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NYT on RFID
The New York Times has a piece on RFID tags. It's basic, but worth reading as a milestone - the technology is starting to enter the public eye. These RFID tags will have unique serial numbers - every RFID-tagged item you purchase will be uniquely different from every other nearly-identical item, enabling it to be identified and associated with you long after the purchase. And no, microwaving will generally not destroy the tags, and no, most items won't be microwaveable anyway. Try to microwave your couch.
You mean you don't have a jiggawatt microwave gun?
That goes next on the list to a lime pit for all mad scientists.
1 tequila 2 tequila 3 tequila floor
But How does it benifit the end user, oh wait I don't have to wait as lon in the checkout line with five screaming kids and a trolley full of sofas
...And no, microwaving will generally not destroy the tags, and no, most items won't be microwaveable anyway. Try to microwave your couch. ..
What about trying to Slashdot'em???
Apple iProduct. Non importa cosa sia, lo comprerete!
How to Find That Needle Hopelessly Lost in the Haystack
By BARNABY J. FEDER
ew product tags equipped with microchips and tiny antennas could one day make it easy to scan all the groceries in a bag simultaneously, allow businesses to locate any item in a warehouse instantly and enable the Defense Department to better manage inventories of mundane necessities like meals and spare boots. Hitachi announced this month that it has developed tags so small that they can be embedded in bank notes to foil money launderers and counterfeiters.
Tags with the technology known as radio frequency identification, or R.F.I.D., transmit a digital response when contacted by radio signals from scanning devices. Older versions of the technology have been around for decades, but now major manufacturers and retailers and the Defense Department are pushing to speed the development of a new version that could be read by scanners anywhere in the world, making it cheaper and more efficient to track the flow of goods from global suppliers to consumers.
The Defense Department expects to issue a statement in the next few days calling on suppliers to adopt the new version of the technology by 2005. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. made a similar announcement in July when it said it was requiring its top 100 suppliers to place tags with the new technology on cartons and pallets shipped to its stores by the end of 2004.
Radio frequency tags are currently used in products like wireless auto keys, toll collection systems and livestock and military armament tracking devices. A radio tagging system at Prada's store in SoHo in Manhattan identifies the clothes a shopper takes into a dressing room and allows the shopper to call up on an electronic screen images of the items being modeled and information about other colors and sizes.
But as business's interest in the technology grows, so do efforts by privacy advocates to place strict limits on its use.
"Very few people grasp the enormity of this," said Katherine Albrecht, director of Citizens Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, a group that was founded in 1999 to protest the use of frequent shopper cards and credit cards to collect data on individual consumers' purchasing habits.
Ms. Albrecht and other critics say that companies and government agencies will be able to monitor what people read or where they assemble from radio tags embedded in their books or woven into clothing. Unlike bar codes, which cannot be scanned unless a laser has a direct line of sight to them, the radio tags can be read through walls, and multiple tags can be read in an instant.
"R.F.I.D. certainly has value in the supply chain and in inventory management," said Beth Given, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. But she added that "there are so many potential issues once it gets beyond the point of sale that consumer protections need to be written into law."
Privacy advocates have suggested, among other things, that the tags be designed so that they cannot be reactivated once they are turned off, that all goods with a tag carry a consumer warning and that the tag must be removed when a product is sold unless the buyer agrees to leave it on.
In theory, there may be benefits from keeping the tags active once a product is sold. Washing machines, for example, might identify the clothes in a load and automatically select the appropriate cleaning cycle. And a smart medicine cabinet could tract the expiration on drugs.
Ms. Albrecht, however, has called for a one-year moratorium on using radio frequency tags on individual items while discussions about the implications of the technology take place.
The privacy concerns have already caused some technology managers to play down their interest in using the tags. The Benetton Group, the clothing retailer, for example, announced in response to consumer protests that it had not attached the tags to any individual clothing items. And Wal-Mart halted plans for a widely publici
Say you feed the tag to your cat, and then you microwave the cat, would the tag still not work? Hell, why don't you just pin it on some neighborhood dog or cat anyway .. similar to what they did on Police Academy 3 with Zed and Sweetchuck, when they were told to pick up rubbish so the taped the torches on the dogs to make it look like they were walking around.
Forbidden or not...
I should imagine the coils used by the RFID tags to get power and data should be detectable in the same way that metal detectors look for changes in their coil characteristics by the presence of the metal in the field. This should work even if the RFID tag is being quiescent waiting for a secret code to come in before it will talk, since it must suck power to listen.
"Cleaning behind the couch" will get a whole new meaning.
Something worse than 1984 is approaching. If you can't see the need to overthrow our corporate rulers then you must love Big Brother.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/29/technology/29TAG S.html?ex=1065412800&en=ae0b64773a522d63&ei=5062&p artner=GOOGLE
No, I didn't RTFA, as it requires a requires a registration. My question is, how long do the power sources in these things last? The link to EPC global did not answer that question.
Why should I? I'm not paranoid.
Remember folks -- when you buy tinfoil, remember to remove the RFID tag from it before you make your hat.
Ha! I laughed at my buddy a few years back when he said that the U.N. could fly over your house and scan it to see how much money is in it. Now that is a reality. The RFID tags would be useful for inventory purposes, but the privacy thing is hard to shake. Who says that "advanced" criminals in the future won't develop a "super RFID scanner" and scan all of the houses in a neighborhood and "see" what goodies are in each house to try to figure out which house to rob. OR the government can use it to see which house is guilty of thought crime! :)
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Why aren't RFIDs used for baggage handling at airports? In Europe all baggage of a passenger has to be removed from the plane if this passenger does not board. This may lead to delays because they have to sift through every piece of luggage.
RFIDs should make this much easier...
We may not be able to stop companies from putting RFID tags on their stuff, which becomes *our* stuff when we buy it, but we sure as hell can find these tags and remove or destroy them after purchase.
How difficult would it be to build your own RFID detector? If it is too difficult for Joe and Jane Average, how much might one cost at WalMart/Target/Walgreens/geektoys.com?
Somebody want to start a business making these? I have a manufacturing background...
Moan, tell other people get them to moan too. A store in the UK used these (coupled with a camera system) on razors recently (there was a prev /. post) enough people complained and the store removed the tags. The only way to stop these constant attacks on our privacy is to activly resist them.
Oh and for people asking how to destroy these, if you can find them a hammer works. The problem is finding them.
I can see this happening the same way as Europe boycotts GM food, to the point where supermarkets may actually state on the product :-
"This product does not contain any RFID tags"
RFID can be harmless - for instance, helping supermarkets judge thier stock better, tallying up popular products etc.
However, they are almost certainly going to be abused !
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
will be to make it illegal to disable or destroy an RFID tag - as that will be a common procedure used by terrorists to avoid being tracked.
I sure hope that people WTFU and realize that people who WANT to hold office only want it for the power, and the longer we keep electing these people, the more freedoms we will lose.
Political office should be a "draft" position - you get drafted to serve in office for one term and then you're done.. and lawyers aren't allowed.
Katherine Albrecht, director of Citizens Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, she is an alarmist, freaking out thinking Big Brother wants to know what brand of coffee is in your cupboard...
