Slashdot Mirror
Cheap, Paper RF ID Tags To Replace Barcodes?
Chris writes: "From EETimes:
"International Paper Co. and Motorola Inc. have developed a low-cost RF identification system that could become commonplace on disposable items like cereal boxes, replacing the ubiquitous bar code."
While the article does mention that the cost of the technology must drop further (from about 10 to 30 cents per ID to a couple of pennies), it overlooks the potential impact on privacy. (Just imagine embedding these tags in your clothes.)"
On the other hand we won't need to worry about the police asking people to describe the suspect. Instead of "He was a caucasian, about 6 foot 2 200 lbs, wearing a tan sportscoat and running shoes." We will get: "He was a white caucasian, about 6 foot 2 200 lbs, wearing a tan JCPenny Sportscoat model 007958 item number 1119949396882. This same sportscoat was later scanned at 1610 Maple Street at Walt's Bar, and is currently believed to be in that area.
Theoretically, if you paid for your clothes with your credit card, the store would know that you bought the clothing. Those records could almost certainly be subpoenaed.
Of course it would be much more straightforward, and quite a bit more fun, to simply tatoo a bar code of your social security number on your forehead. Somehow I don't see that happening either. If you can't be paranoid on /., where can you be paranoid?
So when does Digital:Convergence sue because now people can't use the Cuecat to scan the barcodes in!
Geoff
Briefly, in Sterling's world there is no such thing as privacy once someone cares enough to try tapping you. But this technology is so cheap and ubiquitous that anyone can use it to tag anyone else and trace them around. There is lots else besides. Strongly recommended.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Sounds like a new way to steal items from the supermarket, as soon as they come out with their cart at a time checkout, you just carry around a device to kill the signal on some of your more expensive, harder to notice items (say razorblades)... Or, if you are against the devices, in an act of civil disobedience kill the signal on everything in the store...
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
In a related note, Digital Convergence has issued cease-and-desist letters to all users of their intellectual property, "pencils" and "paper". The New York Times crosswords have been cancelled.
Digital Convergence's new RF-Paper scanners (the ":Cue:Dog:") have been reverse-engineered by sneaky Open Source hacktivists and used to fill out multiple-choice exams, do math problems, and even do artistic graphite rubbings. None of these uses were authorized by Digital Convergence and represent a violation of the EULA which is printed in invisible undetectable ink on every single page of paper.
Don't blame me - I voted for Howard Dean. http://dean2004.blogspot.com
I don't think someone who has the ability to scan through the walls of your house for these things will be interested in stealing TVs.
And if you're worried about your privacy, I don't see how they are able to collect any information with this that they aren't already collecting with bar codes.
And of course one of the selling points is that it makes it easier for stores to track stolen items. Do you consider that a bad thing?
Jon Sullivan
Jon Sullivan
www.jonsullivan.com
Bullsh*t! They just let out DueDog...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
A quick look on the web, seems to suggest that the RFID concept is quite old (e.g. see Transponder News), so there's probably other people working on the problem . .
Any suggestions?
this type of id would be harder to tear off compared to the various tags they have now
Actually, it would be much easier to carry around an RF-jammer. You wouldn't have to "tear" anything.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Why should we not complain about it?
I think that privacy is very important. I don't want my information and habits collected without my knowledge and then shared amongst goverment agencies, corporate salespeople, or malicious information vandals. I want "opt-in" mailing, emailing, and calling lists to be the law in this country (USA), not the exception. I want encryption to be legal without restriction.
However, Chicken Littles who scream "privacy" every time some new technology surfaces make all of us concerned about privacy look like a bunch of extremist knee-jerk wackos. Extremist knee-jerk wackos tend to be ignored, and are excluded from the decision-making process because mainstream voters don't understand the issues involved and don't trust people who are always beating the same drum while yelling in a shrill voice.
Complaining about all of the possible threats is a waste of focus and a poor battle plan if you ever expect the general public to support the goals you're trying to accomplish. Instead of focusing on all of the possible privacy problems on the horizon, focus on the real ones that are here right in front of us. Be reasonable and work within the system wherever possible.
Unless you just like to complain and accomplish nothing, in which case... nevermind.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I believe that your closing statement, "criminals are always the first to adopt new technologies", has no factual basis. I think your entire post is based around this erroneous assumption. With that in mind, your post seems quite absurd.
Maru
BTW - Read the article again. They are talking about "Supply Chain Management". This is tracking packages and palletes of goods through a factory from start of manufacture to shipping. Go to a factory, learn how a bar code is used (at a previous employer we tracked all stages of steel production using bar code technology ... do you think we were worried about someone walking out of the plant with a 20 Ton coil of steel under their arm?).
/. 31337 h4x0rs), but they also knew where you lived.
Have you ever had a UPS/FedEx/Airborne delivery? Bet that scared the $hit out of you knowing that not only did someone have a package with a barcode with your name on it (that could be tracked over the internet by those malicious
Privacy is important, but pick the right fight to fight.
P&G also has a problem with Companies outside the U.S. copying and selling products in fake P&G packaging. This will also help the consumer to authenticate "real" P&G products from the fake products that possibly make them ill.
=====
On the other hand, it can bring about two major application uses: shoplifting is one, as this type of id would be harder to tear off compared to the various tags they have now.
=====
How do you draw this conclusion? Current antitheft systems, such as those offered by sensormatic or checkpoint, utilize small adhesive rectangles that are stuck somewhere on a piece of merchandise its package. They are plastic and are highly adhesive and can be difficult to remove. The IPC/Motorola offering sounds identical in that it will also be a small, adhesive package. I do not see the difference between current technology and and IPC/Motorola system when applied to loss prevention.
Maru
Technology steals jobs. We should get rid of evil things like bulldozers, cranes, machinery, farm equipment and employ people to perform all of those tasks. Let's get rid of computers too. If we are truly successful, we'll generate a lot of employment and maybe the US will become a perfect place to live in where the people are happy and there's plenty of employment. Kinda like Somalia, I guess.
Mmmm.. Donuts
You people need to read the article and take a class in simple electronics. The ID tags are not self powered. They must be in the presents of a RF signal, much like the inductive tags used today. Like those tags Walmart puts on the more expensive stuff, so it will set the alarm off as you go out the door. Those upright retangular things on each side of the door are basically produce and EM field that the inductive tag uses to power itself and identify the fact that it is there (at the checkout they run the tag acrossed a very powerful electro-magnet the essentially burns the tag).
