovered the ending to your new novel—or so you hoped. How does that happen for you? How do you know?

A lot of the experience of the novel—after the beginning—is being in the novel. You set yourself with a complex problem. If it’s a good problem or one that really engages you, then your mind works on it all the time. A novel by its nature is new. The great struggle, conscious or unconscious, is to make sure that it is new. That it actually has raised issues that deserve to be dealt with in their own terms. They’re not terms that you have seen elsewhere. It’s sort of like composing music. There are options that open and options that disappear, depending on how you develop the guidelines. You think about it over time. And then something will appear, something that is the most elegant response to the question that you’ve asked yourself. And it can absorb the most in terms of the complexities that you’ve created.

It struck me when you said we must “trust the peripheral vision of our mind.” It seems like a muscle in your body that you have to develop by training some other part of you.

One reaches for analogies. I think it’s probably a lot like meditation—which I have never practiced. But from what I understand, it is a capacity that develops itself and that people who practice it successfully have access to aspects of consciousness that they would not otherwise have. They find these large and authoritative experiences. I think that, by the same discipline of introspection, you have access to a much greater part of your awareness than you would otherwise. Things come to mind. Your mind makes selections—this deeper mind—on other terms than your front-office mind. You will remember that once, in some time, in some place, you saw a person standing alone, and their posture suggested to you an enormous narrative around them. And you never spoke to them, you don’t know them, you were never within ten feet of them. But at the same time, you discover that your mind privileges them over something like the Tour d’Eiffel. There’s a very pleasant consequence of that, which is the most ordinary experience can be the most valuable experience. If you’re philosophically attentive you don’t need to seek these things out.

In a way, it seems more difficult. Like trying to look beautiful without makeup.

Harder in some cases than others. It is hard. Frankly, I think most people would think that if you look beautiful without makeup, you’re more truly beautiful than if you’re beautiful with makeup. Although that’s an argument in and of itself. If it were simply discipline, like learning to juggle, or something like that, that’s one thing. But it’s finding access into your life more deeply than you would otherwise. Consider this incredibly brief, incredibly strange experience that we have as this hypersensitive creature on a tiny planet in the middle of somewhere that looks a lot like nowhere. It’s assigning an appropriate value to the uniqueness of our situation and every individual situation.

by Thessaly La Force, Vice | Read more:
Image:Denise Nestor

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It's Hip to be Hip, Too

Those of us in our 30s and younger have come of age during a time of incessant media-based self-reflection. Not of the meaningful, “Where do I fit into the universe?” kind that might've passed for existential maturation in a more philosophical era, but of a more superficial stripe. “What is my personal brand?” we ask ourselves. It's something that was a lot easier to answer in the past, when there were only so many to choose from, and when a career or class did most of the heavy lifting for you. Today the perpetually splintering brackets of contemporary demographic specificity engender an eternal anxiety of self, one in which we're meant to renew our vows of identity with regularity. And the choices are many. Identifying as bros, or tech nerds, foodies, gamers, health-conscious types, fashionistas, politicos, or the sports-obsessed are all viable branding options. There's just one type that we're not supposed to assume for ourselves, which is strange, because we're all obsessed with it: the hipster.

This overarching identity dilemma is one born of aggressive social-media expressions, singing songs of ourselves each day and launching them unto the world to either coalesce in harmony with our peers, or to serve as a jarring counterpoint. Nowhere is this type of perpetually refreshing navel-gazing better illustrated than in our repeated investigation into the idea of hipsterhood. Barely a week goes by where we're not confronted by it—28 Signs You're A Hipster, What Was the Hipster?, and so on. More often than not, these come, for some reason, in the paper of record. This past weekend Steven Kurutz contemplated his own unexpected metamorphosis into this most picked-clean carcass of identity. “My initial surprise was replaced by a stark realization: as a 30-something skinnyish urban male there’s almost nothing I can wear that won’t make me look like a hipster,” he wrote, surprised to find himself enlisted into a community he never volunteered for. “Such is the pervasiveness of hipster culture that virtually every aspect of male fashion and grooming has been colonized.”

The versatility of the hipster signifier is what makes it such an empty avenue of exploration in goofy listicles and trend pieces while also engendering skeptics' frustration with its dogged refusal to go away. Public approval of hipsters is at 16 percent, according to a recent poll—Congress looks good in comparison. As Kurutz notes, almost everything can be woven into the hipster fabric now; it's a choose-your-own-ending story where every option leads to the same page, you standing there in some silly hat or other. White guy with a beard? Hipster. Black dude on a skateboard? Hipster. Just a sort-of-skinny cop? Hipster. Woman riding a bike? Hipster. You can play either a mandolin or a turntable and somehow still be a hipster. No rules! As a result, hipsters have become both an object of incessant scorn, but also endless fascination. When a hipster can be defined as anything, it also essentially means nothing—that's an undeniably appealing paradox to poke at.