My couch is going to have an RFID tag? But... that would allow people to track me everywhere I go -- I never leave home without my couch.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
The article mentions a push for higher data rates...
"The new specifications call for R.F.I.D. systems to operate at an ultrahigh frequency, similar to that used by many cellphones.
"The higher frequency standard would be able to handle much more data."
but... I don't really understand what data needs to be put on these tags. Surely if you have a unique ID for each item, this can be referenced to a DB and then linked back to data there? Can anyone think of a good reason to have (relatively) large amounts of data on the tag itself?
Cut them up. Beat them with a hammer. Kill them. Consumers don't need this stuff. The Government and big retailers need that crap they think. It will end up being another reason to fire some workers some place do to "increased efficencies." I say we call for a world wide ban. It's possible abuse out weighs it's benefits. It plain sucks.
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
RFID tags that are cheap enough to attach to all your goods are passive tags. They have no power. The reader must generate power that is absorbed by the tag. There are regulations about how much juice you can generate... making the read range about 1 meter for a tag.. sure you COULD generate more... but to scan a whole house? Good luck! That kind of juice wouldn't be very portable. Furthermore, the kinds of readers that can support anti-collision (required for any of this shelf inventory, scan the whole grocery bag at once stuff) even have shorter read ranges.. like 1 ft.
Where can we get scanners to test if the godds we buy carry RFID-Tags and how much do they cost?
Or will the tags only respond if triggered with the right code?
About as portable as a generator and a pickup truck.
Not that I'm worried for the short term.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Well, it makes sense that they will be resistant to a number of different attacks; radiation, static electricity, liquid corrosion, software or hardware corruption, reprogramming via other inputs, etc. They have to be, or else stuff will break.
I'm not so much worried about getting past and deactivating the tags, I'm more worried about;
1: radiation from the tags in my neighbors houses getting into mine and helping to contaminate food (energize particles, break them apart, they form new ones which are called free radicals, I eat them, get cancer or the same radiation breaks apart my dna creating cancer). Just think, if everything in your house was putting off a radio frequency that could be read at ~5 feet, that's a lot of radiation even in a room. If you go onto a train in Tokyo around midday it's like a microwave. Sure, RFID tags aren't as bad but still, everything in your house is getting exposed to it.
2: What happens on a day when there's some solar flare activity? RFID purchases are going to be affected one way or another aren't they? Eccess radiation in an area from other sources will show up on a scanner and may screw with equipment.
3: What happens if I go through the checkout with someone behind me and the reader picks up my bag, and their bag and charges me for all the groceries? How do I get my money back?
4: What happens when the stores decide paper money is antequated and require credit cards only? Don't tell me it won't happen either. When you use money your buying habits can't be checked but when you use credit they can track you. I prefer not to be profiled at all, but they're going to find one way or another to do it and make the vast and dumb majority think it's for their own protection against thiefs.
5: Did someone mention theifs wardriving with a scanner, figuring out what people have in their houses and also figuring out when they are there and when they aren't?
6: What do you want to bet that they're going to require people to get this imbedded in their bodies as well? There's already a rice-sized tag people can get that holds all kinds of information about them. And if you don't do it, they'll just make it difficult for you or impossible to not have one. Forget cash or credit card, we only accept RFID identification at the registers now. Oh, you're a criminal? Sorry, we don't sell food to criminals. Oh, your a hacker? You can't use that computer there. Then think about the real hackers who'll go waRFIDing. "Hey, lets make this sorry bastard a child molester." How many incarcerated or military personell are going to be required to get it manditorily?
Candy-Coated Knowledge
I have to admit, I can see why retailers would want to exploit RFID tags. It would save them a lot of money in labor, as well as reducing the load on any loss prevention manager. This boils down to either more profits or lower consumer costs.
I have three opinions about them.
1) Everything you buy that contains an RFID tag must be properly labeled. The consumer should know what they are buying.
2) There should be a way to easily disable them after taking the product home. Ideally, they should be deactivated on your way out the door, but there are complications(non-technical) hindering the store's choices.
3) Any product that has a unique characteristic or property shouldn't have an RFID tag. For instance, if I go to the local Sears, Home Depot, Lowes, whatever and buy a personal fire safe(w/o the changeable combinations), I wouldn't want the safe to have it's combination somewhere indexed to the RFID chip's serial number. There is a greater security risk here, this is but one example.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Would microwaving (whatsoever) the tag in a bank note render the note unusable? Will shops also have machines for automatically alerting the local police if I try paying with one of the forged ones?
What if I, without knowing it, carry such a note?
Guantanamo calls.
I'll worry about this when someone makes a reader that works well when several tags are in the field at one time. Currently farmers downunder are getting RFID tags for all their cows and most sheep. The farmers are sort of sold on a concept like Mr Spock's transponder saying Bessy is 126 meters at heading 74 with an arrow pointing at the cow. The problem is the current readers are good to read a cows tag at nearly .5 meters and when you consider how wide a cow is there is a bit of a problem.
In an unrelated subject, if someone has any clue about RF and DSPs and pulling several cruddy analog low powered alalog signals out of the either, I know someone that would like to talk to you.
That sounds like a challenge. The first one to post pictures gets a karma bonus!
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
those tags on your mattress that say "do not remove under penalty of law!"
Yep... the mattress police... fear them.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
It will be a kind of everyone lives in glass houses society. The only people with privacy will be nudists.
But worse RFIDs are in new cars to aid in tracking car movement :
TOP SECRET FACT:Most modern cars have tracking transponders!
Spy transmission chips embedded in tires that can be read REMOTELY while driving.
A secret initiative exists to track all funnel-points on interstates and US borders for car tire ID transponders (RFid chips embedded in the tire).
Yup. My brother works on them.
Your tires have a passive coil with 64 to 128 bit serial number emitter in them! (AIAG B-11 ADC v3.0) . A particular frequency energizes it enough so that a receiver can read its little ROM. A ROM which in essence is your GUID for your TIRE. Multiple tires do not confuse the readers. Its almost identical to all "FastPass" "SpeedPass" technologies you see on gasoline keychain dongles and commuter windshield sticker-chips. The US gov has secretly started using these chips to track people.
Its kind of like FBI "Taggants" in fertilizer and "Taggants" in Gasoline and Bullets, and Blackpowder. But these car tire transponder Ids are meant to actively track and trace movement of your car.
I am not making this up. Melt down a high end Firestone, or Bridgestone tire and go through the bits near the rim (sometimes at base of tread) and you will locate the transmitter (similar to 'grain of rice' pet ids and Mobile SpeedPass, but not as high tech as the tollbooth based units). Sokymat LOGI 160, and Sokymat LOGI 120 transponder buttons are just SOME of the transponders found in modern high end car tires. The AIAG B-11 Tire tracking standard is now implemented for all 3rd party transponder manufactures [covered below].
It is for QA and to prevent fraud and "car theft", but the US Customs service uses it in Canada to detect people who swap license plates on cars when doing a transport of contraband on a mule vehicle that normally has not logged enough hours across the border. The customs service and FBI do not yet talk about this, and are starting using it soon.