These things work nearly the same way, except they are capacitive. That means that instead of an EM field they use an RF field. But it will not be as if they will be active all the time. In fact, they will only be active in a relatively strong RF field. This will work just like the conductive tags do now. At a warehouse or at the checkout counter there will be a RF source that provides the power at some limited radius (like near a door) so that it will be possible to keep inventory. It will not be as if they will query every tag in the warehouse at one time.
Just wear aluminum clothing. Privacy concern solved.
This still requires silicon, which, the last time I checked, was more expensive than ink. Unless the product is universal, it's hard to compete. UPC codes cost basicially nothing (the only exception would be a product that wouldn't use printing), and it works because supermarkets can scan EVERYTHING. If there were exceptions, it would slow down the whole process down. Here's a better idea (GPL'ed of course): how about a watermark system printed over the whole outside of the packaging? It would be like the camera-based system wired magazine had for ads. This way, when I carefully put my ice cream bar at 7-11 on the counter (so as not to melt it), they don't have to handle it a whole bunch before they find the bar code and scan it -- just getting any part of the product in range of the camera would do. also- "the key is that the RFID chip, unlike a bar code, is programmable. The BiStatix chip provides 96 bits of data with which a manufacturer can give each product its own serial number." Bar codes *ARE* programmable. Electronic equipment (heck, FedEX and UPS, too) often has a serial number bar code on the outside; this is cheaply printed. The distintion is that their RFID chip allows serialization and reading at a distance -- something that the above-mentioned watermark system would have a problem with (because the packaging area is so big and covers many sides)... unless there is an effective way to print large pattern watermarks on the boxes before they are assembled. (like a laser?) In summary, I think that "1 or 2 cents" is a far cry from free and that bar codes and/or watermarks still have a long life ahead of them.
These RF tags are perfect for tagging clothes, as the blurb pointed out. But an even more sinister use than tagging clothes is tagging the people who wear the clothes. And I'm especially referring to a certain kind of person:
Slavery is alive and well in this country, and I'm not referring merely to rhetorical or political slavery, but actual slavery. Women from foreign countries, particularly southeast-Asian countries are flown to America and promised low-paying but normal jobs performing menial labor or housecleaning services, but when they arrive, they discover to their horror that the real purpose is to prostitute themselves for the financial benefit of their masters. These women (and even children) are trapped, since they don't speak English, don't have the money to fly home, and don't have the physical or mental stamina to escape their tormentors after so much abuse.
How is this relevant to RF tags? Think of how much easier it would be to kidnap people from airports if all you needed to do was wander around with a small device, picking up the signals from the tags embedded in clothing given to the erstwhile immigrants back in their home countries. No longer would there have to be complicated networks of international communication -- they'd just have to agree on a certain range of serial numbers (of which there are trillions, as the article points out), hand out "free" clothes to people boarding the plane at departure, and sit back while agents at the US airports haul in the "goods".
This never would've been possible if we'd stuck to normal barcodes -- it's simply impossible to read barcodes surreptitiously. And since criminals are always the first to adopt new technologies for these devious purposes, it's only a matter of time before it comes to an airport near you, Thirteenth Amendment be damned.
-- Anne Marie
Someone needs to quickly patent the idea of using the results of an RF read on such a package to look the product up in a "universally accessible" database.
-MC
Do you have ESP?
I can imagine it now!
"Send in 5 Paper RF ID tags with a self-addressed stamed envelope to recieve you toy, in specially marked boxes only"
BTW, I herby patent the concept of feeding a blank check into the machine and letting it fill it out for your approval. AND, the idea of actually feeding a few bills in, and letting it cough out some change. God, I'll be rich now.
Anyway, I doubt the tags put out enough RF to send details of your p0rn collection out to the Mothers against p0rn.
What we really need is a law banning the distribution/sale of purchase history by any vendor providing a service serogate for the common currency (credit/debit cards, checks, etc.), or *requiring* a customer membership/registration to purchase goods. Revocation of your merchantile permit should be the penalty for violation, first offense.
If you want to sign up for a stupid "store discount/please track and sell my soul discount card", that's your problem.
My boss could find me anywhere he wanted?
"Where's Louis? Activate the building wide EM field generator!"
"Sir, the sensors indicate a response in location F12"
"Where is that?"
"He's in his cube, sir!"
Alternatively:
"Sir, sensors indicate his shirt is in location F4 and his pants are in location F7, and that his shoes are in location E1"
"What?!"
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
But this is far from new stuff.
How Stuff Works had an article on anti-shoplifting measures that include paper tags like these.
If memory serves, I first saw this article from a url posted here at slashdot several months back. Interesting how this place recycles stories.
Tim
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
It seems that these things have limited range now, but imagine if you could make them so that they would work within 20 feet or so. You could put three transmitters/receivers in your house (for triangulation you need three reference points) and whenever you've misplaced some item and can't find it, just fire up your transmitters to look for the particular object (this is of course assuming that you've put the little RF transmitter on a lot of your belongings - If they're small enough, why not??). Then hook it up to your linux box, rewrite find so you can do queries like: find /kitchen -name "my shot glass". That would kick ass!
Cheers
Costyn.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Mainly because the US has not been squeamish about automating things that could previously only be done by humans. Try to artificially protect jobs from becoming redundant due to technology, and you will have precisely the opposite effect to that you desire: you will destroy employment and diminish prosperity.
Start cutting jobs and things can change. Is there anything wrong with making profits while still keeping job positions?
Learn some basic economic facts. Start paying a bit more attention to the world around you. Hint: if we had not automated agriculture, then automated much of industry, nobody would have had the time to do such cerebral things as build computers and network them together.
--
Are you replying to my post specifically or just the idea of circumventing RFID chips in general? It seems the latter.
;) How about this: since the tag is right there, why not deliver a high-power pulse directly to the chip or its ink antenna? Here's something simpler. Locate the little piece of paper with the chip on it. Unbend a paper clip, poke it into the tag and pop the chip off its paper antenna. There are a thousand other ways to accomplish the same thing. The idea was to disable the tag in some way (and it is impossible to prove that it can not be disabled, so don't pick nits) and to take advantage of the automated checkout to look to the cameras like you're buying stuff but to cause selected high-ticket items not to be rung up.
