A variety of information

• Insurance against fare increases

Farecast is offering to lock in your ticket price for one week. The normal charge for this service is $10, but during an unspecified testing period, the price is only a buck. The trick is that Farecast monitors prices between cities, and its algorithm makes a guess on whether prices will go up, down, or not move. If Fare Guard tells you the price is going down, you pay the fee to lock in the lowest fare. If the price goes up instead, Farecast will send you the difference between the price you locked and the price you had to pay. If the fare goes down, they keep your fee, and you pay the lower fare.

Note that if Farecast says the price is going up, and I buy but the fare goes down, I'm out of luck. At the time of this writing, Farecast tracks 75 cities.

• How to get arrested at a security checkpoint

This article is from a flyers' bulleting board. The funny part is that our intrepid but anonymous traveler was flying with his collection of rubber bands, which was shaped as a ball that he says is bigger than a softball. For some reason, the ball set off the X-ray machine as containing metal, so he was targeted for extra service. TSA agents called the local police, and the traveler was arrested, charged with transporting drugs and explosives, and spent 12 hours in jail. For your information, the SIDA identification he refers to is "Security Identification Display Area," which means he's authorized to be in restricted areas in airports.

There are two lessons: Don't bring your ball of rubber bands to the airport, and if cops want to arrest you, they'll trump up a reason and then believe it.

• More problems with RFID-enabled passports.

Okay, so the German can be cloned, the Dutch version has been cracked, now the US can be read by anyone with the right gear and the newly released code.

The lesson: get your passport a nice faraday cage.

UPDATE: December 5, 2006. Great Britain announced it was issuing newly-designed, ultra-secure RFID passports. Wired reports they got it half-right. Long story short: they're newly-designed.

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