Photos of chips before molded into tires:
http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:TAQIKjBI01g C: www.sokymat.com/sp/applications/tireid.html
(slashdot ruins links, so you will have to remove the ASCII space it insertess usually into the url above to get to the shocking info and photos on the enbedded LOGI 160 chips that the us gov scans when you cross mexican and canadian borders.)
You never heard of it either because nobody moderates on slashdot anymore and this is probably +0 still. It has also never appeared in print before and is very secret.
Californias Fastpass is being upgraded to scan ALL responding car tires in future years upcoming. I-75 may get them next in rural funnel points in Ohio.
http://www.tadiran-telematics.com/products6.html
but the fact is... YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE A RADIO TRANSPONDER not counting your digital cell phone which is routinely silently pulsed in CA bay area each rush hour morning unless turned off (consult Wired Magazine Expose article). Those data point pulses are used by NSA on occasions.
The us FBI with NRO/NSA blessings, has requested us gov make this tire scanning information as secret as the information regarding all us inkjet printers sold in usa in the last 3 years using "yellow" GUID barcode under dark ink regions to serialize printouts to thwart counterfeiting of 20 dollar bills. (30 to 40 percent of ALL California counterfeiting is done using cheap Epson inkjet printers, most purchased with credit cards foolishly). Luckily court dockets divulge the existence of the Epson serial numbers on your printouts... but nobody except a handful of people know about this Tire scanning upgrade to big brother's arsenal.
YOU MUST BUY NEUTRALIZED OR FOREIGN TIRES!!!!! Soon such tires will become illegal to import or manufacture, just as Gasoline must have "Taggants" added or gasoline is illegal, as are non-self-aging 9 mm bullets.
It is currently VERY illegal to buy or disa
is this a piss-take or genuine stupidity?
1. they don't generate radiation except when scanned. and that's radio waves - hence Radio Frequency ID. how do you keep out all the "cancer-causing radiation" from radio stations at the moment? I'm sure the same method will work.
2. I'd be more worried about solar flares knocking out electricity grids and communication satellites than maybe breaking an RFID.
3. the usual way.
4. if you RTFA, they can put the tags in paper money so you're already screwed.
5. did someone mention police with even bigger scanners tracking the thieves? or how about a big fat house alarm that goes off if a RFID leaves the premises?
6. usual laws apply.
"We understand that to be effective, principles must evolve into policy. Therefore, we are undertaking an intensive process to develop implementation guidelines around our principles and guidelines."
As a general axiom of human behaviour - anyone who crafts such bullshit newspeak as this is up to no good.
What would happen if ammunition was somehow RFID-tagged, in a way that survived firing?
It would be a lot easier to tell who originally bought the ammunition for homicides, even if they didn't do any killing.
Of course, right now the government has a guilty-til-proven-innocent attitude towards speeders they catch with unattended photo-radar traps. Will they take a similar stance if they know the owner of materials used in a crime?
Get off my launchpad!
i microwave my couch all the time
Dear Slashdot,
Following some advice that I read on a popular website, I attempted to microwave my couch. In the subsequent house fire, I lost many of my prized possessions, and my microwave oven was damaged beyond repair.
Do I have recourse to legal action in this matter?
Not so long ago, we had a story here in the Netherlands where a shop was able to locate people who bought a certain item, which was poluted by someone wanting to damage a company, because these people had used a bonus card, with a unique number identifying them, and because the shop did register who sold what. Some people had become seriously ill after eating the contaminated product. Luckily, they all recovered.
OK, how do I stop from getting double charged for items? Like, I buy some books from Borders, then a week later walk into the same store with one or two of those books in my backpack? Or I buy a pack of smokes in one store, then walk into another one with that pack still in my pocket? Or buy some socks from BJs one week, then next week when I go there I'm wearing them.
Cant you just find where they are and smash em? And who wants a smart washer machine since when has looking at the tag n the back of shirt become to hard to do?
Damn republicans always ruining everything
There are some objections and a lot of legitimate strengths to RFID technology. I am surprised to see so many on slashdot being such knee-jerk Luddites. This is promising technology and there are clearly ways to limit the risks it poses.
Here are what seem to be the risks:
1. Businesses keep a database of my purchases and spending habits. What do I care? Maybe they will keep stocking and producing more of what I want to buy. Maybe they will use this to market stuff to me that I am actually interested in. What is the problem with that? The grocery stores already do it with the cards they issue and I am happy to have them do it.
2. Bad guys will drive by and scan my house to see what there is worth stealing. This is not a credible threat, as someone else has pointed out, these are passive tags that can't be read easily at a distance.
3. Nefarious gov't figures will be able to track my movements and will imprison me or kill me. Am I overstating this fear for dramatic effect? Well, what exactly is the fear? If this can be determined to be a true threat to our rights against unwarranted search and seizure, all we have to do is pass a law to have the units blanked out upon the point of sale. It also would seem to be technologically unfeasible.
There are probably many many ways to get around these weaknesses which in my mind are not really that great a threat anyway. The laws against unwarranted search are going to end up being a challenge to the worst of them anyway. The creation of these technologies does not suddenly cause the veracity of deeply entrenched law to just evaporate like a mist.
What are the benefits?
1. I am a database developer, and this is going to create a LOT or work for me for years to come. What's wrong with that?
2. This will greatly increase the efficiency of inventory and logistics systems, cutting down on the need for tedious soul-killing work counting widgets and keeping track of stuff.
3. There are a lot of really fabulous futuristic applications for this that I can't wait to see implemented. The article mentioned auto-inventory of medicine to see what is expired.
4. Far more accurate and efficient inventory means less cost to bring stuff to market which means better stuff for lower prices, or better profits for businesses whcih means more $ available to hire ME to beef up their information infrastructure.
5. These benefits are only the tip of the iceberg.
If a manufacturer wants to stop resale of it's goods on the second hand market (think: CD, software, E-book) it says so on the packet and puts a unique RFID into every item.
Then it goes round the car boot sales and picks up the items (doesn't even need to buy/touch them - scan as they walk by), tie back to the original sale (you did pay by credit card didn't you ?) and hit you with a court case.
Result: more profit
Higher data rates would help the scanners read more tags at once. One major application is to scan entire pallettes as they pass into or out of the loading dock doors of a warehouse. If you have a pallette full of boxes and each box contains some cartons and each carton contains some retail packs of batteries and all the packs, cartons, boxes, and pallettes have tags, you get a lot of tags to scan. You may want to read thousands of tags in a 1 second interval.
Becuase the tags are passive and dumb, there is no collision detection or avoidance at the tag level. Only if the duty cycle for each tag is very short (i.e., a very short pulse at a high data rate) can you reliably read lots of tags in a short period of time.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
loser & whiner
good combo
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
"But How does it benifit the end user, oh wait I don't have to "
For that all you need is an ID thats unique PER PRODUCT, not PER INSTANCE OF THE PRODUCT.
Its the individually unique ID thats the problem here, if it was like barcodes (identifying the product) it wouldn't be such a problem.
