from slashdot
from a practical standpoint, take car theft as an example. criminals have always been able to bypass the locks and steal the cars or the stereos. amatuer mechanics can easily bypass speed regulators the japanese have put on their cars.
from a hardware hacking standpoint, hackers drive microsoft crazy (xbox), and ipod, and tivo, and those barcode scanners... the list is endless. (for those of you unfamiliar with this, basically "hardware hacking" is stuff like cracking open the case on your tivo and replacing the 40gig hard drive with a 160gig hard drive which lets you record 4x as many movies etc. it's arguably illegal, but very common and easy.)
the point is,
does anybody really think the comparatively TINY companies like Smith & Wesson or Beretta or Glock or Sig Sauer, with no history of electronic expertise or computer security and very limited resources, could design a security system that couldn't be bypassed by a 13 yr old following instructions he downloaded off the internet?
in the market for illegal guns, i doubt "smart guns" stand a chance. obviously, we're creating a market for firearm chop-shops that at most will add a 20% premium to the cost of illegal guns. and since we're forcing criminals to funnel their guns through a professional criminal to make them servicable, they'll probably tack on some "value-add" services like scrubbing serial numbers, modifying the rifling etc to foil "ballistic fingerprinting" databases, etc.
alas, unintended consequences
According to the press release, smart guns demonstrated by the NJIT, can recognise authorised users utilising "sixteen electronic computerized sensors embedded in the gun's grip" and "Under New Jersey law, passed in Dec. 2002, only smart guns can be purchased in the state three years after personalized handguns become commercially available. Lautenberg said New Jersey's legislative effort to introduce smart gun technology should be a national model for the country"."
from a practical standpoint, take car theft as an example. criminals have always been able to bypass the locks and steal the cars or the stereos. amatuer mechanics can easily bypass speed regulators the japanese have put on their cars.
from a hardware hacking standpoint, hackers drive microsoft crazy (xbox), and ipod, and tivo, and those barcode scanners... the list is endless. (for those of you unfamiliar with this, basically "hardware hacking" is stuff like cracking open the case on your tivo and replacing the 40gig hard drive with a 160gig hard drive which lets you record 4x as many movies etc. it's arguably illegal, but very common and easy.)
the point is,
does anybody really think the comparatively TINY companies like Smith & Wesson or Beretta or Glock or Sig Sauer, with no history of electronic expertise or computer security and very limited resources, could design a security system that couldn't be bypassed by a 13 yr old following instructions he downloaded off the internet?
in the market for illegal guns, i doubt "smart guns" stand a chance. obviously, we're creating a market for firearm chop-shops that at most will add a 20% premium to the cost of illegal guns. and since we're forcing criminals to funnel their guns through a professional criminal to make them servicable, they'll probably tack on some "value-add" services like scrubbing serial numbers, modifying the rifling etc to foil "ballistic fingerprinting" databases, etc.
alas, unintended consequences