£72 for a freakin' passport renewal!!

But what other reason is there.

We've already established that it isn't being used to travel to foreign lands

on 100 pound for a week?

That'll be about 7 pence.

That's about 10 second of my time at my billing rate. So it is VERY cost effective to go to the Bank machine and take out 4 weeks money each time!

tim

It's not meant to be an advance in security

It's meant to be an advance in (non)counterfitability (if that's a word?).

tim

The benefit isn't "not being stranded", the benefit is "a lower risk of being stranded". The fancy passport only delivers the latter, not the former. That lower risk *is* an immaterial benefit because the unreduced risk is already low enough.

Well, if it was that common, then (a) there would have been well established procedures for dealing with the consequences, and (b) it sounds like this was the kind of hold-up in which the perpetrators would get on with the job quickly. They would not search each person's bag first and say "oh, this guy's passport is one of the new-fangled secure ones, I'll let him keep it".

Ah so you can't, didn't think you could, just talking bollox as usual

I don't just frequent the USA or did you miss the part where I mentioned Canada, Australia, New Zealand, S Africa etc?

Redman

Have you some particular reason for being so reticent about where in the world this is supposed to have happened?

"tim (not at home)" wrote

No we haven't! We said one reason was "so it'll be there if needed for foreign travel at short notice...".

"tim (not at home)" wrote

... which is a **full half** of the 14p per week that a passport costs, which you said was "blooming expensive"!

Dear Mr Moore,

Thank you for your enquiry

No it is no longer possible to have another passport for travel within incompatible countries. You will have to renew the passport if you have a stamp on the passport. I am unsure why the Government decided to withdraw this service.

Thank you. Customer service e-mail team

----- Original Message ----- From: "John Moore" Date: 25 February 2008 Subject: Re: IPS132246

That was not quite my question. Am I to take it you no longer supply second passports for people who simply wish to travel to Israel without getting their main passport stamped, as you used to do in the eighties? According to the FO website the Israelis now refuse to stamp the visa on a separate piece of paper as they used to before 2006. Why has this useful service been discontinued?

Stop moving the goalposts, you silly little man. You said it wasn't possible to fly with a military ID as...er...ID. It is.

Game over.

If you're trying to appear all macho and argumentative because you're secretly bummed out that you're not in the military any more, get over yourself.

At 18:17:42 on 25/02/2008, Ronald Raygun delighted uk.finance by announcing:

Yes. It's these consular services that form part of the charge for a passport.

I never moved the goalposts at all, I told Mr Black that it was bollox that you could fly on a Military ID internationally and it is unless it's a Military flight, you only replied that you do it all the time (see your post this thread, Time - 03:39) I asked you to name any civilian airline that will let you do it and you said you managed it between Qatar and Kuwait, most likely a civilian flight chartered to the Military as I use to fly this way going to Kosovo, Bosnia etc but I was still required to carry my passport, obviously by your rant above you can't name any big carrier and I've proven to you by the reply from BA that it's impossible to do so, so once again that's one up for me, now do one and f*ck off.

Bwhehehehehehehehe

BELLEND

Plonk

Redman

What facts are these?

So it must be true if it's on a government web site?

There are many sources that claim differently.

M.

Yes - it's pretty obvious with a properly designed directional antenna, that you could read these things from much greater distances.

And other radio sources are not going to intefere.....right....and if as stated they are encoded, how long do you think it will take you to break the code?

That's the whole point about a directional antenna - you can avoid interference by other radio sources.

In regard to the chip, it's not obvious it is secure unless it has been externally reviewed. Maybe this is the case, but it is very hard to make these systems completely secure, e.g.

or If you can get the cryptographic secret, then all the data's available.

If you need to open the passport anyway to get the information to decrypt the chip, why not use a chip with contacts instead?

Jeremy

A more relevent and interesting article:

"What about the technical difficulties? The government claims the new biometric passport chips can be read over a distance of just 2cm, but researchers all over the world claim to have read them from further. The physics governing those in British passports says they could be read over a metre, but no one has yet done that. A Dutch team claims to have contacted chips at 30cm."

"There isn't even a defence against the brute-force attack. In much the same way as you are only allowed three attempts to feed in your PIN number at an ATM, the passport chip could have been made to stop allowing repeated incorrect attempts to contact it. As things stand, a computer can keep trying until it gets the numbers right. To say this doesn't matter displays a cavalier lack of concern."

"Jeremy Sanders" wrote

'No-one has yet read a chip over a metre'!... Do you think that you might notice someone standing

**right next to you** with one of those directional antennas?

BTW - people could read the normal writing with their eyes, over your shoulder from much, much further away than that...

They only reduce interference, not eliminate it. Considering the signal strength the chip will respond in it is unlikely you could eliminate enough of the background radio interference to read it from a large distance.

In addition even directional antenna have an angular coverage which means the further you are away, the more likely you are to pick up interference in your coverage.

Someone standing next to you on the tube is hardly any distance at all.

Furthermore, Dutch passports have been read at 10m distance and the data cracked within 2 hours.

"Jeremy Sanders" wrote

Yes, but don't you think you'd notice them aiming at your pocket?