I've read about this tags in a lot of articles now, and I always see the same complaints. Oh, how am I gonna deactivate them and I don't want to give off a radio signal of the things I'm wearing/carrying. Anything broadcasting its own signal and upc is going to be a small, but findable chunk of plastic and metal. Take new sweater, find tag, take hammer. DEACTIVATED. Its really not going to be that difficult. You may not use that method on your couch, or dvd player, but your not going to walk around in public carrying something the size of a refridgerator, at least I hope not!
*There's Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off Jim!*
There are already taggants in all bullets. Its a federal law. The technology is top secret. Bullets also self age.
Bullets were reclassified as EXPLOSIVES in some cities such as Pasadena and are illegal to possess on private property unless paperwork is filled out for each box.
The taggants used in bullets are "binary' pinches of things mixed in small batches to identify lots.
The chemicals include : rare earth oxides, radiological, BATF 3M color coded taggants (6 million cominations in use), Westinghouse ceramic 0.2mm particle taggants, Mossbauer taggants, Vapor Taggants, disproportionating salts, elastomeric adsorption, microencapsulated vapor, and many more,
Some can be defeated using neodynium magnetic separation, and multiple sift passes due to magnetics, as around 50 ferrites are used preferably.
Most taggants can only be thwarted by mixing many many lots of materials ogether and buying all lots using cash and not credit card and furthemore masking the face, because walmart records all faces even for cash transactions and all receipts are accurately timed within seconds and even transmitted to central walmart headquarters in real time. no other retailers do this though.
bullets do indeed have VERY accurate tagants, so you are either joking or do not know what you are talking about.
chemical taggants are used in all commercial prepared explosives including fuel-nitrate based.
EGDN (ethylene glycol dmltrate), NG, DNT-dinitrotluene, TNT-2, 4, 6,-trinitrotoluene, RDX, etc
worse than ALL taggants are RFIDs already hidden in most cars tiresand readable at highway speeds even in clusters of cars. See my post today on car RFIDs. It also mentions bullet taggants in one of the sentences. i posted it before you even wrote your post.
bullets are tagged under federal law with unique identifiers able to be read off the projectile.
begins.
They are going to put these in tires. When you buy your tires the seller is going to be required to enter your information in a database.
One day when you are going a little too fast in a school zone or run a yellow that switches to red too fast an underground computer is going to sense the rfid in your tire, immediately reporting the number via rf link to police headquarters.
You would think that this would be for the purpose of giving you a ticket. You're right, you will get a ticket. But that is not the end the trail for your rfid number.
It immediately gets sent to the state government where it checks to make sure you are not a deadbeat dad that the wherabouts of are unknown. Simultaneously sending it to the FBI to see if you are a name on the "patriot" act watchlist and indexes your location. If you drive on the same street on a regular basis they will know where to find you.
You're not a deadbeatdad, lawbreaker, or terrorist you say??? Well the trail that your rfid number takes does not end there. Your rfid number is sold by cashed-strapped states to a commercial database under the auspices of "risk mitigation" that insurance companies subscribe to. Because you were speeding, you are at an increased risk and your car insurance rates are subsquently raised. Because you drive dangerously, your health insurance rates are also raised. Maybe they cancel your policy outright.
You're thinking I'll just remove the rfid. No you won't. Driving with unregistered tires is against the law, and if the police can't scan you as you drive past his cruiser he pulls you over and immediately suspends your license and impounds your car. But you won't be able to remove it anyway, without destroying the tire, as it is purposefully integrated with the "steel belt".
Does the trail end for your rfid tire number now? No, it most certainly doesn't. To see where it leads further, you are going to have to talk to my patent attorney.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
God I'm sick of reading this post - you shove it in every thread, regardless of how many people point out you are talking out of your ass. GPS "emitter" in cell phones? Puurlease. Go back to your tin foil tent quick - before they come and take you away.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Well, I might be a bit worried, if you weren't being so blatantly sensationalist and paranoid. /. a few months back, so it's hardly "never appeared in print before and is very secret".
Oh, and I seem to remember seeing a whole article about this very subject on
Idiot.
Alright, who rated that interesting? The only way its interesting is as a load of crap. They dont ask you for a liscense plate number when you buy new tires, and you can just drop off the rims if you feel like it. So, basically, anyone who ever bought new tires for their car would suddenly not have any link between the transponder and the car's id? Not to mention the fact the articles are about transmitters so they can identify the tires while in the factory... you really think they'd waste money making their transmitter that works for a few days hold up for a few years instead?
*There's Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off Jim!*
The tags that have been proposed for consumer goods operate at high frequency. IIRC, around 900 MHz is a commonly chosen frequency. So if you want to extend the range of the scanner, you need only build a high-gain antenna. So the same geniuses that do WiFi across the kilometers, could probably read tags at at 10 or 20 meters. The 900 MHz antennas would be a bit bulky, but it can be done.
And if the RFID go to higher frequencies, then proportionally smaller directional antennas would do the trick.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I can see a market for fake RFIDs (did anybody think this won't happen). After all, those fake Guccis wouldn't be worth anything if they didn't let you pass muster at that exclusive club you are trying to get into.
1. If you're worried about ionizing radiation that much you'd better start making tinfoil hats for your food and put them while they're being grown as the sun is busily turning your veggies into free radical bombs. 2. If you can modulate random solar radiation into a challenge/response engine I think Jules Verne was looking for you last century. 3. RTFA. Checkout RFIDs work in closer proximity to the scanner (1 foot). 4. And its not protection against the grey market economy ? Barter, stolen goods, drugs, etc ? 5. More Tin Hats (or Faraday cages...pretty easy to shield against war drivers) 6. Why do you believe that lowjac'ing people is a new concept ? Biometrics don't require electronic implants..the only way you can escape is to die right now.
Got an expensive mobile phone, watch, PDA? Carrying several hundred dollars? Doesn't matter if it's out of view. Zap, you're a prime target.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I don't know what the situation is in the US, but definitely in some countries (such as New Zealand, where I am), it would at least take an act of legislation for that to happen.
One of the legal requirements here, as I understand it, is that if you're running a business and you place a monetary price on an item or service, you're legally required to accept paper cash as payment if the customer wants to pay that way. Telling someone that they're required to pay by credit card isn't legal. If you're able to negotiate a more convenient method of payment with the customer such as a form of bank deposit (cheque, credit card, EFTPOS, etc) then that's fine, but you have to be prepared to accept cash if the customer walks up with a suitcase holding enough of it.
I'm not sure of the reason for this... whether it's a privacy issue or something else that co-incidentally happens to be there. I'm also not sure how it works with things like mail and internet sales. It might be that it's still on the burden of the customer to get you the cash within reason, but I wouldn't really have a clue.
2: The signal will consist of a specific code, for sure there are CRC-checks and so on. There is no reason to believe that solar flare activity and such will disturb the RFID tag.
3: I'm sure that this will be figured out. Reading the RFID will only work for a very small distance. By simply limiting the distance of the customers should solve this issue.
4: There is no proof that the credit card data and the RFID-tag data will be linked. And this will hopefully stay that way.
5: This is complete nonsense: Those "thieves" would have to use an enormous device to generate enough power to activate RFID tags that are some 10 meters away. Figuring out if/when someone is at home is quite easy already, we don't need RFID tags for this.
