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RFID: The New Big Brother ?
Makarand writes "The possibility that we could be tracked not because we have a microchip implant but
merely because we wear clothes, eat and carry objects around is real
according to this article on C|net news.
A technology called RFID (radio frequency identification) consisting of miniscule microchips
the size of a single grain of sand that listen to a radio query and respond by
transmitting their unique ID can make this possible.
Most RFID tags use the power from the initial radio signal to transmit their response and hence can be placed anywhere imaginable.
Retailers are adoring this concept and soon
everything more expensive than a Snickers bar will sport RFID tags
making tracking possible through our own personal possessions.
The privacy threat comes when RFID tags remain active once you leave a store and currently the RFID
industry seems to be giving 'mixed' signals about whether the tags will be disabled
or left enabled by default."
I'm sure it would work.
Just be careful. Certain synthetic fabrics (nylon for one) will catch fire fairly quickly in a microwave.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Cost: $.50 per tag.
Range: 15 feet "optimally oriented in front of a reader in free space."
While the chips themselves are small (grain of pepper is mentioned), the antennas are 1/2" to 4" long.
Sure, this is interesting news (from a technology perspective), but I for one don't fear their use by big brother just yet.
Yes it will work, its how half of the theft prevention devices work. Look for the square stickers with the coil wrapping around a center square. These are the earlier counterparts to what they are talking about. The gates that check for the tag listen for the response from the tag by emmiting relatively low power signals. To disable the tag, higher power is output, frying the circuitry.
So to "clean" your, you could emit broad spectrum high power RF noise and nuke the little bastards.
I work in the packaging industry and have seen firsthand some of the RFID application processes on folder gluers. First of all, the defect rate hovers around 10%, which makes relying on this technology a dubious proposition.
I doubt that the practical size is approaching "half a grain of sand," which would make application a nightmare to try to control. And most importantly, RFID tags are like UPC barcodes: they're coded to a single frequency and product, not to each instance of the product! If an RFID tag is enabled on your North Face jacket and you walk in a store, they may be able to tell that you're wearing the jacket, but that doesn't tell them who you are.
So if I've helped reduce the paranoia level a little bit, I'll now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
RFID tags need to be printed on paper
Wrong.
For one, it depends on the type of device. The ones you see embossed on paper are essentially just antennae that resonate at a certain frequency. There are other versions that are MUCH more sophisticated, though, AND active to boot, and manufacturers ARE anticipating imbedding them in a lot of products permanently (if for no other reason than to save the stores the labor costs of removing them.)
Do you think the little mylar strips in US money are for COUNTERFEIT protection??? haha. Stack up a few 20's and it wouldn't be hard to spot them at all using the same technology (i.e. finding the resonant frequency of a passive radiator consisting of an array of mylar strips of known size stacked a known distance apart.)
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
These anti-theft stickers are not RFIDs. They do not store and respond with IDs. Instead they are simple oscillator circuits which influence the frequency of the detector oscillation. They are not disabled by microwaves but by a magnetic pulse which induces a current high enough to trigger the builtin "fuse".
Business 2.0 had a feature on RFID tags just under a year ago. The feature talks about how companies are planning on using the tags primarily as a means of better inventory tracking internally, and how other devices like laundry machines will be able to make use of the tags in order to determine, for instance, what types of fabric are being inserted. Most of the tags planned for use in commodity items are "passive tags" which don't broadcast their identity.
A sidebar talks about how Walmart plans on being an early adopter.
Privacy concerns? Pish. Do you REALLY think that people out there care enough about whether or not your clothes are a dacron/polyester blend to go around scanning you? I'm totally for the idea of allowing products to answer a "What are you?" question from devices like store checkouts, laundry machines, etc. Saves me the time from "asking" and "answering" the question myself.
There's two types, the magnetic and the RF. Technically the magnetic ones don't have a fuse, but instead are disabled by magnetically saturating the metal. These are the most commonly used tags. The others are actual RF circuits. They don't transmit IDs, true, I shouldn't have given that impression, but the do respond to the broadcast in much the same way the rf tags do.
