How to spot a good fake ID
trevorklee.com
trevorklee.com
Last winter my wife was ill with a cold. I stuck my credit card in my pocket and went to the drugstore to buy a box of Theraflu, an over-the counter decongestant. They wouldn't sell it to me without ID and when I protested this they grabbed the box and told me to get out of the store or they would call over their armed security guy. This was a corporate change, I had bought the same product many times before without ever being asked for ID.
People are forced to ask permission far more today than a few decades ago, and everyone is treated like a suspect if they object. I don't know who's more contemptible, the petty authoritarians or the people meekly giving up their privacy and dignity to get permission to engage in the most ordinary activities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudoephedrine#Manufacture_of...
I'd perhaps prefer a world in which many drugs were legally sold, which might make this specific issue disappear but even then I'm happy that cigarettes and alcohol, and some other potentially dangerous items are age restricted.
What the store is doing is not preventing teens from buying Alcohol or Tobacco, it's simply covering its ass. There is a certain liability with certain transactions. In that case, the store covers. If it can't cover, it doesn't make the transaction as the liability is too high for whatever profit there is.
Some advice you never asked for: in that situation, protesting often makes things worse. Learning a little bit of negotiation and sales is an invaluable investment in life.
A simple you seem concerned about selling this to the wrong people / I'm about to make your day a little bit more difficult / you probably think I'm being unreasonable / is it absolutely impossible for me to come home with the medication my wife expects me to? / I don't want you to do something you're uncomfortable with / how can I explain this to my wife? can go a long way.
On a more serious note, I wonder just how people end up with unpleasantness being the standard go-to behaviour when people behind the counter aren't just giving them what they want.
Surely at some point in their lives they must have noticed that being polite and pleasant is far more likely to get you what you want than acting like a dick?
Usually the guy behind the counter has no say on company policy, and going against it is very much not in their interest. They'll be even less inclined to breaking policy over someone that acts like an asshole
In general, I think it's unfair to ask a probably-underpaid cashier to break policy in this way -- they almost certainly have no control over the policy, and quite possibly face severe consequences if they acquiesce.
----
The probably-underpaid people who break policy make the world go around. We'd get nothing real done if people just followed policy all day long.
It might sound like I'm joking, but I don't. I have huge amounts of respect for those people, and obviously if they help me out I will do what I can to help them out. (Even if it's just paying it forward and breaking policy when necessary myself.)
I'm not anti-policy. I love good policy, and I rarely have reason to break it. The policy that often needs breaking is the bad policy.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/protest :
> the act of objecting or a gesture of disapproval
> a complaint, objection, or display of unwillingness usually to an idea or a course of action
Revelation 13:16-18 New International Version
16 It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, 17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.
18 This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666.
When we went to the restaurant to have breakfast, they adamantly refused to remove the clear plastic partition dividing the table in two.
We couldn’t move it to the side, we couldn’t move it anywhere else. It had to physically separate my wife and I. To what purpose, I have no clue.
Oh, we’re both vaccinated. But it is corporate policy, so nothing we (or the staff) can do, even though anyone with a brain could see that it was pointless.
Most stores sell non-pseudoephedrine versions of the same medications that usually have phenylephrine which does not require showing and tracking your ID. But anyone whose taken it know that phenylephrine is a poor substitute and barely acts as a decongestant.
Sounds like they could’ve done a better job explaining what was going on. But I imagine that as a pharmacist, “guy who’s mad he can’t buy pseudo anonymously” isn’t someone you have a lot of patience with.
If they're loud, obnoxious or stubborn about it (if they don't accept a reasonable explanation), that's obviously something else. I'm not talking about people being a dick. Just the general principle of taking that moment to explain the why rather than assuming anyone who doesn't immediately comply with a "hand over your ID for registration" order must have security called upon them as in the example above.