One thing that seems universally agreed upon, however, as most of these types of pieces about what constitutes hipsterhood point out, and the thing that makes Kurutz such an obvious candidate for hipsterhood himself, is that no one—even the most self-evidently hipster among us—wants to admit to fitting the description. The only rule of hipster club is don't admit you're a member of hipster club. Nothing could be seen as less hip than actually wanting to align oneself with a superficial demo. That's exactly the wrong attitude, it seems to me, if we're to pin down this mercurial concept. The original hipster was someone who bucked the status quo and jumped out ahead of the curve. So, unlike Kurutz and the thousands who have come before him bending themselves into logical pretzels trying to shrug off the designation, I'd like affirm my hipsterhood—with pride.

by Luke O'Neil, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Luke O'Neil

The Last Laugh

[ed. See also: The Longform Guide to George Plimpton. Especially this story, by Gay Talese.]

Norman Mailer went out running with Muhammad Ali one morning, a few days before the fight with George Foreman in Zaire. He asked me to go with him, but I thought of the long ride to Ali’s training camp at N’Sele in the darkness, and thumping along for five miles or so in the wake of the challenger, and, besides, I had done that sort of thing before with Joe Frazier. So I begged off. I said I didn’t have any equipment to run in.

We came in very late from the gambling casinos in Kinshasa—around three in the morning—and Mailer was just coming through the lobby on his way out to his car. He had sneakers on, and long athletic socks rolled up over the legs of what was probably a track suit but of a woolly texture that made it look more like a union suit, so that as he came through the lobby Norman gave the appearance of a hotel guest forced to evacuate his room in his underwear because of fire: the impression was heightened by the fact that he was carrying a toilet kit.

That night he and I had dinner and he told me what had happened. He had kept up with Ali for a couple of miles into the country upriver from the compound at N’Sele, but then he had begun to tire, and finally he stopped, his chest heaving, and he watched Ali disappear into the night with his sparring partners. In the east, over the hills, the African night was beginning to give way to the first streaks of dawn, but it was still very dark. Suddenly, and seemingly so close that it made him start, came the reverberating roar of a lion, an unmistakable coughing, grunting sound that seemed to come from all sides—just as one had read it did in Hemingway or Ruark—and Norman turned and set out for the distant lights of N’Sele at a hasty clip. He told me he had been instantly provided with a substantial “second wind” and he found himself moving along much quicker than during his outbound trip. He reached N’Sele safely, jogging by the dark compounds, exhilarated not only by his escape but by the irresistible thought of how highly dramatic it would have been if he hadn’t made it.

I asked him what he was talking about, and he grinned shyly and began to admit that once he had got to the sanctuary of the compound he had been quite taken by the fancy of being finished off right there by the lion…all in all not a bad way to go, certainly a dramatic death right up there with the more memorable of the litterateurs’—Saint-Exupéry’s or Shelley’s or Rupert Brooke’s—and the thought crossed his mind what an enviable last line for the biographical notes in the big dun-colored high-school anthologies: that Norman Mailer had been killed by an African lion near the banks of the Zaire in his fifty-first year.

Well, his fancy had all come to dross, he went on, because Muhammad Ali had returned from his run, his villa crowded with his people, and Norman had not been able to resist revealing the incident of the lion. It was greeted first with silence, everybody looking at him, and then the laughter started, first giggles, then hard thigh-slapping whoops, because they had all heard the lion, too, and heard him just about every morning, because that lion was behind bars in the presidential compound, a zoo lion—there weren’t any lions in the wild in West Africa anyway—and the thought of Mailer’s eyes staring into the darkness, and his legs pumping in his union-suit track clothes to get himself out of there (“Feets, do your stuff”) was so rich that Ali’s friend Bundini finally asked him to tell them about it all over again. “Nawmin, tell us ‘bout the big lion!”

It was interesting listening to Mailer talk about this—quite shyly and not without self-mockery, and yet with a curious wistfulness. He told me that the other fancy of this sort which he could remember involved a whale he had seen swimming through a regatta off Provincetown, Massachusetts—very impressive sight—and he thought that would not be a bad obituary note either: “Taken by a whale off Cape Cod in his fifty-first year.” Hemingway? Melville? He couldn’t make up his mind.