Working for a rather large corporation that is working heavily with RFID technology, I can atest that this article is entirely FUD (and misinformed FUD at that).
RFID tags are not the size of "grains of sand" but rather the size of an oversized stamp. They are based on passive RF technology. When probed, they absorb a little of the energy and use it to respond. Outside an RFID scanners range, they are just circuits and have no function.
The price point the article quotes is also very wrong. Costs are much lower but still 2x - 3x what they need to be.
So what is this technology being developed for? To replace UPC labels! Instead of having to scan a bar code, you bombared an RFID with energy. An RFID is just as useless as a bar code in the absence of a scanner. The only difference it's a lot harder to mess up scanning an RFID than a bar code (not to mention that bar codes can degrade much easier than RFIDs).
This article was absolutely FUD. Just someone trying to cause a ruckus over nothing.
For this statement of the obvious, there is no charge.
RFID technology has been around for years. Have you purchased a CD or DVD in the last few years? Remember the check-out guy "beeping" it before you left? That's an RFID tag at work. In this instance, it's just a proximity tag that will alert the store if you (ahem) neglect to purchase the product. (The official term for this is "inventory shrinkage.")
Checkpoint Systems makes RF Electronic Article Surveilance (RF-EAS) tags (the US site is not responding, but the Japanese one is, showing the bulk tags.) And here's a company that sells machines to auto-insert the RF-EAS tag into DVD carriers.
An amazing amount of effort has gone into reducing the cost of the RFID anti-theft tags. They're typically screen printed, and usually are destroyed when you purchase the product. It's not cost effective to make it re-programmable, as the retailers are playing a statistical game - they're weighing the probability of someone stealing a returned (or defective) unit against the reprogrammable cost that burdens EVERY unit going out the door.
One step up from this application is the ubiquitous personnel badge that most of us drones are required to wear at the orifice. Here's one from TI (PDF datasheet.) This costs a little more, and is definitley capable of identifying who you are.
The buttons are usually metal too, chief.
Put a cup of water in the microwave along with the clothes. It should absorb enough of the energy to prevent serious arcing and heating of the metal while still letting the RFID be fried.
The ones you described, with a coil and a capacitor, are RF tags. The magnetic pulse is used to induce current. Make it strong enough and the current will blow the fuse. Induction is part of the principle which makes these things work in the first place. Further reading reveals that the "fuse" is actually a predetermined breaking point of the capacitor, which will change the resonance frequency of the circuit when it is overloaded. The detection works by measuring the amount of energy which the tag oscillator circuit absorbs from an electromagnetic field of a certain frequency, not by measuring frequency changes as written in the other comment. Real RFIDs use the absorbed energy to power a microcontroller and actively send information. The only "response" from an anti-shoplifting tag as we know it is that it absorbs energy. Such a tag is merely the "generator" part of a real RFID tag.
Microwaves use directional beams and they aren't fired towards the front window. If they were, the screen wouldn't do a very good job at stopping the radiation anyway. It's high-energy EM radiation, not unlike the lower-energy light that escapes just fine.
All of this is wrong. Microwaves are on a wavelength of about 10 cm, making a microwave photon about 20,000 times less energetic than a visible photon. The beam may be vaguely directional, but the microwave gets filled fairly uniformly with radiation after reflections. Finally, that screen with the holes a few millimeters across does an excellent job of stopping microwave radiation; due to the microwaves' longer wavelength, the screen looks like a solid barrier to them, while visible light passes through the holes easily.
I recently finished a server for a client that involved managing RFID tags. They have extremely short range, so anybody wanting to track you would probably prefer something that can support a greater distance.
You were probably working with one of the lower power models.