Full disclosure: I'm also this kind of person. Needed to authenticate myself to get a phone number (a regular phone number, both pre and post paid at different times so that's not the difference) at a local office. The person behind the register takes my ID, I figured she'd check and we'd be good, but then she puts both sides under some reader. I happen to know it's illegal to copy the national identifier code (BSN in Dutch) but I don't want to be obnoxious right? Not as if she's a lawyer, she's just doing what she's told to. So I just ask (politely, I thought, not stopping her or anything) which field(s) the machine copies. Well now did I want to let her do her job or should I find myself another carrier maybe? was the retort.
Hotels, similar thing. Photocopying an ID in that situation is illegal for the same reason. Employees get hostile faster than a tesla gets to 60, and I'm left feeling of a different generation before I'm even 30 years old. Anonymity is not an option, heck even complying with GDPR is not something one can expect, but refusing to even inform me what they're doing? That's off limits now?
If they want to control the sale of it then they can put it behind the counter or put a giant advisory sign nex tto it on the shelf. But they don't do that because it will hurt profits. I don't care about their problems with meth heads.
This is not just about the situation of buying one kind of cold medicine. I'm in my 50s, why should I need to present ID if I wish to buy a beer or attend a show? Sure, the answer is 'we have to minimize our liability' but the answer to that is not to violate everyone else's privacy and autonomy.
I'm an easygoing responsible person who doesn't do stupid shit. I'm just running out of patience with public and commercial entities handing me the metaphorical bill for every imaginable security issue. The USA has turned into a nation of paranoids where people are interrogated over things like nail clippers.
Smurfing is the practice of sending several people out to buy pseudoephedrine just a box or two at a time at a bunch of different stores. These federal id tracking requirements are an attempt to curb that.
Yes. Regulation can be BS too.
I've never been asked for ID for either OTC or prescription medicine, and while I obviously need to present a passport to travel internationally, the airline doesn't need to see it. And all my recent travel has been domestic, and not needed ID.
(Since I turned 18, the government scheme for when to ask for ID for alcohol has ratcheted up from nothing to "Think 21" and on to "Think 25" so a younger me would probably have needed to show ID at least a bit. But I don't think that's entirely unreasonable)
Two, if you're old (which unfortunately I am) then your apparent age is enough anyway. I do not ordinarily carry ID. Nobody stops me buying alcohol, entering nightclubs, watching movies, or doing other age-restricted activities, because "This person is obviously like, fifty?" is enough.
Of course, for both the knife and the alcohol regulations, the law is around age. ID is merely the mechanism that everyone uses to validate age, as it's settled practice that doing so will prove the ID card holder's age sufficiently for the purpose of the legislation.
I've lived abroad for sometime now and last time I went home to California to visit, I went to a restaurant to have a beer and dinner with my dad.
I've been gone for so long, I no longer have a drivers license or ID except for my passport, which I don't carry around with me.
I tried to order a beer and they refused. I was very upset as I'm 35 and obviously not a kid. I was just trying to have a beer and catch up with my dad.
Just a huge lack of sensibility in the US these days. They would never do this in 90% of the world. Unless of course you're obviously young.
This doesn't change your basic premise (the law is nuts), rather it extends it (the law is even more nuts than you expected).
Not to go all lawyer on you, but wouldn't be a good idea to see what the law actually says instead of making up reasons that might or might not exist? In CA the law is not really that onerous and just says it's a misdemeanor to sell to someone under 21. The only severe penalty is serving alcohol to someone who is a minor and already intoxicated (and thus that much more likely to do something stupid). But it's widely understand socially that any drunk person can be refused further alcohol at the discretion of the seller. But many commercial entities have just decided the way to cover themselves is just demand ID from everyone.
https://www.abc.ca.gov/education/licensee-education/laws-and...
“I need a license for my pet fish, Eric.”
I would support a law that prohibits kids in a grocery store
My mom (well over 21) tried to buy liquor, but was refused because a lack of ID. She sent me (also well over 21) to buy instead. At the register, I made a passive aggressive comment about how my mom was refused 30 mins ago. So they refused ME because they wanted to "ID all people at my party" - or something like that.
But this isn't specifically written into the law, i.e. the law doesn't say "you must check the ID of everyone in the group." Rather, it's that businesses receive ENORMOUS fines if they're caught selling alcohol to underage people - so most of them have very strict internal policies to minimise the chances of a false negative.
