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I wonder if this guy can cite the recent WTO decision against the US as an argument that the federal government doesn't have any right to block international gambling?

Maybe you haven't been told that Google Desktop hooks into your TCP/IP stack?

After installing Google Desktop, every net transaction has a bit of google in it.

A nice site 'bout it

The range of RFID tags is not long enough to make tracking you by them possible.

Nine meters seems like a pretty useful range.

You need much less (including current ones that have up to a three foot range) if your goal is to simply install a hidden transceiver on the sidewalk in front of the library and log the results.

The "man" can track your book useage by your library card anyway.

Yes, and librarians, eager to protect our democracy by protecting your right to anonymously read are very afraid of this. This is why librarians fought the PATRIOT Act clauses allowing secret library record searches. This is why many libraries purge their records as soon as a book is returned.

(Right to anonymously read? Given a strong shift in public opinion (it sometimes happens), we might end up with book burnings again. And after you burn the books, you'll have to burn everyone who read them.)

RFID tags only have a range of a few inches to a foot
In fact companies have announced passive RFID tags with advertised ranges of 9 meters or more. Active tags can have ranges of miles. The very first RFID tags had very short ranges but the technology has improved and will no doubt continue to improve. The greater the range the more useful tags are (and the fewer recievers you need), even if they are not being used for surveilence. It is therefore highly likely that RFIDs will become even more surveilence friendly as time goes by. Directional receivers specially constructed for surveilence (similar to parabolic microphones) could no doubt increase the range at which tags could be scanned by at least an order of magnitude.

RFID tags are fundamentally no different from barcodes
RFID tags can be invisible and impossible to remove from a product. Barcodes by definition have to be visible and even if they are integeral to a product can covered or scratched out. Barcodes need a clear line of sight to work whereas RFIDs can work though significant amounts of covering depending on the material. It is impossible to use barcodes to track people in any meaningfully way (unless you force everyone to have one tatooed on their forehead), but RFIDs can make such tracking trivially easy and totally invisible.

Surveilence using RFIDs will be too expensive and difficult
If RFIDs are widely deployed then the receivers will have to be cheap. If every shop is going to have may of them, like they now have barcode reader, then they are not going to be extortionally expensive. Economies of scale mean that the police will be able to afford large numbers of receivers. It is also the case that you do not need to cover even a small fraction of a country to make surveilence work. All you need to do is place receivers at strategic high volume choke points where large numbers people pass by (entrances to buildings, traffic intersections etc.). Also the usefulness of handheld receivers, especially in crowds, cannot be underplayed.

People exchanging tagged items will make surveilence impossible
This is only true if very few (presumably expensive) items are tagged and so the average person only carries one or two tags around with them. Once RFIDs are unbiquitous most people will have a dozen or more tags on them so it will not matter if you bought your PDA on ebay or your shoes were a gift from you cousin. The majority of the tags will be traceable to you. If fact at this point this effect becomes a positive advantage surveilencewise, since it will make it possible to track associations between people without seeing them meet. If you are carrying a cheap ball point pen that was bought by someone living twenty miles from you then there is a high probabilty that you know each other (or have a mutual friend).

Tags will really come into their own once they are are in a large fraction of products. At this point most people will have at least a dozen tags on them most of the time and the majority of these tags will be traceable to them through the initial purchase. In fact even if such purchase records were not kept (which they certainly will be) or the government didn't have access to them (which seems unlikely given the present climate) it wouldn't really matter.

RFIDs are like having a dozen or so unique ID numbers stamped on you as you walk around. The numbers may vary as you swap clothes, shoes, and items like pens, wallets, PDAs, keyrings etc., but all that is needed is one instance where they scan all your RFIDs and know who you are. Such situations might include security checks at airports, being stopped by the police or any number of other situations.

Once the govenment has a list of RFIDs you were carrying at one particular time it will be trivial to correlate that against previous scans of unknown individuals to work out all the RFIDs that you routinely carry arou

Content experiments are also under way for WiFi Hot Spots scattered throughout Tokyo. I helped to setup some of these.

DoCoMo is looking to establish services that can be accessed from its phones as well as wirelessly connected PDAs and laptops. Their aim, I'm sure, is to setup another "walled garden" (which has helped to make i-mode a success) that encourages consumers to purchase additional DoCoMo hardware to access the latest DoCoMo-branded content.

We can expect to see a number of interesting wireless services that push curent Japanese technology even further along.

As someone who just spent 6 months in Europe I happen to agree. Europe, epically British, prices have long been artificially inflated and its just since the internet has come along that British consumers have begun to see the difference. Heck they go over to France to buy their cars now.