Later that evening, in the bar at the Inter-Continental, I found myself talking to an Englishwoman who described herself as a “free-lance poet.” She was hitchhiking her way up the west coast of Africa. I thought of her standing in a dusty African road in the darkness of the early dawn, and I mentioned Mailer’s fantasy. “Consumed by a lion? What on earth for?” she asked. Her eyes widened, as if she had suddenly seen an image, and she said that she thought—if one had to “shuffle off”—it would be terrific to be electrocuted while playing a bass guitar in a rock group.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

“I think it happens quite often,” she told me. She had an idea that rock groups which flickered into vague prominence, with a hit record perhaps, and were not heard of again were actually victims of electrocution. “In Alabama in the summer, that’s when it happens,” she said. “In an open-air concert in a meadow outside of town where they’ve built a big stage of pine, and the quick summer storms come through, or the local electricians aren’t the best, and all of a sudden zip!—the top guitarist of the Four Nuts, or the Wild Hens, or whatever, glows briefly up there on the stage, his hair standing up like an old-fashioned shaving brush, and he’s gone.”

by George Plimpton, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: George Plimpton by Larry Fink

Frito Pie

Walking taco. Texas straw hat. Stomach grenade. It goes by many names but only one that matters: Frito pie. Cheap, hearty, and pretty darn bad for you, this humble fare, with its bold chili, crunchy corn chips, silken cheese, and bracing onion, is typically found at high school football games and state fairs. But as soon as the recipe started to appear in grocery store promotional campaigns in the fifties—to be prepared with Fritos-brand chili—it didn’t take long for home cooks like Peggy Hill to figure out that this was the stuff of which easy dinners were made. (...)

Most likely the idea for this happy union of chuck-wagon grub and Mexican street food occurred independently to a number of folks. Since then it’s been fancified (duck chili and goat cheese), bastardized (witness the “apple hash and pumpkin gravy Fritos pie” at fritospieremix.com), and improvised (let us hail the 7-Eleven Frito pie, in which an expeditious meal is made with a pocketknife and a furtive run on the hot dog condiments). But like the Frito itself, there’s no better version than the classic.

Serves 1

1 two-ounce bag of original Fritos
Pot of chili, homemade or canned
(I am loath to endorse any sort of canned meat product, but Texans swear by Wolf Brand.)
Grated cheddar cheese
Diced white onion

Take a knife or some scissors and split the bag down the front.
Ladle in a scoop of chili.
Top with a mound of cheese and a heap of onion. 
Festoon your creation to your heart’s content (sour cream, jalapeños, avocado, and so on), though expect to be chastised by purists.

Eat it straight out of the bag, preferably atop a thick pile of paper napkins.

by Courtney Bond, Texas Monthly |  Read more:

Image: Jody Horton

Katsuda Tetsu - Evening (1934)
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Chaos Computer Club breaks Apple TouchID

[ed. See also: Biometric Technology Takes Off]

The biometrics hacking team of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has successfully bypassed the biometric security of Apple's TouchID using easy everyday means. A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID. This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as [an] access control method and should be avoided.

Apple had released the new iPhone with a fingerprint sensor that was supposedly much more secure than previous fingerprint technology. A lot of bogus speculation about the marvels of the new technology and how hard to defeat it supposedly is had dominated the international technology press for days.

"In reality, Apple's sensor has just a higher resolution compared to the sensors so far. So we only needed to ramp up the resolution of our fake", said the hacker with the nickname Starbug, who performed the critical experiments that led to the successful circumvention of the fingerprint locking. "As we have said now for more than years, fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints." [1]

The iPhone TouchID defeat has been documented in a short video.

The method follows the steps outlined in this how-to with materials that can be found in almost every household: First, the fingerprint of the enroled user is photographed with 2400 dpi resolution. The resulting image is then cleaned up, inverted and laser printed with 1200 dpi onto transparent sheet with a thick toner setting. Finally, pink latex milk or white woodglue is smeared into the pattern created by the toner onto the transparent sheet. After it cures, the thin latex sheet is lifted from the sheet, breathed on to make it a tiny bit moist and then placed onto the sensor to unlock the phone. This process has been used with minor refinements and variations against the vast majority of fingerprint sensors on the market.

"We hope that this finally puts to rest the illusions people have about fingerprint biometrics. It is plain stupid to use something that you can´t change and that you leave everywhere every day as a security token", said Frank Rieger, spokesperson of the CCC. "The public should no longer be fooled by the biometrics industry with false security claims. Biometrics is fundamentally a technology designed for oppression and control, not for securing everyday device access." Fingerprint biometrics in passports has been introduced in many countries despite the fact that by this global roll-out no security gain can be shown.

by frank, CCC | Read more:

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Sushi by BenjaminAng
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[ed. For Anna. Happy Birthday!]