I've been refused for having expired ID, despite the picture very obviously being me, and my age very obviously being well over the legal age.
My wife's been refused because apparently her federally issued citizenship card, with a photo that showed she was well over age wasn't apparently good enough.
I actually remember one time when i was fairly young, early 20's, I'd let my license expire because I wasn't driving and couldn't be bothered to renew it at the time. I got refused at the liquor store and there was an old guy behind me. He just started ranting at the cashier about how I'm obviously legal age and how you don't need a license to drink and all this stuff. The cashier actually relented and sold it to me after, but that old guy's rant always stuck with me since.
And, it's made me notice how more and more, it's not even about how old you are, it doesn't seem to be about protecting minors, it just seems to be a way of training people to provide ID any time regardless of the reason.
I left my purchase at the counter and went elsewhere to buy herbal teas.
Subsequent research suggests that few cold remedies are effective at all (though decongestants can improve breathing). Teas with slippery elm and eucalyptus seem at least somewhat effective, don't require IDs, and are not meth precursors.
On why / how older generations may be primed to object: I remember reading a science fiction story in the late 1970s / early 1980s, a short in a compilation (likey a Hugo or similar award collection), in which a data system with universal identification system, with one of the designers of the system being given the opportunity to opt out.
He does.
I think of that story often.
If you think it's bad now, wait until they roll out vaccine passports.
- Does not have any raised lettering
- Has weird edges around my hair from the shadows that look just like the ones the author called Photoshop evidence
- The hologram looks like crap. Nice to see that Massachusetts doesn't skimp on it the way $STATE does.
- The aspect ratio of the picture is squished because they just used my last photo. COVID, you know.
- Clearly says "NOT FOR REAL ID PURPOSES" which I know refers to "RealID", but still makes me laugh.
Raised print is particularly variable, a lot of states don't use raised print. As I understand it, it's done by a specific machine that is especially costly (the rest of the laser features mostly come already done from the stock manufacturer).
Edit: it's L-1 Identity Solutions. I believe the ID card printing component used to be with Identix before they merged with a newer company to form L-1.
edit: some folks need to go rewatch Back to the Future...
They usually scan the document in several stages using different light sources to check UV/ IR / visible light features and sometimes illuminated from different angles but usually with a fixed camera position.
This leads to the interesting effect that you could present different images in quick succession to show the correct image for each spectrum even if you don't have a document that can appear correct in all spectral ranges at once.
You can't obviously do that by hand but we ended up using a display (even a high dpi smartphone) that synced up to the scanning process for security testing.
[1] if you are interested
That would require access to the passport database of each country and 24/7 network connectivity.
For border control in an airport, maybe it's possible to operate in these conditions. However the product certainly has more use cases.
Another issue would be reliability. Doing an attack on the network to break the verification backend would cause a fallback to manual border control which is a problem if your whole process is already relying on the automated gates and you have scaled back the available agents.
Doing that during a time with very high demand would allow an "attacker" to use it to get more people through due to less attention of the border guards.
If I remember correctly the usual timespan a border agent is considered to be attentive enough is 2 hours, at which point they would need to be rotated out, but if your demand has unexpectedly increased so much that you operate twice the manual gates you don't have the people for the normal rotation
At the time some cities were fully converted and were willing to accept (with some difficulty, the scanners were picky!) our passports others only had the local ID readers. (The local ID has embedded RFID, you just touch it to the scanner plate and the gate opens.) However, others were not--a couple of times security simply let us out without doing any sort of check.
If the biographic details were cryptographically signed, you'd need only a public key for each passport-issuing country.
I'm not sure how you'd deal with key revocation in situations like this.
And as far as I recall signatures were only checked for being signed by a valid key not if the key matches the country of origin. So someone in country A could sign a forges passport from country B (but not 100% sure on that anymore)
And older passports use weaker hash functions to verify the integrity of the data
So we had exactly the images the scanner expected, but it is not an unreasonable assumption that a document forger would have access to such a device.