;)
You'll nead to carry a portable radar amplifier with you to zap these chips - ther're pretty tough.
Presumably a "portable EMP generator" might incorporate this (and not be just a 9V battery and a piece of wire)? Since I'm just talking hot air on this one, I'm going to say my imaginary EMP generator would.
Two - they can be used in conjuction with proven anti-theft technologies.
There is no "proven anti-theft technology" that cannot be disabled by a skilled and knowledgable person. Moreover, the problem is in using these with an automated cart-at-once checkout as seen in that (AT&T I think) commercial (this being the idea behind my original hastily-written post). That is, where you just roll your cart through the exit and it bills your credit card and prints out a receipt. No holding items up one by one to a camera or receiver or tag remover or deactivator.
Take a look at Sensormatics smartEAS - based on Intermecs chip.
I have. Those things are as big and bulky as current anti-theft clothing tags, meaning they would have to be removed at checkout. (The smaller versions look to be attached with adhesive, but that just makes them easy to remove.) I'm not sure how they can claim (as they do) that this will enable "automated inventory returns, active merchandising, self-checkout." I certainly wouldn't want one of those things in my undies poking me you-know where. Therefore, at some point (probably POS), it must be removed. (Sensormatic explicitly says this.) If they are going to sell "readers (fixed and hand-held), detachers and deactivators," what is to stop a disgruntled Wal-Mart employee from lifting a detacher/deactivator and turning it over for reverse-engineering and duplication? (I have, ahem, heard that this has already been done.) Anyway, this still prohibits the automated cart-at-once checkout idea, which was the topic of my original post, so these devices, others like them, and this entire paragraph are not really relevant.
Lastly - jamming won't work easily. The chips work woth frequency hopping interrogatorators.
Who said anything about jamming? Presumably Jamming would just be silly--it's a good way to get busted for shoplifting and get in trouble with the FCC. It's about as smart to disable the interrogators by kicking them over and ripping them out of the floor.
Anyway, the point of my original post was that attempts to use RFID tech to allow self-checkout leaves one open to abuse. Retailers know this, and that's why these RFID tags are probably just going to end up doing three things in the short term:
1) reducing the amount of time the clerk spends looking for the barcode and repeatedly trying to scan the same barcode-less side of an item,
2) providing better inventory control for retailers, though that is debateable (Why do they need to know which box of cereal sold? Because management says so.), and
3) creating more jobs for programmers to re-write inventory systems to handle the new data.
There is, of course, the possibility that retailers will find the level of shoplifting allowed by self-checkout and imperfect security acceptable in light of the ability to lay off a few clerks and shorten lines. Which, as I said, I think is a great idea!
Corgha
I hope you're not trolling. These are passive RF tags which have no power or activity of their own. They react to magnetic fields, though - kinda like the magnetic door passes most companies have in the employee badges.
Mmmm.. Donuts
Am I stupid? Is it that you didn't read my post, or didn't understand it? They noticed when they were being bombarded by the EM signal, but it was a simple sine wave, coming from an identifiable source outside the embassy, and they concluded it was a jamming attempt.
Read before you criticize.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
The tags do not have their own power source. They need to be present in a relatively strong RF field. It is likely that the transmit a very weak signal, probably only detectable for a few yards at best.
I dare you to try and produce a strong RF signal at the any comercial US airport. You will find that the airport will not be very happy with you.
There is slavery and it happens to people right here. They do not need to be flown in. But these RFID tags will not change the slavery business. The dealers in flesh are greedy and sick, but usually not stupid.
Troy
Phone Flying Null on +44(1223)875200, and they'll answer "Scientific Generics, can I help you"
Then again Harston Mill was such a lovely office (a converted mill, woo!) it makes no sense to move out until absolutely necessary.
Phil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Yeah, right and the embassy wouldn't notice that they were being bombarded with RF or EM? Not very likely. You must think they are stupid or something.
Digital:Convergence's business model is ruined!
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
BTW - Read the article again... one of the applications mentioned is protection from shoplifters.
and in one giant spasm, our civilization will announce its invententory of consumer goods, which will then be vaporized....
=googol=
Now I understand better where you're coming from, however I don't agree. Comparing the US with Europe, people in Europe complain about invasion of their privacy all the time - as a result they have significantly better privacy protection.
:(
So empirically - you're strategy has been shown to fail.
Oh, is that why my keyboard chirps whenever my sleeves get close to it?
Let me point out that most of your clothes -- not to mention your wallet -- are normally well within 6 feet of the floor, and usually much closer to the frames of the doors you walk through. And the system has to be able to catch things as they go by, or they'd be useless for conveyor belts. A human with a wand will not be needed.
So, here's the scenario: some clearinghouse -- doubleclick is a likely suspect -- arranges with merchants to put scanners on their doorframes, and on their checkout counters. The clearinghouse can then link together
- different items of your clothing
- the (postal) address which received a coupon you once carried, but didn't use
- the stores you frequent and the items you buy
- the places you travel
- the people you hang out with and exchange gifts with
So, as you walk into a store, the salesdroid will knowThese things are effectively cookies for meatspace. Like cookies, the question is whether or not they're used in a way that allows cross-company correlation.
I'm just curious. Would you want a job where, every day you worked you knew there was a machine that could do exactly what you did, but for half the cost and twice as fast? I don't see a lot of job satisfaction there. In this job, you are effectively a useless member of society. You are actually worse than useless, since you're keeping others from doing a better job. Would you want a job like that? On the flip side, would you want to employ someone in a position like that? You're basically giving money away for free.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I hearby submit to the public domain the notion of associating products and their manufacturers to to relevant pages on the Internet via any device capable of recognizing relevant information in any sort of RF Identification system, or for that matter, any Identification system operating in the electromagnetic spectrum.
Mojotoad
Digital Convergence has already issued Cease and Desist letters for their impending RF:Cat.
Icebox
I personally like to see companies turn profit and always hiring for all types of jobs.
That's just stupid. Why should anyone, anywhere, have to do any work so trivial that a machine can be made to do it?
Getting the same work done with less people is a good thing! It means that eventualy we won't have to work 40 hours / wk for the better half of our lives. We could work less, get more done, and have more free time. It's good!
Only problem that this creates is that if for 20 hours you get the standard of living that you get working 40 hours now, people are going to want to work 40. So we need to find a fair way of balancing all that.
