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Harnessing Subatomic Effects for Product Authentication
Anon writes: "Israeli company Microtag claims to have come up with a way to avoid counterfits, and they mean everything from CDs to clothes to cash to vegetable seeds. Mix several micrograms of their 'magic powder' - which is engineered with a unique identification using the matter's spin - into your product - and later you can verify its authenticity with a relatively low-cost reader. Although their presumption is that no-one else will be able to create this 'magic powder' (which is probably only a matter of time and enough money), an Israeli article claims that Motorola and even the Bank of England are interested in the technology."
...but you can't cook that bean in this pot. You can use that pot but that pot wont work with your stove. You may want to call the manufacturer to get that other pot activated for your new stove.
Mod him up for humor, just to throw a monkey wrench into his plans.
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Each manufacturing plant, and each production run, is individually identifiable, but not because there is a conspiracy to tag products. They are identifiable because we're surrounded by trace elements, and smelting processes don't remove these trace impurities. Each ore deposit, and in fact each truckload of ore, will have slightly different proportions of these traces; with enough work, you can then track material back to its source.
IIRC during the cold war the US monitored soviet nuclear tests by measuring the atmospheric proportion of a few carefully chosen isotopes, and could not only work out how many nuclear tests had been performed, but how powerful the explosions were.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Whenever I hear claims of some company being "interested in" some technology, I imagine the following scenario:
(at trade show)
salesman: "Hey, we've got a magic powder that we can mix into stuff and do cool stuff with it and stuff"
joe schmoe:"Yeah, that would be kinda cool if you can make it work. Maybe then I'd even buy some of it for myself"
salesman:"What company do you work for Sir?"
joe schmoe:"Motorola. Why do you ask?"
It seems like someone is planing another adventure in venture capital. Improbable + investment = angry_shareholders + carribian_vacation.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
Someone else mentioned that this makes sense if you say UV instead of RF - well that may be true but its hardly new. Here for example is a UV taggant that works on that principal.
It may well be that their selling point is that they _are_ using RF taggants because its too easy to check if a UV taggant has been applied to something (one of the uses of UV powder tags is to check which employee has touched eg a secure terminal. You have been warned!)
The only thing that's new about this, as far as I can tell, is the low cost deployment. Consider what they do say about it:
- The technology uses materials with "very unique physical and chemical properties" at the "sub-molecular level."
- The reader is an RF "transceiver" which can detect the material in a manner analogous to "magnetic resonance imaging."
Sounds to me like they've build themselves a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer that doesn't have to be very powerful due to bulk effects -- fire some RF at it, stop, then listen.
There's nothing keeping anyone from using a more powerful NMR spectrometer to isolate the material and reproduce it. So maybe they'd just lobby to have NMR spectroscopy outlawed as a "counterfeiting tool." Security through obscurity reigns...