In the final version we had it running on an Android device. We did know the exact scanning sequence and timing (first IR, second visible light, third UV exposure) so the phone showed the IR image by default and used the brightness sensor to detect the first flash of the recording, then an internal timer ran to determine when to switch to the second and third image.
If I recall correctly the digital part was done with JMRTD [1] flashed to an empty smart card
The certificate check obviously would have failed, but as mentioned in a comment above that is not always an issue.
Granted I might get a lot more scrutiny if I walk into the DMV wearing an El Tri t-shirt and speaking with an accent but barring that it seems a very low bar to turn a crappy hand-typed 50s birth certificate into a modern secure ID.
The hot shit is to use a baptismal record instead (accepted most anywhere but usually found only for older people).
Though when I applied for the trusted traveler program they did keep my documents for a few weeks so they might have been doing that sort of verification.
It was most amusing when the document you were trying to validate had the exact same person’s photograph as in the sample document.
You would likely be able to get an ID card issued in someone else’s name, but it’s not as easy as typing up a fake birth certificate and electric bill.
Source: three different states, personal experience
The SSN has a name attached to it. That has to match the birth certificate (probably with some rules about other records for name changes and the like).
However, they may make a copy of the utility bill to keep on file, but my memory is fuzzy about that part.
I suspect this varies by state, and I can't speak for other states, but in Ohio the initial driver license also requires: a knowledge test; vision screening; and a driving skills test consisting of two parts: (1) maneuverability, (2) on road.
Surprisingly I don't believe there is any updated vision test requirement on renewals once you have a valid license.
Seems to cover about all cases and pin your identity to previously verified identities recursively
Let me add that the age of drinking was set to 21 across the country because the Reagan administration did not wish to make airbags mandatory. It was argued that raising the drinking age would produce an equivalent or greater savings in life compared to mandating airbags in new cars. The Department of Transportation could withhold funds from any state that allowed those under 21 to purchase alcoholic beverages.
Those of you younger than I am will know how much effect raising the drinking age really had. My impression is, Not much.
Mandatory airbags and seatbelts happened at the same time but MADD was focused on the alcohol part. 21-24 year olds had the highest rate of drunk driving but 37 year olds were the most to die in alcohol related crashes.[1]1993
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1993/4/10/reagans-sober-l...
I think it had a very negative effect of creating a cohort of second-class citizens, who had the responsibilities of adulthood but not the rights.
So, yes, the fact that the drinking age was 21 didn't prevent me from consuming excessive quantities of alcohol during my first three years of college¹, but it also eliminated differential situations like Illinois-Wisconsin which had a measurable impact on reducing DUI fatalities, so it was a bit more than not much.
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1. During the late 80s, the dorm soda machines were stocked by the students. Many of the machines had a slot dedicated to beer (often a "random" slot where you took your chances. You might get something good, you might get Coors Light. The soda machine of the era were capable of dispensing glass bottles of beers even though they were designed for cans. Mostly capable. Occasionally, your 60 cents would end up buying you a pile of broken glass and beer foam. Regardless, having campus being the only place to feasibly buy alcohol meant that drunk driving incidents were rare to non-existent.
I can't beleive beer vending, either, but I do remember cigarette machines.
But even after age 21 drinking came in in the state, most of the bars where I went to school were perfectly fine with a college ID with no age on it. (And my drivers license at the time was an unlaminated piece of index stock with no photo.)
First two years, any student could sign out the dorm lounge and with $40 and the school would provide 1/2 keg of beer, $80 would get you (2) 1/2 kegs, $120 etc.
Spring weekend, not break, First two years $5 wrist band let you drink Friday, Saturday and Sunday, regardless of age. The school provided the beer, and a constant run of bands on 3 alternating stages.
The end of my 2nd year, there was a really bad drunk driving accident with 3 underage students killed, the school stopped sponsoring alcohol at events. They also started enforcing drinking age laws.
My argument is that unless young people have experience with both, it's unlikely that there won't be an initial increase in DUI accidents until they get that experience.
'No taxation without representation. But also, no beer until representation.'
I always thought it meant state as in ‘nation state’ - so a passport would count.