But really, why not automate as much as possible? Do you really think anyone would actually enjoy doing the work that a DBMS does? Do you like skimming through millions of pages of boring documents looking for some inane thing? What about a car-production robot? Want to make the same weld in the same place on the same car 5000 times a week? But, specific to this, do you think the person that runs your chocolate bar and pasta past the bar code scanner enjoyed doing that? Was it a valuable use of their unique potential as a human being? NO!
If you were offered to be paid the same amount for your current job with half the hours, wouldn't you appreciate the extra time and get more out of life because of it?
Barcodes were a little too obvious, after all.
The only thing that we learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.
"There are going to be trillions of tags like these on all kinds of consumer products, and they'll tell us exactly where those products are in the supply chain at all times," said Larry Kellam
"hmmm, all these 'Debby Does Dallas' tags are coming from that house, what a weirdo"
"the signatures from those 2 stolen cases of PS2's are coming from there..."
"click, click, Hey! that house over there has a tag for that new Expensive TV set, lets go break in and steal it!"
I'll have to use my Palm to inventory my home to give to the insurance people. Then, if there is a fire, I won't be able to claim those armani suits, two PS2's (value $1500 ea, per ebay:), the Big Screen TV, the Picasso, my 5 desktops, my 7 laptops, etc...
You don't see a good side. How about shorter checkout lines at stores, or practically no lines at all. Just push your cart near the scanner and swipe your credit card. Less overhead for stores also means cheaper prices. And when the added barcode scanners that allowed quicker checkout and inventory we didn't see a huge drop in retail labor.
Alright... now they are going to tag you like some animal. Doesn't concern you? Fair enough, but I demand more respect from the places I buy goods from.
The great thing I see with these is that they probably will not be removable from the items that they are placed on (like bar codes). this would give you some great oportunities to develope some neat apps for the home.
Simply set a RF receiver in every room of your house. Loose something and you can querry your box to see where it is. Give your whereis command some real power!
Also no more expired milk! embed the expiration dates into the tags. Then your box can let you know that not only that the milk in the frig has gone bad but that it has reached a sentience level allowing it to plot and sceme against you. { Message to root: milk is hacking FBI database from your phoneline. disconnect Y/N : }
Papa Legba come and open the gate
This is pretty impressive from a scientific perspective. As for burning out the circuit, I'm not sure if that is possible. Unlike magnetic stuff, which can be re-polarized, if protections are taken, these circuits may not be able to be fried.
What I was really interested in, which was not mentioned in the article, was what kindof range are we looking at with something like this? If you had long range, how could you differentiate between the various circuit unless they all operated on different frequencies. If they were different frequencies, it would then be possible to locate a specific object in space via triangulation... that would be pretty nifty. A cheap tracking device.
However, given the fact that power must be transmitted to the device, my general feeling is that range is pretty small, since trasmitting power is nasty business.
As for invasion of privacy, I think there are some valid concerns here, but a serious discussion on that matter should probably wait until another day.
Captain_Frisk
You're right. We should also eliminate bulldozers, because they put so many ditchdiggers out of work. Cars put all those horse-and-buggy manufacturers out of work. Those stupid electronic telephone switches put a lot of operators out of work. All those horrible robots in car factories... my goodness.
How insensitive of us!
Gee, we could give a hundred million people toe-nail clippers and have them cut grass instead of a few lawnmowers... that would put more people to work than any government program yet conceived!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I mean, I'm sure this isn't a New World Order-Satano-One-World-Government mind control Area 51 ploy. I'm sure this is some retailer deciding "jeeze, if I had $1 every time someone couldn't scan a barcode cause it was on a chip bag or some other reflective, weird crinkly surface..." and the engineering mind thought of another solution.
OF COURSE the government will find nifty uses for it.
OF COURSE we will find ways around it.
OF COURSE criminals will find some way to exploit it.
OF COURSE the last two will be made illegal.
OF COURSE there will be "Digital Freedom" websites extolling measures for or against the previous three.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
They may know that the pair of Levi's was purchased (or otherwise associated with) your credit card, though existing privacy laws may prevent that.
If you carry a piece of junk mail in your pocket -- or if you did last week at the mall -- they'll know what address it was mailed to.
And why wouldn't they link the scan data with pictures from a the camera you walked in front of?
Yeah, CCTV is all over the place here in the states...
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''Hmm, but I want to stand there and have a cute chick put my groceries into a little plastic bag, so I dont' have to take an extra 5 minutes using a nice, reusable basket to carry things around.
Everything takes place in small steps. First it's a paper tag, tomorrow it's another not too big of a deal tagging system. If you don't believe in privacy, take the shades off your windows, leave your door unlocked and email me your social security number, credit card number and oh, wear this tag up your ass, it's small, nothing really. Try to think for yourself... If it's no big deal, then why are they doing it? have fun~play well
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
The uses of recycled plastic are fairly limited - I expect this is largely because the different types of plastic can't easily be separated, so only low quality products that can withstand an unknown mix of types can be manufactured.
If every plastic bottle, cardboard box, whatever, had a very cheap RF id tag like this that identified what it was made of, the separation process could be much cheaper and the output much more homogenious and high quality.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
"bzzzzzzzz you didn't wash hands after urinating please repeat the procedure for disabling the transmitter"
just cool such thing...
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The mesh size of a Faraday cage depends on the frequency of the RF. Chicken wire size would be usable IIRC for VHF ranges (up to 200-300 MHz). That mesh on the door of your microwave oven, that's for MW freqs (1000-4000 MHz). As long as you had a fine enough mesh, blocking the frequencies used by the tags should work.
Ask your librarian for your libraries rules. And if you don't want people to know what you buy, go to a store you don't go to often and pay cash.
The Cure of the ills of Democracy is more Democracy.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
Did you read the article?
These new ones are capacitive, not inductive.
It didn't say what the max radiated power would be, but even with a high-gain antenna it sounds like these things would be difficult to activeate and read from very far away
As for tagging stuff at the store and cash cards, bring it on.
I just wonder how long it will be between mostly-unattented stores and small devices that you carry into the store with you to overpower and burn out the chips before you get charged.
Perhaps, if we had anonymous cash-card devices, they would include little readers to debit the card, credit the store via bluetooth-like receivers, and then burn out the tag in the product. Then, anyone attempting to leave with an active tag would set of an alarm.
