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Sun Joins RFID Program
per unit analyzer writes: "C|Net is running an interesting article on Sun's recent affiliation with MIT's Auto-ID initiative. The article is a layman's intoduction to passive RF tag technology. The concept is to replace the ubiquitous UPC bar code with a 5-cent RF-tag. When hit with the right excitation signal, the tag emits its own RF signal encoded with a 96-bit number. The privacy concerns are obvious; items people buy could be tracked anywhere they happen to go. How would you like the security scanners at airports or even the local high school be able to generate a complete inventory of the consumer products carried by each person coming through the door? (OK Johnny, hand over that pr0n magazine in your backpack...) The Auto-ID ilk includes many of the major consumer product manufacturers and retailers. Incidently, the American Radio Relay League is also currently fighting an uphill battle to keep the RF-tag technology of Audo-ID Technology Board member Savi Technology out of the 70cm Amateur Radio band in the US." We have a couple of earlier stories about RFID tags.
Couldn't the retailer be required to disable the RF-Tags at the point of purchase? I would think that would help alleviate privacy concerns. I'm still not thrilled about this technology, either the privacy concerns or taking bandwith from the radio amateurs, but perhaps it can be done in a way that is less intrusive.
Ray Benjamin
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
The issue of the cost of the tags is looked at heavily in the article, but that's a long run consideration. In order for the cost of the tags to really be applicable the stores have to have the readers installed in the checkouts. Readers which are likely to be horribly expensive - and management drones are notoriously tight when it comes to spending money on "new" (to them) technology.
Warning: you suc
While individuals might not like the sound of that, for company inventory/stock/asset management systems, a standardised rf tagging system would be great. Currently, most companies either have to tag their own iventory, or rely on a multitude of different barcode inventory tagging schemes that manufacturers have - and, for outdoor inventory, a barcode can quickly wear off...
I wonder if its possible to buy these tags in bulk. Carry a bag of 10,000 into the store with you. Something like that would have to overload the system. You would be in your car before the computer could process all the tags at once.
I dont know about you, but I dont leave bar codes on my underwear, so I doubt I would leave one of these chips on it. Even so, I would question whether or not these tags could survive a trip through the wash cycle...you do wash your underwear, right?
If this goes on credit cards and drivers licenses then I can scan you and get everything but your signature and (perhaps) the expiration dates. I can check that you're not carrying cards or IDs in more than one name (useful for airport security). I can scan you as you walk in the door of my rug store and check whether your cards are gold or platinum, and have my systems check whether a purchase of a certain amount can be covered. This means in many situations it won't matter if you dress up or dress down, because there will be a more accurate metric of your worth available - presuming you aren't carrying someone else's stolen wallet. Clothing would be an obvious use for this since many stores already have bar code plus security tag on each item - this would replace both. Serve 'em right if the introduction of the technology drives down sales by subtracting from the semiotic value of rags as wealth indicators.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
An excellent source of information on RFID basics (quite technical, actually) is Microchip, Inc.
RFID Design Guides
NB, they're in PDF format.
Ken
An OPEN mind is a beautiful thing...
My retail-store place of employment has a system which is occasionally used during the busiest of times when all the available cashiers are on-line and there are still long queues. A manager uses his hand-held bar code scanner to zap all the items in a customer's cart while he's waiting in line, then all the cashier has to do is scan the bar code on a little card and the register rings up every item that the manager zapped.
Speaking as a cashier who's worked with this system, I would find it very convenient not to have to scan every item before I bagged it (especially with the arcane "rings per minute" efficiency monitoring system my store uses, which requires pressing weird button combinations to stop the clock when we're not doing something). And speaking as a customer, I would find that sort of speedy checkout much more enticing.
They just have to balance the convenience with privacy concerns somehow...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
In fact, a lot of the current anti-theft tags DO work on RF already - they just resonate at a particular frequency. The detectors on the doors emit that frequency, and detect an "echo" which sounds the alarm. To deactivate the tag, when an item goes through the barcode scanner a much stronger pulse at the same frequency burns out the little tag, so it no longer echoes.