When I was clubbing in New York, the bouncer would even control my id very closly when I went back in after a smoke. It was cold, he saw me leave, he saw I wasn't wearing more than a t-shirt in the cold night. Yet he took 20 seconds to check my passport. People tell me I look like 35.
Source?
And I know in my city they’ll hire folks who are underage, with fake IDs to try and get pdf the checks.
The bar has probably been busted before and told the bouncers they’d be fired if they didn’t check closely.
Just a guess.
Prohibition tends not to be effective when there's broad demand for the prohibited item, especially when applied only to a small segment of society. In many places, it's customary to introduce teens to alcohol under parental supervision, which I suspect reduces later high-risk behavior.
The data almost certainly isn't stored in any sort of secure manner, either.
You only need to be 18 to buy alcohol but staff will systematically ask for ID if you look anywhere near 25.
This causes folks in their 30s (close enough to not be sure) to systematically be asked for ID. It's super annoying to be treated like a teenager. :(
I'm 30 and I still get asked for ID occasionally, and you know what? I don't care - because I've been on the other side. I've worked in those shitty low-paying jobs where you often have to ask people for ID and I've seen how rude, pissy and entitled people can be when you make them suffer the enormous inconvenience of flashing their ID so I can avoid the risk of getting fined thousands of pounds and fired. If you think it's such an indignity to be asked to prove you're above 18 then I suggest you spend more time working in service jobs.
And it's not even particularly annoying? Usually more of a compliment.
I don’t want to be identified. I just want a beer.
[1] https://longstreet.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83542d51e69e2011571d0...
This would be great and all, but all parties who are in a position to choose to implement this kind of system or to keep the status quo are already motivated to keep (and expand) the existing systems, for any number of reasons. Everybody (except the end users) loves to keep that juicy metadata and incidental logs of everything.
I Reveal My Attributes (IRMA) proves things like age without giving up SSN or whatever. I don't know the details but I've been hearing about it from nerds for years so I'm assuming there's a solid signature scheme behind it or some way to prove you're not carrying your of-age friend's phone.
Doesn't seem like anyone's interested in rolling this out though... something something proof of vaccination in the EU without compromising privacy, perfect solution mumble mumble...
Brisbane Australia scans ID cards on entry to nightclubs (I think there’s a control where if you’re booted from one club you’re barred from all for the night). I’m all for a safe nightlife, but good luck asking a bouncer what their data retention, data privacy, and operational/technical security are without getting laughed out of the cue.
All PKI can do is „this photo matches this information“ perfectly.
It cannot do „this person matches this photo“ perfectly.
Worst comes to it, I’d opt more for biometric verification provided the software / hardware is produced by a sane entity such as local government and not some seedy nightclub.
I wonder if it's legal to print one's own barcode as a privacy shield..
I wouldn't think printing out your own 2d barcode with some fields masked would be strictly illegal, as long as you weren't committing fraud by putting fake info.
Practically though, even just covering mine up with tape I've run into a few people who call it a "tampered" ID. IIRC this has only happened for situations where I accept they're going to require the identification number, so I've removed the tape from the printed number on the front but not the barcode on the back (because it's harder to nicely put the bigger piece of tape back). When I hand over my ID I ask them to key in the number instead of scanning, and most people will happily do so. But the occasional person will get tense and say it's a "tampered" ID and refuse to accept it. I've always quieted them right down by removing the back tape and handing it back to them. But I can imagine if you have a different barcode and someone notices it might set off similar "serious business" flags that you won't be able to assuage so easily.
But if you've got the bandwidth to try it, go ahead. Human rights aren't going to defend themselves! Just remember to be pleasant in your interactions, and it helps to have examples ready of why you want to keep your information out of databases.
Technically not an identification, but Zero-Knowledge-Proofs might be the solution to that. If I remember correctly, some countries in the EU are looking into this for medical prescriptions - proving your eligibility while exposing zero information about you.
https://patronscan.com/id-scanner-for-bars
I have no idea where GP lives in that this information wouldn't be retained for some reason (in the US.)