The RF power that would nose these chips over will cook you and anything you blast with it. That would be something on the order of 1kW or more of RF power somewhere around the 2GHz area.
As for jamming, it's possible, but really only at close range- this stuff works by way of RF backscatter. Think of it being a sophisticated mirror of RF energy that encodes the carrier with information. The noise level's going to have to be up there to jam these at the ranges they're designed to operate at.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I'd love to see a Beowulf cluster of those!
--
What happens when you outlaw guns
But it requires so much RF power that it'd be dangerous to burn them out.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
If someone wants to break in, they have a lot better and more convenient ways of figuring out whether you own any valuables. And for the guy who just zeros you out for kicks, taking what he finds when he gets into your house, what difference is this gonna make?
"I say consider this day seized!" -Hobbes
"Tomorrow we'll seize the day and throttle it!" -Calvin
Well, RF tags won't invade my privacy, so it won't be an issue for me. You know why? Because I'll be interested enough to find them and disable them.
Now, it could be a problem for you! I could drive next to your house on my bike with my palm pilot and antenna to see whatchya got in your house.
I think its a nice ethical gesture for nerds to discuss these issues. If you'd prefer, we could hide the ramifications of technology under the table. It would be a tough, cruel world if we did. Issues of privacy have grave importance.
I wonder if having a bunch of these in ones clothing would bollix airport security scanners. Getting to the gate might not be so simple as putting the cars keys in the plastic tray.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
Give each tag a unique key. When you buy it, it goes on your account. Where you go, who you are, what you use, wear, etc. Of course, as other commenters have said, these tags could be disabled, and I'm sure most will. But, as fortune puts it, just because you're paranoid doesn't meant they're not really after you. ;-)
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Despite your ignorance, I hope you are never affected by cutbacks. Right now the unemployment is the lowest in years, and are economy is doing great. Why? For one the web has generated lots of tech jobs. People are leaving lesser jobs for higher paying jobs creating a demand for employment everywhere.
Start cutting jobs and things can change. Is there anything wrong with making profits while still keeping job positions?
Has anyone even bothered to think this thing through Corporate-wise? They are not sticking these things on clothes or in hard drives. This is a BARCODE replacement. You will still have the UPC on the box and in the paper of the box is the RFID tag. You buy something, you throw away the box, thus the tag goes away.
"I am a Bomb-Disposal Technician. If you see me running, try and keep up."
from the article: ...But these new chips have the potential to completely eliminate the human element, which even the bar code couldn't do."
By some estimates, manufacturers now lose anywhere from $70 billion to $200 billion per year as a result of theft, counterfeiting and excess labor, much of which could be eliminated... "Bar codes were a giant leap forward for their time
emphasis added.
This is Funny +1
Silly moderators, points are for me©
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Have you ever tried washing your tv? More than enough to disable the tags, trust me on this.. ;)
I would imagine that putting a garment that is tagged with one of these RF tags would have it's tag "burnt out" when you put it through the dryer. It might survive the washer though...
If they are anything like the RF tags used by the major manufacturer, there is little to worry about. A small incision into the tag will break the circuit, rendering it useless. The problem with the current RF tags (as opposed to the magnetic ones) is that they are too failure prone. Even holding two tags close to each other can disable them. I still like bar codes, not much can go wrong there...
I'm tired of all of the radio frequency devices. It sucks. I'd like for my children to live past the age of 30, not die prematurely from RF-induced cancer.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Now we can find out where all those lost socks are! Now THIS is fsckin' Science!
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Never heard any criticism, only bitching, what criticism did you hear?
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Yours is the typical pavlovian libertarian's reaction. On hearing about a new threat to privacy that comes from THE CORPORATE world, you immediately bitch about the government. What's the matter with you guys?
-- look, cheese ahoy!
Tzz
the barcode on the back of my neck
As for burning out the circuit, I'm not sure if that is possible.
First, place the tag in the microwave for a few seconds. Guaranteed.
Now, you can also assemble a transmitter of much lower power that can concentrate the beam to do the same damage in a brief pulse. Just 10 watts of RF power can do considerable damage to the target, including skin tissue. Did I mention smaller things are very portable? A crude small transmitter like this could fit in a purse.
There's a shoe maker we're working with (can't say for sure here, but they're really, really big) that is embedding Digimarc ids right into the graphics on the clothing. Labels, hang tags, even the back of watches are currently embedded. Kinda cool, in a way. Hold the item up to a camera (or any reader, if it's RF or visual barcode) and boom, you're at the website with info, support, whatever about that item. So, there are some advantages.
Jason
God, if I had a nickel for every Slashdot reader with a mindless hard-on for useless technology.
I remember some years ago people tried to sell something like this to the hog industry. The idea is that you'd put a small chip with an transponder and a small amount of storage in the hog's ear; then you would scan every time you did something to the hog (such as feed it). Tracking cost of sales is a big thing in the hog business. It turns out, however, that it wouldn't work because it would spoil the hog's ear (which apparently is a perfectly sellable commodity) and there's no part of the hog from the snout to the tail that isn't sold for some purpose or other.
Apparently undeterred by this, folks with similar technology started promoting it for use on children as a way to deter abduction. I believe uses of similar devices have been proposed for use in a variety of applications such as military medical care.
If the cue cat shows anything, it's that bar codes are a cheap legacy technology -- one that hasn't been particularly exploited. For example information densities could get a lot higher than the standard one dimensional bar code is capable of providing. Bar codes aren't going away.
I think there are lots of places where there would be applications for the new technology; places where bar codes might not be readable (this happened with attempts to bar code railroad cars -- they got so dirty automatic scanners failed) and places where you need field programmable data (shipping and luggage handling).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Project Furby 2
CIA Requisition Order 2000-01275543
Referencing Department Purchase Order 19781A
Quantity Description Cost
1 GMC 1500 panel van $22,900
1 2x4 18 element Yagi $375
1 Plastic roof storage unit $225
1 2200W linear amplifier $2,400
1 RadioShack rotator $23
Total: $25,923.00
Goal:
To assess the concentration and usefulness of
RF-excited microtransmitters in gathering
domestic intelligence.
.sig: Now legally binding!
They're a function of the antenna size and RF power they're irradiated with...
The originators of this technology, Amtech, formerly a division of Intermec, now a division of TransCore, developed this technology during the Regan years to monitor the body temp, etc. of cattle to pick out sick animals before they went to the slaughterhouse.