This system could be used in a similar way: as you walk through a detector arch, the computer identifies and deactivates each tag it senses. Once there are no more tags present, everything you're carrying has been scanned and charged for - and you aren't carrying any working tags any more, so there are no privacy concerns: once you've paid for the items, the tag is deactivated.
Because these loopy RFID tags are on different frequencies- you're going to have to hit a lot of different frequencies. Spark-gap oscillators will effectively jam anything up into the microwave domain. The catch is that it jams everything and you'll eventually draw attention to yourself.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
If all your clothing had rf tags then with an internet enabled washing machine you can be informed that you have left a red sock in with your washing. Correct washing of all the items and if you buy new stuff the washing instructions can be downloaded over the net from the clothing manufactures web sight. This also means that they can tell how often you wash what cloths but would still be very cool
2^96 (2 to the 96th power), or
79 octillion, or
79,228,162,514,264,337 trillion, or
79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336
unique identifiers.
According to the Population Reference Bureau there are 6.137 billion people on earth, 1.193 billion of those in "more developed countries".
Doing a little quick math:
Each human can be equally assigned
12,909,917,307,196,405,017 IDs, or
12 quintillion ID's, or
12,909,917 trillion ID's per person, equally distributed among all humans.
I don't think I have that much stuff in my house, even if you break down every item into its simplest parts. And I have 6 PC's!
So my question is, can someone drive by in a van, by my house, and get an entire inventory of what I have in my house? Or does it only work within a few feet?
Could the Gas Man (natural gas) with a little wand walk around my house and get a good idea of what I have? Yikes!
TossableDigits.com: Temporary Phone Numb
I work for a systems integrator and I have evaluated and used RFID in a couple of systems. There are only a handful of scenarios where using the RFIDs makes sense right now.
One scenario where RFIDs do make sense is in large warehouses and storage systems. With barcodes, the fork truck operator must be fairly accurate in his aim to get a proper ID back. With the RFIDs, he has a lot more room for error. A single RFID can identify what is in a skid of product, so the cost is relatively small.
A situation where RFIDs don't work well is in the consumer market. Currently, beverage makers are able to print the barcode directly onto the container (case, can, bottle). With RFIDs, the manufacturing must add an extra step in order to apply the ID. The additional cost of the ID, plus the cost of modifying the packaging system is far too great right now to justify using RFIDs. Add to this the fact that most supermarkets will need to install new equipment at the checkout for identifying the products. It is a change that is not worth making when the current barcode system works very well.
For those concerned about someone scanning all of your products in a single sweep, don't be (at least not with today's version of RFID). You have to be within a couple of feet of the ID to get it to respond. Also, several brands of the RFIDs are reprogrammable, so you could simply reset all of the IDs when you got home. Most likely, the ID is applied to the packaging, and not the product itself, so you could just throw out the box as well. I have found in my testing that if more than one ID is within the activation range of the reader, the reader will not get the right value. So you can rest your fears (at least until a better RFID tag is created).
You can make passive radio frequency, RF, tags with diode arrays. Semiconductor diodes fluoresce in RF when illuminated by microwaves. The fluorescence wavelength is determined by the energy band gap of the diode. Combinations of diodes with different energy gaps fluoresce in different combinations of radio frequencies.
There is a technique for making microscopic (tens to hundreds of nanometers) dust from the surface of a silicon wafer. I forget who invented it but it's years old... you use hydrofluoric acid, hydrogen peroxide, and ultrasound. I think Science News did a piece on it.
Here's the part I thought of:
A very diffuse cloud of this diode dust has interesting properties. You can illuminate it from one direction with a microwave beam and you can observe the cloud with a RF receiver. Now, any sound waves in the cloud cause the RF signal from the suspended diode particles to oscillate (Doppler effect)... it's straight frequency modulation.
You can hear everything within the cloud and only sounds passing through the cloud. You just have to demodulate the RF coming from the dust.
Spread the dust through a building and you can listen anywhere in the building by controlling the volume of overlap between the microwave emitter field and the RF receiver antenna field.
I don't have the money to do this but I'll bet any one $5 that it would work.