Dispensaries, nightclubs: many if not most all retain information parsed from the AAMVA-encoded text within the PDF417 barcode on the back.
Most of these devices aren't using OCR, either, because why would you when you have a 2D barcode standard?
You can tell it to just do an age check (has completed nth year) or a place check (lives in community with x ID) and it'll just return yes or no. There's also a pseudonym function that returns a unique ID per card+vendor combination (so the same vendor can tell it's the same ID again, but a different vendor would receive a different ID).
I can't see it used in night clubs though. There's a staggering amount of requirements you have to meet in order to receive certification to go to one of the handful of service providers that meet even more requirements to run a secure server that are connected to the PKI allowed to talk to the ID card.
https://euagenda.eu/upload/publications/untitled-96809-ea.pd...
Oh, and my picture on it is laughably bad. I distinctly remember the border agent using a consumer Logitech webcam to take it.
A person turns the driver license around a few times, too quick to read anything on it and gives it back to you, or they ask you where the birth date is and quickly check whether the four-digit number you pointed them to is smaller than whatever the current cut-off date is.
Depending on the night we’d instruct the bouncers to be either more strict or less strict about checking ID’s. Everyone’s paycheck came from the tips so if it was too quiet then staff might not be able to pay rent. If it was too crazy, staff might get hurt.
Yes, technically serving minors is “strict liability” but the city police didn’t enforce it that way. If someone had a reasonable quality fake ID it would let us off the hook as far as the usual cops were concerned. Obviously it wouldn’t help us if the alcohol enforcement agency specifically showed up that night (very very rare) or if an underage drinker died in a drunk driving accident (never happened thank god).
Our bouncers were better than police at checking fake ID’s because: 1) they check many orders of magnitude more ID’s than cops ever do 2) part of our on boarding is to give the new bouncers a pile (200+) of fake ID’s to study which we had because we confiscated them. These included real ID’s which we confiscated because they were being used by not-the-owner of the ID. Then 1-3 months later they are tested against a different set of fake/real ID’s and needed to get some absurdly high % correct.
Wait, how does this work? You (as a private, non-government entity) can just confiscate an ID simply because you suspect the bearer isn't the person whose ID it is?
In many states possession of a fake ID is a crime, in addition to laws that cover use or intent to defraud.
That's one of the many ways Trump loyalist Matt Gaetz's best buddy pedo-pimp Joel Greenberg got in trouble, making fake ids using information from surrendered driver's licenses.
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/local/2020/07/16/joel-gree...
>The report claims that some customers came to Greenberg’s office to surrender their driver’s license -- for instance, when they were receiving a replacement or renewal -- with the understanding that their old ID would be shredded.
>Instead, federal prosecutors allege that Greenberg used the information from at least two IDs, one from Florida and one from Puerto Rico, to create a fake driver’s license that would have his picture on it along with the victims’ names, date of birth and other pertinent information.
>“Joel Micah Greenberg used the surrendered drivers licenses that he had taken to cause fake driver licenses to be produced that had his photograph but the personal information of the victims whose driver licenses he had taken,” prosecutors wrote.
Most of the bars I knew of had their own collections of fake ID’s. The good ones would use them for training purposes and the bad ones would find ways to sell them on the black market.
Holding onto them for training purposes may be illegal but generally we had very good relationships with the police, it wasn’t something that would have ever been enforced.
To dispel the notion that this was some “bootlicker” bar that got special treatment from police, it was the actually the most popular bar in a college town very much like Berkeley or Austin or Cambridge. When Obama won the election the bar was standing room only but the manager had the staff give a free shot to everyone in the bar.
Nut how does that give you confiscatory rights? How do you come to be exercising police powers and deciding that you can take other people's stuff on behalf of your local jurisdiction? Is this a legal requirement, and if so, how do you justify a) bending the rules as described and b) not surrendering the confiscated property to the civil authorities?
(I realize you were tending bar, not operating the business, yourself.)
