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An ID Number for Everything

Posted by michael on from the technology-is-not-neutral dept.

jon323456 writes "Put this in your privacy pipe and smoke it. According to news.com, MIT researchers have cooked up a new barcode that has enough dataspace to include a unique serial number for everything. And in combination with RFID tags...."

3 of 391 comments (clear)

  1. Re:An ID on every car axle? by avalys · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There will be a huge fight against these in terms of the privacy issues -- tracking cars, for example.

    Yeah, imagine how awful it would be if every car had a unique identifier associated with it. You could be identified wherever you go by anyone with access to the right equipment.

    Ever heard of a license plate?

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  2. Re:No more inventory counts by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Article states:
    "No more inventory counts. No more lost or misdirected shipments. No more guessing how much material is in the supply chain--or how much product is on the store shelves."
    Boy, these guys need to get into the real world. Stuff gets spoiled, damaged/dropped/spilled, eaten by rats, misfiled/misplaced, etc. Sure, you query the rdif tags, and they report back that you've got 6 cans of #2345 white paint in stock. Now you go to ship all 6, and find that 3 cans are leaking, 2 of the other cans are mislabeled, and the last one, someone's opened and "borrowed" the contents to repaint the john..

    You'll always have a need to do a physical audit.

  3. Re:96 bits??? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thank heavens you aren't allocating bit-space then. Part of the power of what you think are excessively large address spaces comes from the fact that they stay sparsely populated (and the resultant ease with which you can perform classifications due to that sparseness).

    Example: IIRC there are less than 256 countries in the world. One possible IPv6 allocation is an 8-bit country code field embedded in the 128-bit address, leaving 120 bits for each country to address devices. And then in the US, for instance: 6 bits for the state field, 8 bits for the county field, 8 bits for the city field, still leaving 98 bits for addressing *per city*. A similar example holds for 96-bit barcodes.