Singapore Expats

Just picked up an EZLink card and the "todo" list on its cover says to register the card. To do this I need a FIN number, which I won't get for another week or so.

I can still use the card on the MRT in the meantime, right? I'm simply not protected if I manage to lose the thing before it is registered to me.

Thanks!

Your conclusion is exactly the same as mine was, when I was in your circumstances.

Does the SMRT site have anything like an FAQ entry 'Advantages of registering'?

JR8 wrote:Your conclusion is exactly the same as mine was, when I was in your circumstances.

Does the SMRT site have anything like an FAQ entry 'Advantages of registering'?

Registering gives you some or little insurance cover if you lost it, and EZ link can sell your info to marketers

If you want to get bombarded ... just register it

JR8 .. the benefits should be under transit-link website ... the issuer of the Contactless cards

Also means the embedded RFID chip, together with those in your bank-cards, and the SIM in your mobile... make your daily movements and position traceable, right back to 'little old you'

Up here in space
I'm looking down on you.
My lasers trace
Everything you do.
You think you've private lives
Think nothing of the kind.
There is no true escape

I'm watching all the time.
I'm made of metal
My circuits gleam.
I am perpetual
I keep the country clean

I'm elected electric spy
I protected electric eye.
Always in focus
You can't feel my stare.
I zoom into you
You don't know I'm there.
I take a pride in probing all your secret moves
My tear less retina takes pictures that can prove.

Electric eye, in the sky
Feel my stare, always there
's nothing you can do about it.
Develop and expose
I feed upon your every thought
And so my power grows.
Protected. Detective. Electric eye

What a cracker! That was right when they first crossed my radar, nice!

Ok, so that was 30 years ago. How would the lyrics be revised to bring it up to the modern day?

Futile as it sounds, I've never registered one and have lost a couple, just chalk it up to the cost of doing business without putting myself on yet more radar.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2 ... ance_state

If you don't register it doesn't matter. They'll be able to figure it out exactly who you are if you ever carry a cell-hone with you while using that EZ-link card (and of course the more times the easier). They can just correlate the pair of movements together.

When we had to study, amongst others, Orwell's 1984, and Huxley's Brave New World for English Lit 'O'-level, we were still living under the shadow of being one generation on from the end of WW2.

I don't know if they were on the reading list to prime us on how such horrors might come about and how they might end, or simply because they were very compelling reads, with multiple levels of depth (to us at that age), that would thus make good exam fodder.

I don't recall ever whilst reading them thinking 'Oh heavens, this could be where our society might end up'. In some ways it was more akin to.... er, rather grave science fiction set on the future earth, with personal elements that you could directly relate to.

It's interesting now looking back and considering how society has evolved since the 70s. I'm not suggesting re: just SG (and where this topic above ^^ has got to), I'm talking about anywhere that can afford, at a state level, to initiate mass surveillance, varying levels of 'social conditioning', and so on. Both books appear on many 'Top-100' lists, and I'd recommend them to anyone who enjoys a thought-provoking read, as none too lengthy or heavy classics.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
[Published 1949]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
[Published 1932]

Should required reading even today, but more so, people should seek those books out and read them. Kinda the opposite of how not knowing history one is bound to repeat, not knowing these veiled predictions one is doomed to find oneself living in them.

Also kinda relates to my intentionally cryptic post earlier this evening.

Catcher in the Rye - Salinger
Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway
All quiet on the western front - Erich Remarque
Heart of darkness- Joseph Conrad [ultimately adapted into the film Apocalypse Now]
Crime and punishment - Dostoyevsky
Our man in Havana - Graham Greene
.... and many more ...

All classics, but with a storyline to carry them. From which you should be left both entertained and 'thought-provoked'