I work for a company that manufactures and sells access control systems. We do everything from magstripe to proximity (read RFID) to bio-metric readers. And the idea that the prox type readers are only short range is wrong. Hughes Identity Corporation (HID) makes a higher power reader that is capable of reading at several feet. Mind you its bulky (about 18" per side and 3" thick.) and pulls a good bit of power, but it is accurate and can cover a doorway easily enough. We have several customers that use them for inventory control, you put one of the tags on each item, then, as it is moved through a doorway, it is read and tracked.
The only draw back I have ever seen to these types of readers is that they have a rough time of it if you put 3 or 4 cards near them at once, they just refuse to read them. Also, if you put a switching power supply next to one, it all but loses its ability to read the card. Though, these are access control readers and so tend to avoid reading if conditions aren't just right (its a security feature).
As for the idea of microwaving them, I don't know, I've never tried it. But from what I understand about them, it would probably work. If the antenna picked up enough energy, it might overcharge, and fry, the capacitor that is used to power the response circut.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
They will
Auto ID Center
The flip side mobile Cloak
This Stanford seminar gave a good overview of the underlying technology.
most of whom don't understand how the microwave works
Including, apparently, the poster.
The microwave oven beam is directional only until it hits the "stirrer", a rotating paddle designed to spread the microwaves all over the interior of the oven (for even heating). Plenty will leak out the front if it isn't shielded.
The screen does a wonderful job at stopping the (microwave) radiation, since the holes are far smaller than the wavelength -- it "looks" like solid metal to the microwaves.
As for the energy -- there may be higher total wattage in the microwave beam, but per-photon the higher-frequency light waves have much higher energy. That higher frequency also means the wavelength is small enough to easily pass through the holes in the screen, so you can watch your dinner cooking, or the pretty light show from nuking an AOL CD.
-- Alastair
No need for either broad-spectrum high-power RF or microwaves. It's easy enough to find out what frequencies the RFID tags use (usually fairly low frequencies). A relatively low-power transmitter operating on the frequency to which the device is tuned would fry it without arc-welding your zippers.
Of course, such a transmitter would probably be declared a "DMCA circumvention device"...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The author of the Cnet story goes a long way to confuse this issue. Nothing as small as a grain of sand can receive and transmit useful radio signals (in a normal noisy environment). It is not until the end of the article that he admits that they need at least a 1/2 inch antenna.
You all are tripping. I worked on these things over the last year. The first approach should be the old fashioned Hammer.
These are the same Tags that have been around for YEARS. Its what they tag whales with. Now their in your cars as passive anti-theft devices on the Luxury and expensive models. The keys have a chip in them.
I dont think you will be frying this thing with any low power RF noise. Thats everywhere, and I have yet to loose an electronic device to it.
This think is not a tick. It will not absorb energy till it pops.
Microwave is an excellent idea. If its too small to be seen, its power output will be too low to be of consequence.
Not quite, the most common tags today are the sensormatic acoustomagnetic type, found at a wide range of retailers from WalMart to Home Depot to many cd/movie stores. This type has a number of advantages, over the older RF based tags. In fact, many consumer items can be found with an Acoustomagnetic tag inside the item. Recently, I disassembled an answering machine I had purchased from KMart and inside the case was a (presumably deactivated) tag. Because 58khz acoustic echos are not much affected by the container, (after all these are just sound waves) tags can be embedded rather than on the surface of the item (as with radio frequency tags) where a shoplifter can easily peal them off. Don't expect the RF tags to actually be embedded in too many items, metallic items and objects containing water will either absorb the RF energy or detune the tag, itself a simple LC (inductor-capacitor) network tuned to 8.2 mhz (most common - or 9.5 mhz). The above posts are indeed correct, the common RF tags are deactivated by a high intensity RF signal, but usually of a different (usually lower)frequency that the tag also has resonance at. The fusable link is commonly a crimp across the capacitor which upon deactivation shorts the capacitor out, thus detuning it, rather than burning itself out.
The saturation type strips the parent refers to are actually prone to false alarms from certain metal objects with a low (and abrupt) saturation point. These systems are commonly found in libraries, rather than retail stores. Several other types are in use.
Read here and here.