Benetton Clothing to Carry RFID Tags

Posted by michael on Tuesday March 11, 2003 @05:55PM from the welcome-back-to-benetton-mr.-smith dept.

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."

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Re:How do you disable them? by shadwwulf · 2003-03-11 18:14 · Score: 5, Interesting

A trick that the US Navy has used to for years as an electronic counter measure would work for this on a much smaller scale. The navy uses planes with high powered radio transmitters in the noses of them. They fly over and blast the target with high powered RF and fry the reciever, and pretty much everything else in it's path(light bulbs, FM radios, 2way radios, computers, etc). Well in your case you should just have to get close to a high powered transmitter such as a 1500 watt radio transmitter and put it REALLY close. It should fry out in a heart beat with the clothes none the worse for wear[pun intended].

SW