One of the more common applications of this is the tags on each and every rail car in the US and Europe. These have a unique ID that identifies the rail car as it passes a zone antenna at speeds up to 160 MPH. Another one is the TollTags that many of the toll bridges, toll roads, etc. have taken to using worldwide. These are designed to be read at up to 40' away at speeds in excess of 100 MPH- through the window of your car.
If they want to, this same chip could be designed around a system that does what the seemingly paranoid claims about what could be done with the technology.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
For what it is worth, the first few harmless moves made by a small, non-descript Austrian corporal were seen as not much of a threat and not much to worry about by any number of people, important and otherwise.
The end result was a lot of people losing liberty for a time and a (probably avoidable) conflict killing millions.
The road to Hell isn't paved with good intentions, it is paved with pebbles, each one of which didn't seem terribly significant.
If you don't have privacy, chances are shortly you won't have freedom.
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Aris
Yes, businesses are out to make money. The ridiculous examples in your previous post also led to depressions and economic hardships. Some people are unfortunate where they only can work low-end jobs, do to mental and or physical reasons. Their lives are affected when they loss jobs to cutbacks. What I am trying to say is, lets try and use technology to save jobs not reduce them.
To bring our dog into the USA and ensure that we can take her back to Australia without any problems, she was tagged with a RF chip (about the size of a grain of rice) in the scruff of her neck. She is yet to have her eating habits processed, her urinary accomplishments scruntised, or sent to Washington to perform oral^H^H^H^H (sorry, that becomes law AFTER Bush gets in).
... 'Anarchists Cookbook'. Is that a load of fertiliser and diesel that you are tracking down Penn Ave?")
... get over it.
We are already tagged and traceable - get in your car (licence plate), use your credit card (location/spending habits), use you Ralph's card ("market research"), borrow a book at the library ("hmmm
There are too many people who confuse privacy with paranoia.
The article is about a replacement for barcodes
almost all types of RF tags carry no power source of their own.
they are merely a number encoded chip connected to an induction coil. when the coil is brought near an oscilating magnetic field it induces a current that drives the IC and emits a small amount of coded RF energy from a tiny antenna. simply make the driver field strong enough to cause the ohmic heating in the tag's induction coil to burn it out and no more "the gubment's trackin' me!" delusions to worry about.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
The max range for another brand of RFID tags with metallic inductive antenna is about 3 feet. Privacy is probably not an issue with the current generation of RFID tags...
And for that, you will be the first to be hacked.
Ready...Aim...Fire!! (tapity, tapity, tap)
Blarf.
In the past I have been a cashier and I would have to say that the barcodes work just fine for all intents and purposes, in my opinion this technology would be a waste until it got to the point where it could be read from a few feet away. Imagine walking into a supermarket, and on your way out the door you don't need to go through a cash register, but instead it just automatically bills you?
Only those who dream can grasp reality.
Never heard any criticism, only bitching, what criticism did you hear?
/. faithful.
In all likelihood, you didn't "hear" anything, you read it - I know I did.
Let's see if we can continue semantic quibbling and knee-jerk generalizations of others rather than discussing anything meaningful. I'd hate to disappoint the
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I agree: just how far is a small paper tag going to transmit?
Perhaps not too far. That's when you turn up the exciter power until a satisfactory response is achieved. High gain directional antennas are wonderful. Aim the antenna to different portions of the house to scan the inventory.
Sounds like a fascinating project. Measure the range of these things and what you can get out of a house.
The Soviets used a system similar to this to spy on the US Embassy in Moscow about 20 years ago. They 'gifted' a wall emblem to the embassy, and of course it was checked for bugs, and no emissions were found, but it actually had embedded a long copper loop that acted as an induction coil.
The gist was, the KGB could park a van a block away and emit a very powerful high frequency sine wave at the embassy and the coil in the emblem would turn the EM flux into power to drive an embedded microphone and transmitter (using the same coil).
This went on for several years because the US regularly ran bug sweeps but it wasn't generating or storing any energy most of the time, and when it was being powered from the outside, the US figured it was some sort of attempt at jamming telecommunications within the embassy (which it was doing a very poor job of, being at the wrong frequency) so they basically ignored it.
Anyhow, this is all relevant because these RF tags are powered by inductance, which means any range limitation is purely a factor of the EM field powering it. There's no inheirent limitation in the device itself.
As for privacy, I don't care about tags in my cereal box. If I can walk out of a store and automatically debit my account instead of waiting in line, so much the better. If I can tie it to an anonymous cash card instead of my credit card, better still. If there's anything to worry about, it's the RF-powered listening devices, but since you probably don't run bug sweeps inside your own house on a regular basis, this isn't any more dangerous than an ordinary joe-blow X-10 camera bug in your shower.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
From browsing the web, quickly, it would seem that they can range from a few inches for a stamp sized 'reflector' to several feet for something the size of a sheet of paper.
I don't know how they plan to scan, though. Saturating a building with EM energy doesn't seem to smart. Perhaps a wand that directs energy towards the package would work, and just read the reflected energy.
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
I absolutely agree that the editorializing that goes on in the headlines concerning alleged privacy concerns at every step in the road needs to be slowed. We get enough bad Slashdot comments as it is, without the editorials.
Food for thought: we should be able to moderate down the editorials. Then hopefully my filter (at level 3) would drop all but the best.
Hook the chip up to a larger processing unit, and use your own mini-scanner (easily installed in a glove.) Then read the tags of those passing by, and items you pass in stores- and copy them to your own.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
My former employer had a similar chip- I was designing enterprise class systems around the use of it.
The name of Intermec's product line using it is Intellitag 500[tm]. Little chip not much bigger than a glass head pin in diameter. Put it on stickers, etc. for inventory control, parking access/billing, etc. What makes Motorola's BiStatix chip special is that it doesn't need a foil antenna- conductive inks will do for most close-range applications.
Jamming them isn't going to be easy. They work off of RF backscatter- they don't transmit anything. They impress a modulation on a reflected carrier. They're basically a very fancy RF mirror and reflect ANY RF in the range that they're tuned for.
Overloading them isn't going to be very easy. The power levels are in the ball park of 500-1000 watts of RF power. Most of these units operate in the 900MHz, 2GHz, or somewhere around 5GHz in Europe. You'll cook yourself with these power levels.
