UK Government: Fight online fraud with free iPods

Now this is interesting. head of applications and data services at the DTI Patrick Cooper proposes using iPods as the new transport for online ID card for UK citizens. Supposedly it would work out cheaper than making the infrastructures for the ID themselves.

There are a couple of problems with this scheme:

• With the transport of the secured ID information be what is essentially a harddisk, it's simple too easy for anyone with technical knowledge to gain access to the information.
• With this scheme, they are relying on Apple to deliver on ID transport. Apple iPod is a very close-sourced product, with an extremely fast product cycle. iPod Mini, for example, was put out of market by a new product-line within a year. This makes the standardization of ID extremely difficult.

Cool concept nevertheless.