This has a list of most states’ rules on the matter: https://law.stackexchange.com/a/41818
As an aside, strict liability in criminal law strikes me as unjust. There should always be a culpable mental state attached to a crime, even if it's just negligence so that people are only punished for behavior that the relevant legislative authority has deemed bad.
Holograms and such seem like a clumsy strategy.
The obvious way to do that has some drawbacks though, the big one being that if the private key ever leaks, your whole system is now useless and needs to be replaced (cards, verifiers and all). And you'd need to either generate all the cards in one place, or the private key would need to be available in multiple places. Not really a recipe for success long-term.
That's a problem addressed with [public key infrastructure (PKI)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_key_infrastructure).
In practice, it could be done pretty securely and cheaply.
I don't really agree.
Yes, you want to use PKI. But it doesn't solve the problem of needing to immediately update all your equipment when there's a key leak, and replace or reprogram a huge number of cards. PKI just makes things a bit smoother in general.
My suggestion is pretty simple. Have a few different locations that sign keys, have them all sign each card, and require multiple valid signatures. Exact details up to the implementer, but that way you could have at least one key leak without causing any user hassle.
Do you know which are compact enough while remaining secure? I looked into this recently and failed to find one. Went for online verification in the end so data being signed was minimal.
You've got a central agency, responsible for IDs, paperwork and currency, with a root key in an HSM. From this key, intermediate certificates are generated for each ID production plant. This HSM is kept offline in the vault that also keeps the mint masters for coin and currency production.
The ID production plants then sign IDs with their intermediate key, also kept in an HSM, and tack their own certificate on.
The ID now has an X.509 certificate, or rather multiple ones, with a certificate chain going back to the root certificate of the agency.
Now if you send a correctly signed request via NFC to the ID, the ID will generate a response in its own HSM, and return a signed response with the whole certificate chain.
Such a request can be "given the following date, is the owner of this ID above 16?" (18, 21 are also available).
The request can also be "what is the full personal data for this person?"
To send such a request, the request also needs to be signed, also with a certificate chain going back to the same root CA.
The agency provides certificates with different features enabled or disabled to different users. e.g. a bar can get one that allows them to query IDs for "are you 18 today?" with a certain limit of how many requests per ID they can make per day (the ID verifies that) to avoid brute forcing the actual birthday.
This is for example used in fully automated cash-operated cigarette dispensers.
You can also get a certificate that allows you to request all ID data, but is restricted to your own ID.
The card can use the date in the certificate provided to approximate the current date, and will remember the last good date it saw, so you can't just decide to change the date and do another x years old check. AFAIK there is no "rate limit" for those.
I mean, doing so online isn't necessary -- there're plenty of validation mechanisms that could work offline, and presumably they'd be useful in the odd cases in which internet-connectivity isn't available. But internet-connectivity tends to be pretty accessible in most scenarios where an ID would need to be checked anyway, right?
Most US driver's licenses also include a 1D barcode along the top edge that contains just an excerpt of the information from the face. This is also according to an AAMVA standard.
Granted, using "obtuse" in this way is apparently becoming more common, so this is probably a losing battle...
Decent quality fakes will have the correct info in the barcode as well. I guess it weeds out the cheap ones at least? At my cousin's sorority they'd just find a similar-looking girl over 21 who would "lose" her ID and request a replacement, not sure how a bouncer would be able to detect that.
There are free smartphone apps available for both Android and iOS that let you read and verify the chip.
I have no doubt war also has neurological effects, but they don't seem to be age specific.
It is challenging, if not impossible, to otherwise defend it. If someone has the possibility to choose (or be forced) to harm themselves and shorten their life in war, then why shouldn't a choice apply to alcohol?
So, this just invites the same perennial arguments frequently made in relation to drug decriminilisation.
On my part, had the drinking age been 21 where I live, I wouldn't have started drinking until I was 21.
You really don't know then. As someone who lives where it is 21, I'm qualified to tell you that you're very likely wrong.
Before the "Source? Study?" parrots show up, you're darn right this is anecdotal. The "real data" is going to be from kids who aren't telling the truth.