6: This is a common fear and it is not that absurd anymore. Technically it is possible. But hopefully privacy institutions will prevent this.
Note anyway that it's not necessary to attach RFID tags to the human body itself, the underwear/clothing/purse and everything else that is attached to the person very often will suffice to identify the person. This is the real danger, hopefully people will recognize this and prevent it.
Won't it be fun. A robber will only need to point his RF Gun at your Window to see if that couch, TV, PC, or CD collection is worth stealing.
Sure alot of people will do their best to remove the tags, but not very likely if it's inside the device and will void the warranty, or in the middle of a seat cushion.
You don't have to disable RFID tags to screw with the data collection and tracking systems. If you are able to find and collect RFID tags you can carry them around with you wherever you go. Imagine having three or four car RFID tags on you as well as about a hundred refridgerator RFID tags. Dumpster diving for RFID tags would be great fun. You'd have tags from stuff that never really led back to you and would confuse the hell out of anyone trying to make sense of the history of the items. You could do things like remove all of the RFID tags from your clothes and keep only one RFID tag in your wallet that was from a pair of underwear. If anyone looked at the data they'd think some guy in the same pair of underwear he's been wearing for weeks is walking around carrying a few cars and a bunch of Refridgerators.
This would be much more fun than filling our frequent shopper cards with bogus information or completing surveys with ridiculous answers.
-----
"Barcode Scamming" -- How RFID could save us all
The problem with barcodes is how easy they are to create, or more importantly how easy they are to forge. All one must do is download a standard UPC barcode font from the internet and install it on their home computer.
An individual could walk into a store and write down the UPC code off of - lets say a 15" flat screen monitor that costs $245. This would-be criminal then goes home and prints up a UPC code on a label from his home computer. Our criminal then returns to the store, places the label on a 21" flat screen computer monitor that retails for $995 and proceed to the checkout counter.
When the would-be thief passes through the checkout stand, the cashier scans the product, rings up the sale and the criminal passes right through the front door with his thousand dollar monitor that he just bought with a $750 "instant rebate".
You have just witnessed the latest technological innovation in shoplifting, a crime I have termed "Barcode Scamming". The amount of damage a single criminal could do is staggering.
It doesn't have to be a thousand dollar transaction. A barcode scammer could simply take the code from a small box of XYZ Laundry detergent and place it on the Jumbo box. The cash register still displays "XYZ Laundry detergent" but the price isn't right, and who's going to notice?
Businesses are already losing untold billions of dollars per year because of shoplifters, a cost that is then passed to the honest consumer. Right now, shoplifters get away with whatever they can hide on their person, or sneak out the front door. Now, with the use of technology, these five finger discounters can pass through any register, pay for the 'discounted' merchandise and walk right past the security guard on the way out the door.
We must replace the venerated 12 bit barcode with a technology that can insure the integrity of each retail transaction. Just like a nation must insure the integrity of its national currency, product manufacturers and retailers alike must insure the integrity of each retail transaction.
Consumer privacy advocates are concerned that the technology could be abused by retailers to track products from the store shelf to the individual's home.
I say that the concerns voiced by the privacy advocates are unwarranted. The benefits provided by the use of these new technologies are far outweighed by the economic threat posed by keeping with the obsolete UPC code. Consumers aren't stupid; they'll steer clear of retailers that keep track of too much of their personal information. Grocery stores learned this lesson when they began losing customers once they started tracking customer purchases through the use of store discount cards.
Retailers simply want to increase the efficiency of managing their inventory, while at the same time maintain the integrity of the products for sale in their store. RFID tags provide the necessary solution to this problem. In this case, the cost of not implementing the technology will soon far outweigh the costs associated with its implementation.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
cells phones auto-broadcast the GPS location when polled, there are countless discussions on it and the FBI used it to catch one man on "amber alert' as well as used non-in-use but enabled cell phones to track many suspects. Wired magazine had expose on it. You and all the naysayers taht ALWAYS mod this down to -1 are goverment shills. I and I alone posted this article, and did so FIRST over 15 months ago but the feds try to suppress it.
The RFID is a goddamned WIRE with nothese in it and a capacitance area... it is INDESTRUCTABLE and not meant to last a mere week in-factory as the other federal shill maintains.
so go to hell and let people read it if they want to learn. follow the links you idiot. there is NOT ONE FACTUAL ERROR IN THE ENTIRE POST.
Not one.
especially regarding digital cell phones and 911-gps law.
The feds go to your driveway... they then RECORD-SCAN your tires
they then enter that into databases already existing of car movement.
alternatively... the feds lookup your new-car tire id and do not bother to go to your house and assume you may still be on first set of tires.
third usage... the feds correlate your tires to your car when you go through a tollbooth or cross canadian border
4th usage : the best : the feds TAG your car by using the programming feature on some car tire RFIDs to mark your car as "hot suspect to track' and the computers all do the rest from that point onward.
load of crap my ass. you have a low iq or cant follow links and read. the post is 100% factual in every single detail not one mistake or false fact.
The tires are FINGERPRINTS but the tires can be used to track your car movement. That is the MAIN FEATURE and primary fbi goal. TRACKING a particular vehicle. Tying it to a partiular owner is secondary.
The RFID chip works in conjunction with a tuned circuit {capacitor and coil; the coil also behaves as an antenna} that extracts energy from an applied RF field. The resonant frequency of this tuned circuit is the operating frequency for the system. The size of the coil determines the operating range. An RFID device with integral tuned circuit measures about 20mm. by 10mm. by 2mm. and has a range of a few cm. A smaller device would require an external coil, but the bigger coil would extend the working range.
The transmitter feeds an RF power amp with a sensitive ammeter in one of its power supply leads.
Now, when the tuned circuit is brought within range of the transmitter, it will pick up the signal. But that is all. A voltage will be induced across the system, and a current will flow, but they will be out of phase. When the voltage is at a peak, the current is nil, and vice versa. Recall that power = voltage * current, so there is no power. Bringing the tuned circuit into range of the transmitter will not affect the ammeter reading.
However, if you connect a resistance across the two ends of the tuned circuit, then the current across this resistance will be in phase with the voltage. Energy is now being changed from electromagnetic waves to heat. And, strictly in accordance with the first law of thermodynamics, the reading on the ammeter will go up. Reduce the resistance and it will go up more. Of course, the imperfect coupling from transmitter to receiver itself behaves like a big resistance, which effectively limits the power available for the receiver {and therefore the ammeter swing}.
Anyway, if we switch this resistance in and out of circuit, we can watch the ammeter moving in sympathy with the switching.
The RFID tag gets its power by rectifying the AC induced in the tuned circuit, and using this to charge a capacitor. This capacitor stores enough energy to allow the tag to miss a few cycles, because it unavoidably will as a consequence of how it works. The tag then switches on and off a transistor which sits across the bridge rectifier {a transistor only conducts in one direction} in accordance with a predefined pattern. When the transistor turns on, more power is drawn from the transmitter. {As a side effect, the voltage is pulled down and the RFID tag has to rely on the capacitor contents to keep in this state, remember how far through the sequence it is, and so forth; so this state lasts only a few cycles}. The transmitter can see, by measuring the supply current to the RF power amp, whether the transistor in the RFID tag is on or off.