Oh, and the original trade-press releases from Motorola were around the January/February timeframe. I believe that EE Times originally covered this sometime around June, if memory serves.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This article here does a great job explaining how EAS (Electronic Article Surveillence) works. This article pretty much seems to cover an advanced, optimistic use for the item besides busting shoplifters.
- Slash
How about carbon-based ink antennas tattooed all
over their bodies?
What you do is this- wait by the entrance of your favorite store with an activated tag, until five or six people get ready to leave. Then, walk through the scanner at the same time as they do, and watch them all stampede back in the other direction.
It's advisable to be artistic and build the active part of the tag into an attractive postmodern key-fob, and then wave it around when questioned.
--Perianwyr Stormcrow
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
The easiest way to remove the embedded tags would be to swipe them over the counter at the music store.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
This reminds me of the IBM advert, remember the one where the guy goes walking through the store putting goods in his coat and pockets like a shoplifter then walks through a scanner at the end that resembles a metal detector, it looks like the technology is here, very clever ;)
In the future Safeway's will look like a bunch of people shop lifting en mass.
Az.
Wouldn't it be easier to: 1) go through the trouble of taking that tag out/off of whatever it came on. 2) throw it out?
Today, it sure is. Just wait until they start embedding these things within the paper pulp in the cardboard binding of packages and books. It could blend in nicely with the fibers. One could still find the element by looking at the changes of fiber density for what would be an obvious flaw in normal paper. Then, simply excise it with a razor.
But, what if... if... if there were more than one? That is the question.
If/when these tags go into general use, every Radio Shack on the planet will be selling personal "bug detectors". Since the hardware to accurately read the tags has to be cheap enough for commercial use, a simple exciter/detector should be less than $10 (including X-acto brand percision deacivation system).
it overlooks the potential impact on privacy. (Just imagine embedding these tags in your clothes.)
But will these RF tags in my underwear interfere with the microchip that the government implanted in my left buttock? I suggest we all switch to aluminum foil lined underwear to foil (ha!) the governments plans to track our every buttock flex!
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
(Just imagine embedding these tags in your clothes.)
Oh, my God, people could.. well, um, they could, well, um, what am I missing here?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
----
Further information about the RFID tags and related technologies is available at the MIT Auto-ID Center homepage.
Do geeks in general tremble at the thought that someone may be invading their own private space, or does Slashdot have an agenda?
Week, by week, by week the great Gods of Slashdot deliver upon us editorialized half-rants about privacy concerns---and it just does not seem like that big a deal to me.
Just applying a decent strength RF field will burn out the circuit.
An antenna can always act as a reciever as well as a transmitter.
This is how some anti-shoplifting tags work (although most are magnetic) and applying a strong RF field is precisely how they're disabled.
This also suggests an interesting denial of service, if you can get the RF strength high enough from *outside* the building where they're being used.
"Bar codes were a giant leap forward for their time because they made it quick and easy to capture data," said Sanjay Sarma, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.). "But these new chips have the potential to completely eliminate the human element, which even the bar code couldn't do."
yeah, just let lose the Nanites and they'll go swarm all the house that have tags for any OpenSource book or cd or any other media, reducing it down to raw materials for more M$ CDs/DVDs (since office 2005 will come on 5 DVD ROMs)
This would be very handy - you could make sure you only hit on girls you have positively id'd as wearing your favorite Victoria's Secret underwear!
Hmm, so now when I walk through an airport scanner they are going to know that I'm wearing a pair of Levi's and a Tommy Hilfiger shirt?
Not to mention a $20 bill in my pocket, since US currency has had these magnetic strips for years now.
Still not quite sure how this relates to privacy since it doesn't identify you as a person.
Indeed, the BiStatix concept is so simple that the Motorola engineer who co-invented it, Noel Eberhardt, often demonstrates it by using a pencil to create an antenna on a piece of paper. By applying graphite to paper, and then attaching the BiStatix chip to the graphite antenna, Eberhardt has been known to create a working model of the concept in less than a minute.
It's funny that pencils and Eberhardt are mentioned in this same paragraph... isn't Eberhart-Faber one of the leading Pencil/Pen manufacturers?
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
this is really cool. its like a speedpass barcode! as my friend jake pointed out you could use this to inventory the products in your house again a grocery list and have what you need to buy upoaded to your PDA. that to would be sweet. even better is that if someone wants to know what you are getting, for market information, or to rob you blind, they need only a simple device to do it! just like how a high frequency RF scan from something like a satelite can see the location of every speed pass in america or the world really! big brother may not be shy, but at least ill do it willingly. if anybody wants to track me, email me and ill give you my mailing address, send cool technology to me, and ill fucking tell you where i am and what im doing, no need to buy tracking gizmos!
what will I do with my cue:cat?
The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. -Ronald Reagan
The cool thing technologically is that this new tag is powered electrostatically, rather than electromagnetically. The detector system probably involves two big conductive plates that stuff goes between. It's inherently a short-range system.
That was the range that Intermec's IntelliTag 500 series tags were getting- and they're almost identical in ability.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Why in the world would you want to not use a technology that the perform a task more cheaply and accurately than people?! Are you insinuating that someone who loses a job to technology cannot get another?
It sounds to me like you are saying we should not use technology because it would put people out of work who, I assume, could not be employed in other ways. Should we keep a certain percentage of shit jobs around just so these unemployable people will have somewhere to work?
I hate to break the news to you, but business are run to make money, not employ people. Here's a note from the clue train: economics is not a zero-sum game... increased technology opens up far more jobs than it eliminates, as you pointed out. Should we keep some people doing dull grunt work so the rest of us technology-haves can live in our ivory towers or should we work to educate, train and enrich everyone.
Again, how is this any different from the ridiculous examples in my previous post? If I am so ignorant... please enlighten me.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I note two things about this article that might make shopping with automated checkouts fun.
;)
First, they say that this BiStatix chip is programmable. It sure would be nice to reprogram the chip and get an Armani suit for the price of a pair of Armani socks. (Maybe even switch the 96-bit ID between the two and leave a nice surprise for somebody else.) Presumably there would have to be someone watching as there is at automated (bar-code) grocery checkouts now.
Second, it's a chip connected to an antenna. What happens when I walk around the store with a portable EMP generator and zap the chips on some portion of the goods I pick up? My cart is full of stuff--how are they going to notice if a few of the more expensive items in the middle of the cart don't register?