IMO the government should not be in the business of policing one's health, or advocating for the people's health, as the USDA and associated agencies are demonstrably corrupted.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm [1] https://www.usda.gov/farmbill [2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12513041/#:~:text=Conclusion.... [3] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-...
1. The government does care about overweight/obesity; it comes up a lot in discussing issues with the healthcare system (https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html). A lack of regulation isn't the same thing as not caring -- for example, there's no regulation requiring Americans to get vaccinated, either.
2. Farm subsidies seem unlikely to be a problem.. it's not like access to food makes people obese -- in fact, the opposite seems to be true (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781054/). Usually affordable-food helps folks eat better rather than more.
3. The US government's dietary recommendations not being a copy/paste of another set of recommendations isn't a meaningful observation... why would you think otherwise? For example, are you under the impression that someone following the US's nutritional guidelines would be worse off for it? (In case you're not American: the problem isn't the guidelines, but rather that most Americans don't follow them.)
4. The US government's call to regulate teen-drinking was based on a historical uptick in drunk-driving accidents when the drinking-ages were relaxed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._history_of_alcohol_minimu...). This is, the argument wasn't based on a teen's personal health but rather people were crashing cars on public roads, which is definitely a reasonable concern for a government to have.
> The US has signed an international agreement barring child soldiers. What that means in practicality is only that you are non-deployable until you turn 18. (you must be 18 to actually fight).
> If you graduate High school early yes, you can join at 17 with parental consent, you can ship, train, you can join a unit and be active duty, you are just FLAGGED as non-deployable until your 18th birthday, when the flag is lifted.
https://www.quora.com/What-happens-when-you-join-the-US-mili...
Don't get me wrong -- some teens are probably more than responsible enough to be trusted with controlling their own drinking. However, it's those that aren't that're the concern.
Parents generally don't want to have to worry about bars being allowed to serve their kids, either. Maybe not all parents feel that way, though I'd guess that those who'd be against their kids drinking would tend to have stronger feelings on the topic than those who'd be okay with it.
Reference: https://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/fact-sheets/minimum-legal-drinki...
I wonder how many assaults and deaths have happened due to underage drinkers being too worried about going to the police or hospital due to their illegal consumption.
If there's a perfect solution to ensuring that teens suffer no harm from alcohol, that'd be a neat thing! However broadly repealing prohibitions against teen-drinking wouldn't seem to be such a solution.
Maybe because the driving age is slightly higher, training to become a driver is usually more rigorous, and max BAC levels are around 0.05%.
Another aspect might be cultural — in my experience alcohol is much more taboo and simultaneously more likely to be abused by youth in the US than in Europe. This is probably because many grandmothers will give their grandkids a small glass of wine with dinner or a schnapps for New Years or other stuff like that. This de-stigmatizes the drug, thereby making it less edgy and cool to drink.
I remember being 14 at a wedding in Germany and everyone very jovially encouraging me to have a small schnapps shot, and getting very drunk on absinthe at maybe 16/17 in France. No one really cared, and the lesson of the hangover was plenty to whip me into shape.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/chart/5504/the-worst-countries-in-t...
Really seems like there should be research on this sorta thing already, but not immediately seeing one on Google, which is odd..
But, yeah, dunno why folks'd do it in the first place. Seems like simple self-destructive behavior.
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[This study](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3823314/) seems to use a multi-linear-regression (rather than a causative model), but still looks neat.
Overall, looks like they found that stricter regulations and beer-taxes significantly reduced drunk-driving incidents, while drivers-under-24, higher speed-limits, and unemployment had the opposite effect.
Drunk driving is a lot easier to avoid if you can get anywhere easily without driving at all.
Some innovative use cases could be using the ID also as a gym card or as transportation card.
Does laser cutting give better surface finish than machine cut? I thought it was opposite
If it's a bar, they might be on the hook for underage drinking if they don't do a decent job of checking.
(PS, lock your credit reports)
Not even close. If you take a fake ID to a bar in the US, get drunk, drive home and slam into a bus full of nuns just before you reach your destination then the bartender who served you will need a criminal attorney as well as the bouncer who checked IDs at the door and probably the owner of the bar. Strict liability applies here.