However more people in Britain need to start sending their money overseas and deprive the wallet-robbing merchants in your country. Remember vote with your wallet. Or how about lobbying parliament? From what I saw in Britain most people just bitch and never do anything about it until it kills someone (RailTrack).

As for companies favoring America: I agree it's not fair. Allow me to offer reasoning to this though. On the Internet there are about 242 million users. Out of that 120 million are here in the US. The next biggest is ALL of Europe at 70 million (all of Europe - 13 some odd different countries with different languages laws and until recently different currencies). An online merchant is much more likely to favor his biggest possible customer base. Unsurprisingly many merchants cater to the US only due to the ease of not worrying about international shipping, laws in other countries and such (remember Yahoo got stung by France and don't think it didn't cost them a pretty penny).

I'm not saying its right for a site to favor US users but I am trying to illustrate that there are more barriers to get an international merchant site up and running than just adding an item to a drop down list. These barriers are cultural, economical, legal and political. These are barriers we all need to work on breaking down. Things like the euro make it much easier but there is still allot to do, and that is another discussion all together.

I think you'll find that's wrong. VISA recently released a statistic that ecommerce accounted for 4% of transactions but 50% of fraud. Some mentions are here and here etc. Take for example CD Universe having 350,000 credit card details stolen as told here... how many can a waiter copy down?

You are reimbursed both online and offline to the tune of $50 (£50 in UK) for now, but credit card companies aren't charities. The costs *will* be passed on.

In the offline world fraud is less common because in transactions with non-reputable parties you usually use cash (if you are sensible). This new scheme is there to provide you with the equivalent service. I'm all in favour of the digital equivalent of cash, and will be watching this new scheme with interest!

Phillip.

In this debate, it's important to note that even i f you don't pay tax on a out-of-state purchase, AFAIK every state with a sales tax still says that you are supposed to pay them something called a use tax; they just can't force the company to collect.

Do I owe Texas tax on mail-order merchandise?

Yes, tax is due on items purchased out of state and used in Texas. If the mail-order company has a Texas use tax permit, the company will collect Texas tax. And Texas use tax is due even if the mail-order company doesn't have a permit and doesn't collect tax.

A white paper at CommerceNet gives extensive information on the California law, and mentions that this is pretty common. For the curious, here is a table of State Sales Tax Rates, which mentions that Alaska, Deleware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Orgeon have no state sales tax.

<opinion>

Personally, I favor raising the sales tax and dropping the income tax. As a general rule of thumb, taxing something tends to discourage it (e.g., cigarette tax), so it seems silly to tax something like income. I'd much rather tax consumption, and I'm even more interested in taxing things that are environmentally bad. If society is going to allow pollution, we might as well get paid for it.

</opinion>

In this debate, it's important to note that even i f you don't pay tax on a out-of-state purchase, AFAIK every state with a sales tax still says that you are supposed to pay them something called a use tax; they just can't force the company to collect.

Do I owe Texas tax on mail-order merchandise?

Yes, tax is due on items purchased out of state and used in Texas. If the mail-order company has a Texas use tax permit, the company will collect Texas tax. And Texas use tax is due even if the mail-order company doesn't have a permit and doesn't collect tax.

A white paper at CommerceNet gives extensive information on the California law, and mentions that this is pretty common. For the curious, here is a table of State Sales Tax Rates, which mentions that Alaska, Deleware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Orgeon have no state sales tax.

<opinion>

Personally, I favor raising the sales tax and dropping the income tax. As a general rule of thumb, taxing something tends to discourage it (e.g., cigarette tax), so it seems silly to tax something like income. I'd much rather tax consumption, and I'm even more interested in taxing things that are environmentally bad. If society is going to allow pollution, we might as well get paid for it.

</opinion>

This article (PDF format) takes an interesting tack on the question of whether stores should want Internet purchases taxed. It might come back to bite them.

Internet merchants have made the point that it's extremely burdensome to be able to compute the sales tax rates for every one of the thousands of tax jurisdictions in the US, and provide the funds to each of those jurisdictions. (It's especially bad for small vendors - say, people who sell a few things on eBay.)

The above-referenced paper argues that for reasons of basic legal equity, it won't be constitutionally possible to impose an obligation to collect use taxes of this kind on Internet merchants without imposing the same obligation on stores.

Imagine walking into your local store and having them require proof of address so they could compute the proper tax. (Imagine the store owner - particularly small local stores - having to set up or buy a system to compute those different tax rates.) It might not be so bad in practice in areas where there's a single sales-tax rate for a large area...but in, say, the Bay Area, you can barely drive two miles without hitting a change in the sales tax rate

It's an interesting question. Do physical stores really want to open this particular can of worms? Killing small Internet merchants and slowing down the big ones is of economic benefit to store owners, but it might come back around to bite them.