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Benetton Clothing to Carry RFID Tags
An anonymous reader writes "Clothing manufacturer Benetton has announced that they will begin embedding RFID tags in clothing for inventory control purposes. You can
read more about this at SF Gate." morcheeba adds more information: "EETimes is reporting that Benetton will be embedding a Philips RFID chip into the label of every new garment bearing the name of Benetton's core clothing brand, Sisley. The 15 million chips expected sold in 2003 will allow monitoring of garments from production to shipping, shelves and dressing rooms. The I.CODE chip (tech info) used in Benetton's labels will include 1,024 bits of EEPROM and operate at a distance of up to 1.5 meters. RFIDs look like they would be extremely uncomfortable in some Sisley clothes."
When the whole processor id thing was introduced way back when, people threw a big fit about it. Now what average Joe these days even know about it?
That's because the stopped doing it. Motherboard manufacturers even started shipping boards where the default setting was to disable the # in case your chip did have it. Since it's stopped, it's not a very big issue anymore.
Life is too short to proofread.
I am prone to agree with the Microwave guy. This technique will not work on metal-studded jeans or other metal studded clothing but hey, unless you have access to a Radiology department, you aren't going to be able to get them all now are you. If you DO have a radiology department..... Have fun and remember to wear lead...
:)
Take the clothes, dip in water, place in microwave, nuke for 10 seconds. If you don't see a bright flash then you're OK. If you see the flash, wave bye bye to the RFID tag that isn't there any more..
if you run the microwave longer than 10 seconds, you risk the water evaporating and the clothing catching fire. The water gives the microwave something to warm up (attack with the microwave radiation.) and if the water evaporates, your clothing is next...
And remember kids, microwaving clothes and popcorn is a good way to get that warm toasty feeling while you're watching a movie...
Partnership for an idiot free America!
I hope they remove the tag after purchase...
If you read the part where they said that returned items automatically go back into inventory, you could deduce that they are not removing the tags.
Deuteronomy 13:06-9
Because the tags are powerless, they have to be powered via the field induced by the reader. This drops off as the inverse square of the distance. The tag then has to transmit back to the reader - again power is the inverse square of the distance. Therefore, the range is related to the inverse fourth power of the power output of the reader. I.e. to ramp up the range to 15m you'd have to increase the power output by a factor of 10000! You might start melting things at that point.
The 1.5m range is already with big heavily optimised antennas (like the big theft detection antennas by shop entrances) which are operating at the maximum legal power output.
So in summary - you're going to have more luck taking a pair of binoculars and war-driving looking out for barcodes
Oh and here is the close up shot...
http://www.benetton.com/press/sito/photo/product_a dver/sisley/2003_wet/sisley08.html
a ^= b; b ^= a; a ^= b;
This company had an add campaign several years ago which featured death row murders as the spokesmen. This is brutally insensitive to the families of those they murdered. This was a shameless attempt to generate publicity. As a result of their campaign their largest retailer, Sears, dropped Benetton's products (which is commendable). We should all do the same.
For more information about radio-frequency identification tags, or RFIDs, you can check these two columns, "Bye-Bye Bar Codes?" and "The Eerie Possibilities of RFID Tags". The first one contains illustrations about how RFID tags are tested at McDonalds or Prada.
A colleague was warming a bread roll. She thought it was tough, so she gave it a few more minutes. Actually, of course, it had by then completely dried out and the next step was, if not actual flames, a choking cloud of smoke. I've noticed some plastic bowls get very hot in a MW. In complex molecules there will likely be a resonance with the water frequency, weak or strong, so eventuslly everything heats up.
Anyway, all this "disable" discussion is silly. Of course, as the FA states, the tag is in the label. So cut it off.
You just go into the dressing room with 3 things, cut the tag off with scissors, then walk out with 2 items, and leave the store unnoticed with the third.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
A barcode just might not be enough for the level of automation that would make it cost effective in product warehousing.
RFID works by placing sensors around loading bays, key transfer points within the warehouse, and also having portable handheld inventory management devices. A garment could be identified even through packaging sealed for transport - no visual line of sight required.
Ian.
A physicist is an atom's way of thinking about atoms