The external RF field also provides a stable timing reference to the tag, because it can count cycles accurately and dead-reckon a few cycles when it has to.
So, we have a one-way communication from the RFID tag to the transmitter, even though the RFID tag has no power supply of its own. If the RFID tag is absent or high resistance, this is a zero. When the RFID tag goes low-resistance, the transmitter can see this as a one. This allows us to send a binary number from the RFID tag.
All the RFID tag does, once it comes into range of the transmitter, is continuously send out a series of zeros and ones by going low and high resistance. It is up to the transmitter to spot the resistance of the remote end.
It is also possible to send data to the RFID tag, by switching the RF field on and off. While this could be used for programming of tags with serial numbers {instead of laser etching as is currently done}, it would require the tag to have some sort of EEPROM or Flash memory. These devices currently have a high power demand making them unsuitable for operation on RF power alone, but recall Clarke's first law: When a scientist says something is possible they are usually right; when a scientist says something is impossible they are usually wrong. So it is almost certain that future RFID tags could be reprogrammable.
The canonical method for deactivating
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Part 1, in my driveway. Not possible, car sits in locked, windowless garage at all time, with alarm on door. Garage is part of inner house structure. Car does not leave for work as work is within walking distance. Part 3, toll booths. Dont have any, never seen one, ever. Part 4. If they're bored enough to set up tracking units on dirt roads, make it look perfectly like a healthy growing tree or passing deer, as they'd have to as there is NOTHING ELSE HERE. Then they can have the car id. Your still an idiot.
*There's Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off Jim!*
Do not remove under penalty of law changes to do not nuke under penalty of law.
1. Pass Patriot Act
2. Require RFID tags on everything
3. ????
4. Power!
Not knowing how RFID tags will be used makes it very difficult to predict how they could be misused. Some people suggest using them to identify contents of shopping cart to automate check-out lanes. This application begs to be abused by the taping of additional RFID tags to products or possibly even to the shopping carts themselves. Another application mentioned was scanning clothing as people enter stores -- what if people were to just "wear" a few (dozen) extra RFID tags? Could large numbers of forged RFID tags (with plausible serial numbers if necessary) be scattered around a store to cause disruption of an inventory control system?
RFID tags are easily concealed, and if they are wrapped in metal foil they should not set off any detectors when they are carried into stores.
An RFID scanner, a small portable application, and I can inventory the contents of my house and get fair insurance in a couple of hours.
Not to mention tracing stolen couches.
I got burglared a month or two back, and ripped off by the insurance last week, and this is one application I could go for.
Presumably there will be a market in removing RFIDs from objects, but it's like serial numbers on cars and computers and mobile phones: do you really object that someone, somewhere, knows your taste in cars? For me, it's easily worth the security.
Although... my car was also stolen, and although the thieves abandoned it 4 days afterwards, the cops did not tell me about it, two months later I got a huge bill from the car pound where it had been towed.
Which is both good and bad: don't expect the authorities to be even semi-capable of using such technology in any meaningful way; they can't even be bothered to read the 6-character license plate off recovered vehicles.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
An excellent summary!
stop editorializing you asshat.
"...Our criminal then returns to the store, places the label on a 21" flat screen computer monitor that retails for $995 and proceed to the checkout counter."
The product name flashes up on the till, thats how the cashier knows you bought a flat screen TV and not a normal one.
As for the detergent, the barcode IS PART OF THE BOX not stuck on afterwards. So as soon as they reach for the box they know you stuck your own barcode on it.
"Consumer privacy advocates are concerned that the technology could be abused by retailers to track products from the store shelf to the individual's home. I say that the concerns voiced by the privacy advocates are unwarranted. "
The stores could have all the benefits simply by having the RFID identify the product TYPE and not each individual instance of the product without all the privacy problems.
You could also get the same benefits by implmenting a law protecting privacy to stop shops mining all this new found info they have.
Remember that the NYT article has a registration because NYT found it valuable to have information on its readers. Information has value, if you make information available to the shops, they will sell it. Do you want that?
Hmmm,
Let see.. a thief with a handheld scanner could walk around your house and determine exactly what's in your house and the exact worth. If you have a better scanner with a slightly longer range...say 50 feet. You could easily wardrive around for RFID tages and have a GPS and a laptop log were the best loot is.
OK, I REALLY want a way to disable these things. Who needs ID cards when your clothes will give away your identity.
Don't diss him so fast -- If they can use survellance on Kaczynski (unabomber) deep in the woods using satellites (check CNN), they sure as heck can surveil your butt anytime anywhere they please.
I don't think they FBI would even need to use secrecy. I think the technology will become so mundane that people will ignore it to the point that it becomes commonplace and done for patriot act like "security reasons".
I wouldn't put anything past Ashcroft, who has access to anybody's library records through the patriot act.
So as much as you think this guy is an "idiot", remember Ashcroft is the "bigger idiot" by a long shot.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
You may find on some items, the tag contains the serial number and is required for warranty. It will cut out much of the retailers fraud. Returns will require the sales slip and a working tag. Last year's item can't be returned on last weeks sales slip.
The truth shall set you free!
I can just see these things used for public advertising like in Minority Report. "Hello Joe Blow, I see you just purchased some preparation H. Wouldn't you like to consider some non-invasive surgery? Just come on down to Frank's A Shack Today!".
//m
1. The tags have no built in magical power. They will only re-radiate what they receive in a more organized fashion, and the power levels involved are probably far less collectively than the AC fields from your house wiring.
2. Solar flares? Are you fucking kidding? Are you even aware that RF comes in different frequencies. Do you have any concept of relative power levels?
3. This is just an engineering problem for the checkout device manufacturers, and it doesn't seem like a larticularly difficult one. The emitter that activates the tags will most likely be very focused, and any side lobes shielded.
4. Most people with half a brain use credit or debit cards all the time anyway. Cash IS antiquated for anything other than buying a Big Gulp or a single candy bar.
5. Yeah, common theives (who have never really shown any actual sophistication outside of the moovies) will have a magical device that can activate every tag in your house and sort through all the signals, just so they can steal yout TeeVee set.
6. We approaching the culmination of a revolt here in California over too much spending by the dimwit dementor brain-damaged anyone-who-supports-them-is-operating-on-a-zero-in tellectual-level Democrats. You think mandatory embedded ID tags will see the light of day?
And how do you "hack" a hard coded passive device?
They'll have a rfid wand for $99.00 at the spy shop. You can then pull apart your expensive new fleece with tweezers to get the 12 rfids they wove into the fabric out, and ex-lax to get rid of the ones you ate.
Eat at Joe's.
Ammunition CAN be reloaded. You can buy kits that do this. You can melt your own lead, pour it into molds and cast the bullets. Gun power and bullet primers can be purchased seperately. Bullet cases can be ordered via mail.
I used to do this as a kid with my father. He still does it.