Still, very few people are likely to do this, and it may be like credit cards--VISA and MC accept a certain level of fraud in exchange for the business they get.
That said, I think these chips are a great idea!
That's how Intermec was doing most of the systems. There's notable exceptions (something VERY much like the TollTag systems in use...)
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
For your father's sake, I should hope they don't cause cancer. Did he keep his wallet in his front or back pocket? Either way, that can't be good.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
You apparently don't understand a lot about RF...
Concentrating energy like that only works with light because of it's small wavelength. At these frequencies, your wavelength is measured in centimeters- you're not going to get a smaller spot than the wavelength without a LOT of trouble. Since a couple of milliwats per centimeter isn't enough to overwhelm the chip or burn anything, you're back to square one.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
One of those magnetic anti-theft devices was built into my dad's wallet, and never was disabled. As a result, he would beep in *every* store he entered or exited. We thought it was his PalmPilot...
:-P
On a more interesting note, would it be possible to build a personal RF "jammer" that emits strong noise on the frequincies used by these devices? That could at least keep people from tracking the tags in your clothing..
In 50 years we'll find out these things cause cancer. We'll see who's laughing then.
A retail decision to use this or any other salesfloor automation would not mean lower prices for a very long time, if at all.
The cost of the entire industry converting to this system would be high- an investment the retail industry would like to standardize upon if only to lower overhead but charge the same price.
Remember, lower overhead was supposed to make the Web a vastly cheaper marketplace with increased consumer choice. To some extent this is true, and this has been a boon to the consumer and a bust for 'ebusiness'/fucked companies.
This is why almost all ebusiness initiatives by major retailers (who are much more likely to weather the dot-com shakeout) provide half the SKU's and all the price.
They aren't going to pass on the savings, because they want to stay in business.
Don't think I like this, or I feel any sort of affinity with retailers- I'm just acknowledging the way it is.
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
Flying Null, a breakaway company from Scientific Generics, and engineering consultancy in Cambridge, UK, developed a system like this 5 years ago.
The name of the company, Flying Null, was due to the technique used. By setting up a region where competing EM forces were exactly balanced (a null), when tiny objects (the tags) with particular properties were brought into the null they'd disrupt the balance, and would be detectable. How do you scan a broader region of space? Simple - set up the balance differently, and get the null to fly around the place...
And the cost of the tags? In bulk, pennies, and that was 5 years ago.
(SG was 150 employees, about 50 engineers at the time, and only 5-10 were involved in Flying Null.)
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
Isn't a barcode just like a graphic that was printed? In the article it mentions it as a chip. Can anyone explain?
i have misplaced my signature.
Is that really necessary? Wouldn't a normal wash/dry cycle contain enough abuse to disable the RF tag?
This makes IBM commercial with the shady looking guy in the grocery store all that more possible. Every item in the store could have an RF ID, and all you have to do is go through a scanner to check out.
What's the effective distance on these things? I didn't see it in a quick scan through the article. It's not like they could scan your ID code from 10 feet away...
(Just make sure they don't try to print one of these suckers on your forehead or the back of your hand...)
--
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I don't see the good side with using this. With these there will no longer be lots of jobs in the food industry for inventory of products at stores. Yes the company may turn profits but it doesn't always have to use the model of costing employees jobs. I personally like to see companies turn profit and always hiring for all types of jobs. This helps the economy plus lowers unemployment. They can hire someone to try and reduce theft if it will save money in the millions. Granted they won't save as much but at least they are keeping employees.
Please, get over it, you paranoid freak. If someone wants to keep tabs on you, they don't need to use RF tags to do it. Do you use the phone? Do you drive the same car everyday? Do you surf the web (non-anonymously)? Do you send and receive mail (email and snailmail)? Do you leave the house? If so, you can be watched.
If these are so easy to create and we have a future where you can run your grocery cart through a checkout without any human intervention won't we see the equivelant of electronic "kick me" signs slapped on people?
Take a handful of lables into a store and intersperse them in the pages of a magazine, tuck them into a bag of apples, etc etc.... person goes through the check out and rings up a lot more then they've actually baught and have potentially fowled up the stores inventory.
Didn't really see much on product development in the peice, hopefully enough data can be encoded on the things to make such problems difficulut or impossible.
What other nice little tricks can we come up with for something like this?
| | | | | | || |
please don't use so many caps. using caps is like yelling!
On closer inspection, the article states that the device isn't self powered, and powers itself from an electric field that the reading device produces - meaning that you have to be fairly close to read it/activate it - also don't forget that the transmitter can't have that high a capacity... One pretty cool use that I can see (although there would be some issues if I had a wire mesh lined pocket - wire mesh blocks RF) would be stores where you just take all the things you want, put it in your pockets, and use your RF credit card to pay buy just walking through a gate. I think I'd want an activation button on my CC though, don't want to have people walking around with a reader picking up CC numbers... should be interesting.
SSL Certificate
Apparently it is currently feasible to embed an Inertial Navigation System in something as small as a computer mouse -- (http://www.aspy.demon.co.uk/#_Toc480990320) Wedded to a RFID tag and given a little memory, you could make little capsules that, when scanned, divulge precisely the path through space they have taken. There's gotta be some way to have fun with a box of those... Possibly a way to do Inverse Kinematics in an unrestricted environment?
Seems like it wouldn't be too hard to get around it. All you would really need to do is put some chicken wire (unless you feel like weaving copper wire yourself) around the bag you're carrying it in, making the bag a Faraday cage.
Since Faraday cages block RF, voila, problem solved.
On the other hand, it can bring about two major application uses: shoplifting is one, as this type of id would be harder to tear off compared to the various tags they have now. The other is from an AT&T commercial (I think), where you push your grocery cart into a stall, wait a moment, and your total rings up, speeding checkout lines. Possibly even 'smart' cupboards and refridgerators could come from this.
Sure, there's privacy issues in some of these cases, but they're the same privacy issues that we deal with now with those frequent shopper cards. The technology really doesn't introduce anything new.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Hip kids attempting to make a political statement can't very well get a tattoo of a piece of paper! We need to keep barcodes!
-- atomly
This is yet another form of cheap non-volitile memory. I feel another turn of the media obsolesence wheel coming on.
"Obtuse Anger is that which is greater than Right Anger" - Lewis Carroll
Comment removed based on user account deletion