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See Alien technology for examples of UHF tags.

Here's your fiesty upstart http://www.alientechnology.com/ and here's your huge, entrenched competetor http://www.sensormatic.com/home.asp

Alien Technologies http://www.alientechnology.com/
Impinj http://www.impinj.com/
Intermec http://www.intermec.com/

Mostly good information, but you're wrong about range. I've got a Matrics and Alien EPC RFID reader on my desk at work, and the range I've measured is 9-12 feet. The advertised range is 15-20 feet. Alien and Matrics are the two big players, and both advertise about this range. You can see a comparison grid for popular readers on buyrfid.com.

I went to a presentation by Alien Technology and they claimed that one of the big cost savings in depolying these devices was reducing employee theft. I don't see how this could be possible if you are correct.

Speaking of which - how is this different from the products sold by Alien Technology? They are already selling tiny RFID tags for this purpose with 64 bits. They've actually taken care of the real issues with their system like reading the tag at any orientation even when obscured by layers of different materials. Oh yeah, they've also taken care of the whole mass production aspect.

As far as I can tell, all this article says is "96 bits" are a lot. Was there anything concrete in there? I sure couldn't find it.

Admittedly, the 2450MHz band is the same as WiFi, so most of us would be opposed to jamming that on general principles, but it looks like the 915MHz band is what is being used more often. The Alien Technology tags for 2450 look really big and expensive.

It should only take about a watt or two with a bandwidth of 26MHz in the low band or 56.5Hz in high band. (These numbers from the FCC web site:FCC frequency spectrum PDF Some sort of pulse modulation would probably help the jamming, too.

Heck, you could probably take the RF shielding off an appropriate-speed laptop and walk around with it as a first iteration of the design. I remember the old Apple ][+ used to jam channel 6 pretty well.

Great post! For more horror...

Biological organisms do acomplish computational tasks but I doubt anyone's going to try to port netBSD to the ecoli bacteria anytime soon. What we stand to learn from studying these systems is the understanding of the Algorithms that govern basic biological functions.

How does a few simple molecules of DNA self assemble into an elephant? These are structures which are orders of magnitude larger and seemingly more complex than the original building blocks. Can we code a set of building blocks to self assemble into a stapler instead of an elephant?

If our DNA code is to large and obfuscated to make any sence right now, let's forget about it for a moment, how wold you execute any of these instructions to begin with? What protine.dll files do you need to interpret DNA? What happens if you're missing them? What if you cold write extra?

What are the errors involved in genetic computation? Can knowing how these errors are produce be used to prevent disease? Will knowing how these errors occur help us detect precursurs years before disease sets in?

Can we use the knowledge of self assembly to make better RFID tags. The application of this knowledge to nano/micro/macro manufacturing are going to be most imediate in this field. Then maybe nano/micro robotics in a few years... okay many years.

As for the ethics, well we're a long way from being doing anything that's ethicly questionable so ethics is mostly a nonissue. The knowledge just isn't there yet. People occasionally do things in the course of their research that involve creepy things like dead babies, but that's not a new debate in the ethics.

You can walk into a shop, pick whatever you want up, walk out without having to go to a checkout!

"You will! And the company that will bring it to you? <strike>AT&T</strike> Alien Technology."

Read the spec sheet from the company making them. 64-bit address space, factory or field programmable. Not only could they track individual items, but they could re-encode a portion of it when you purchase it.

Whether you care or not, it's always nice to know what capabilities are available..

A. Coward

Read the spec sheet from the company making them. 64-bit address space, factory or field programmable. Not only could they track individual items, but they could re-encode a portion of it when you purchase it.

Whether you care or not, it's always nice to know what capabilities are available..

A. Coward

This Stanford seminar gave a good overview of the underlying technology.

I think you are looking for Alien Technology. This is a proposed alternative to bar codes. It has several advantages over traditional barcodes. The main ones are that it reduces theft and it reduces the number of employees needed to run a store. Also, I think the cost of the individual tags was about 5 cents but it would decrease as volume goes up.

Ever seen that Visa commercial where a guy in a trenchcoat walks out of the grocery store without paying. That's the kind of thing we're talking about.

I saw a presentation by a senior exec from Alien Technology recently, and it was astounding. RFID utilizes incredibly small processor packages that are able to wirelessly communicate with other devices. The real breakthrough is that they can make these devices communicate without manual scanning, and they can manufacture them in volume extremely cheaply.

My guess is once this technology picks up steam, they'll be everywhere, from price tags on the jacket you buy at the Gap, to the pound of ground turkey you snag at Safeway.

Of course, the potential for misbehavior with these things is huge. But it's coming. All of the industry players are on board, the technology is in test production, and before long it'll be deployed.

Alien Technology may be a hoax. From their site: "One of the visitors from Klingon reportedly commented that "I seldom come to Earth - even to Silicon Valley - because there is so little useful technology. Alien, however, may have developed the most important technology since the Romulans developed cloaking. We are considering an investment of up to 1 million bars of gold-pressed latinum in Alien's current financing round.""

A company called Alien Technology has developed a very low power display technology that looks very promising. There was a write-up in the February Scientific American about it.