I can't wait for the first peckerhead to get caught and fined for dumping his couch in the woods because an RFID tag in the furniture was tracable back to him. People dump a lot of junk in the woods... I wonder how many of them will be aware of the RFID tags that will point right back to them. And you'd better hope that your garbage collection service is on the up-and-up, too, or someone might end up accusing you of dumping your junk in the woods.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
active - has batteries, broadcasts it's signal 24/7 for quite a range
passive - no batteries, draws power from the reader, doesnt broadcast 24/7, cant be read from far away.
there are so many positive uses for this, i agree it's one of the many keeping the honest people honest deals. Relax. I bet you could get a break on insurance for having all this info.
-- botsex is {grep;touch;strip;unzip;head;mount}
The Defense Department expects to issue a statement in the next few days calling on suppliers to adopt the new version of the technology by 2005.
The Defense Department?? What did I miss?
I'm a 2000 man.
It's probably along the lines that cash is deemed legal tender by the gov't, therefore you must accept it in exchange for your goods or services that you sell. In order for this to work properly and avoid all sorts of localised (eg town-sized) currency and tax-avoidance issues, a law gets passed that you have to accept legal tender.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
In Utah, there was an individual that was taking barcodes from 15" flatscreen monitors - printing them out on labels then returning and purchasing 19" screens.
On the first go-around, the criminal bought 7 monitors without raising suspicion. The second time, he bought 8.
The second time, the cashier was a bit computer savvy. The cashier stated "WOW, thats a really good price on flat panel screens." and later that day went to purchase one of those screens for himself. It rang up for $999.
We always hear how criminals are stupid, well, this happened at a Costco warehouse. All they had to do is pull the member info and they got their merchandise back -- and Costco DIDN'T EVEN PRESS CHARGES! Because they couldn't PROVE that HE was the one that put the barcodes there.
With regard to the box of laundry detergent. The cashier would have to take notice of the barcode. I mean actually stop & look. Cashiers are trained to get the customer through the line as fast as possible. They don't have time to examine each & every barcode. - That, and go to your store and pay attention to the barcode. There are numerous products that have the barcode label stuck on OVER the printed label.
Trust me, it's happening and it's big. I wouldn't have written the article if I didn't have hard evidence to prove it.
I am 100% in favor of passing legislation that makes it illegal to use RFID info to track consumers. Just like it is illegal to use census data to find people.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Just wait 'till they start requiring all people to have one implanted at birth!
How many folks that are paranoid about rfid tags currently own and use a cell phone? Or have a discount card from their grocery store?
The longest range I know of on RFID (I write code for a company that implements wireless solutions, mostly in warehouses) is almost 20 ft. And that's at very high frequencies (14MHz, with active tags (they're quite a bit more expensive) and using lots of power (up to 60w). Texas Instruments makes a decent one, but so do the likes of Brady, Symbol, etc... This is nothing new...
Besides, they're just tags. Removable. If you think someone is going to be watching your purchased items, throw the tag away. Fairly simple really.
But if you have no cell phone, wear aluminum hats, etc... you could always make your own furniture...
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
My Motoral T730 phone has a GPS listing in the options. The GPS setting can be "911 Only" or "Always". It doesn't explain if 'always' means the phone is always emitting or not. Perhaps the phone will only respond to a request for location if you are calling 911 at the time, unless you set it to 'always'.
Blar.
I'm sick of every new (or repurposed) technology being hyped/justified by this type of tripe: "Imagine a that can automatically . This was supposed to happen with all kinds of appliances so far but there's damn little of that stuff available. The argument is usually a red herring. Imagine a washing machine that will automatically select the right setting to wash clothes. My ass. What does it do if I put permanent press in with heavy cotton (reading off my washing machine, I don't know what the fuck that means) Oh no!! not that!! On another note, why isn't my god damn fridge ordering new groceries yet? I'm getting hungry because that lazy bastard won't do anything. I suspect it is a zombie and is ddos'ing my microwave which won't automatically cook my food.
And don't reply posting links, I have yet to see that shit in Best Buy. That's when it will count.
Rant over. sorry.
While I very much agree with your operation chaos philosophy, I'm sure if RFID tags get suitably integrated into our society/economy, it will become a crime of the same order as any other identity manipulation, or worse, meshed in with DMCA, since you'd be manipulating a device's security features without authorization.
If they're that small, it might be interesting to protect them against the digestive system, and be able to track someome's movements (not THAT movement) for several hours.
Come to think of it, you could track THOSE movements too! What a waste of a good RFID...
Tim
Of course, the criminals they really want to catch will just use faraday cages to keep their money hidden.
Hey, theres a potential new product, a faraday cage wallet.
Personally, I don't give a shit if people track what I buy. I mean, so what? The thing is, people act like they're the only ones that are going to be committing data to this new process. Let's be realistic. Think of how many things are sold each day. Then think of how many people buy them. People talk about 'oh what if I'm caught possessing porn!' Well, even if that started happening, so what? Point to the millions of other porn-possessors and say 'so what?'
Oh no, people might know you bought sanka instead of jamaican coffee....OH NO!
people might know that you bought 35 video games last year....who cares?
There's going to be billions of tags to sort through, and anyone wanting to find information on your particular purchases is going to expend effort to find it. So someone might be able to (eventually) find out that you bought both chocolate AND peanut butter, and might send you an ad for reese's peanut butter cups. WHO CARES?! I don't pay attention to the junk mail I get now, why would I pay attention to any I get in the future, just because some corporate drone pulled my name out of a databse to send the 'why not try OUR brand of junk food/magazine/furniture/porn/whatever else? I'm not going to respond to junk mail, telemarketers, or spam, even if it contains a list of every product I've purchased my entire life. If you don't want people to be able to eventually perhaps hack into your grocery list, use the grey market. I'm sure people will sell food, drinks, clothes, and toilet paper with no rfids in them. It's doubtful that porn or sex toys would ever have rfids in them, and that seems to be what many people are afraid of being caught with. If you think you're the only person who buys porn, check out the revenue that industry generates. If you think you're the only person buying the latest pop crap, check the charts. You aren't. No one cares. If anyone out there has nothing better to do than to try to find patterns in my spending, have fun. If someone wants to rfid-scan my house to rob it, you can rest assured my 'home defense' would not show up on their scan. The point is, your house would not be the only one they'd scan...and here's a hint: casing a house is already an exact science. If you live in a ritzy neighborhood, you're more likely to be burglarized than if you live in the sticks. If you walk around your neighborhood flashing wads of cash and driving a mercedes, you're more likely to be robbed. Why would a burglar invest the money in a scanner and the time into scanning when the range isn't remarkable and they'd have a faster, easier, and less costly option already, because they'd be close enough to your house to...see it. If you have treasure in the projects, either everyone already knows or no one would be scanning your house anyhow. It's nonsense. I don't have any Picassos laying around, I wouldn't put an rfid tag on them if I did, and anything else is just stuff. Why do I care if people know what soda I drink, or what food I eat, or what clothes I wear or what furniture, toys, etc I buy? I'm not ashamed of my life, it's boring and repetitive and I like it that way. Anyone sifting through my purchases is more likely to fall victim to terminal ennui than to do anything that would embarass or upset me.
http://xkcd.com/386/
If RFID tags are put into food products then the flow and volumes of sewage created can be accurately tracked.
Those households creating more sewage can then be billed more for waste processing.
This will soon see a reduction in the high bran veggie society we are fast becomming.
EAT MORE MEAT!!!
Not if the cash has RFIDs. Helps prevent counterfitting, helps speed up counting of large numbers of bills for banks, etc. A bunch of reasons why this'll happen. A side effect is that cash could become non-anonymous.
-B
Try to microwave your couch.
Bad idea: the metal springs overheat, and scorch the stuffing. Always use a conventional oven when cooking your couch!
-kgj
So the microwave won't work. (I tried and the couch just won't fit).
My new (patent pending) solution is the drive through RFID wash. Take your ordinary car wash, remove the hoses brush and crap. Install lead shielding and an EMP generator. Put your tires, sofa and clothing on the cart and when it emerges from the other end no more peskey RFIDs.
I can see a market for a Home EMP Kit as well. (The warning label reads, "Do not use near TVs, Computers, Pets, or Reproductive Organs".
SD
âoeWho knew something as harmless as willful ignorance could end up having real consequences?â
What companies are the leaders in RFID? Manufacturing the tags, creating software to handle the massive amounts of data, developing solutions for companies that want to track their inventory, etc.
-B
Put down the crack pipe and think about it for half a minute.
It's not necessary to record your license plate when you have new tires installed. However, Customs can read the tags in the tires, and associate them with the plate on a particular car. If you change the plate on the car (so it looks like a different car is coming back over the border and not as if the same car is coming back from making a drug pickup), Customs will note now that the plate on the car does not match what they recorded earlier related to the tire tags.
Why would they be looking for cars that don't spend enough time on the other side of the border? Because they have learned from years of busting drug-runners that this is one thing (among many marks) to look for. Plus, checking tire tags would probably be faster than copying VINs down by hand.
The tags are passive and have no moving parts. Why wouldn't they survive in a tire, perhaps safely tucked between layers in the sidewall or bead?
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
*cough* Your license plate is plainly visible to the people putting on your new tires because IT'S ON ONE OR BOTH ENDS OF THE CAR THEY'RE PUTTING TIRES ON. They don't need you to fill it out on complicated questionnaires, or to rummage through yoru garbage for old insurance forms, or break into your house. Unless you remove your plates after you arrive at the mechanic, and affix them again before you leave, good luck remaining anonymous.
--- What
Greed.
It's about maintaining person dignity and self-respect.
RFID's have nothing to do with the loss of human dignity - they are simply a red herring to divert the human rights activists from the real problem: sin. Stalin and Hitler didn't need RFID's to oppress and kill millions, and I imagine that RFID's will play little, if no role in the invasion of our privacy. People have always found ways to strip others of dignity for their personal profit.
Yes, privacy is important to personal dignity. But I would argue that you don't have any privacy left to lose:
- If you want to open a bank account or take out a loan, you have to provide a social security number and employer. With which, your banker can find out:
- How much money you make.
- If you owe the IRS money.
- If you've been convicted of a felony.
- How many traffic incidents you've had.
- Your personal credit rank - done by someone other than you, and by a company unaccountable to you.
- How many credit cards you have, and their balances.
- If you've ever declared bankruptcy, been divorced, etc...
- Your most recent (or perhaps all) items purchased with your credit card.
Precisely what is left that you would want to hide from someone?Your privacy is already gone. To a corporation, people are just records in a database somewhere. You don't have much dignity left as it is. RFID's aren't the problem, they are merely incidental. Technology didn't create the problem; people did.
RFID tags can help control inventory, improve product safety, and help business manage the flow of goods. All of these things end up being good for the consumer because it all helps to control costs. Yet RFID could be used to invade the privacy of individuals. I do not think you could drive past someone's house and determine what kind of appliances they have, the output is too low for that but, you could scan them and inventory them as they walked through a door or other checkpoint.
I think this means that there have to be regulations in place to assure individual's privacy. There is too much potential for abuse to allow this industry to self-regulate.
Still, I'd love to see RFID track items like food. That way if a recall were made, the items could be pulled from the shelves and even if they are missed there, an alarm would sound at the register. It would make it much harder for potentially harmful products to make it into the kitchen.
I think this is the real problem!
I should move to F@%*$&% Canada.
I laughed at my buddy a few years back when he said that the U.N. could fly over your house and scan it to see how much money is in it. Now that is a reality.
It is?
Right now I'm laughing at you AND your buddy.
Who says that "advanced" criminals in the future won't develop a "super RFID scanner" and scan all of the houses in a neighborhood and "see" what goodies are in each house to try to figure out which house to rob.
Me, for one. Any criminal smart enough to build or procure such an unlikely device is in all likelihood not going to bother with burgling houses.
How much do these things cost? .10 cents ?
If I owned stock in Low Jack I would dump it.
DEAL WITH IT!
I should move to F@%*$&% Canada.
What if you accidentally microwaved your wallet? Will that land you in jail for passing off counterfeit bills?
Microwaving your wallet is not as far-fatched as it sounds. Say you have a damaged, leaky microwave - nevermind the fact that it got that way when you dropped it in an attempt to microwave your couch...
Now, every time you hover over it waiting for your popcorn to be done, you zap your wallet, and thus your bills (and gonads, but that's a separate issue).
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
and what are the chances that this really happens? slim to none. we do have a little thing called democracy here, and when these types of laws started getting passed, I'm sure that we'd start to vote out our representatives.
Now you can case out a person walking on the street or scan a target home or car to figure out if they have anything worth stealing! Then, you can know exactly what they have and where it is... How cool. And this is only the usage by common criminals. Imagine how the MOB could use it:
"Well there Jake, from our scans, your household items are worth at least 30K. As your security payment this year, we are asking for a 3% donation -- or $900 for you. Gosh, I'd hate for your house to catch fire or anything like that."
Or, the insurance broker: "Well Jake, I know you bought insurance for 90K of household items, but according to our RFID scans, you only had reatail value of 30K, and if you figure deprechiation, this is about 22K. Anyway, this is the best we can offer you without going to court -- sorry about that fire"
The potential for this exists, certainly, but there is some positive precedent to the contrary.
When driving on a toll road that requires you to take a printed ticked when you enter the roadway, the time of your entry is stamped on the ticket.
Given the knowledge of the distance between when you entered and exited the toll road, and the time you entered and exited, it is a matter of simple artihmetic to figure out your average speed while on the road.
If this average speed is in excess of the posted limit(s), you were, obviously, speeding. Yet, when is the last time you got a ticket for this?
Certainly, the converse is also true, due to the cameras at intersections, that nail you if you enter the intersection on a red light, but still.
Speed enforcement on toll roads would be a trivial matter, and using the above technique would "strongly encourage" people to obey the speed limits, or at least frequent the rest areas on those toll roads, to waste some time. But, this isn't done.
If anything, RFID's, if they begin to be abused to a point of *inconveniencing the public* ( because, really, that's what makes people get off their ass to vote - inconvenience ) will quickly cause the laws to change.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
I have some comments on the use of RFID, since I'm currently researching them now. I don't have too much to say about consumer rights on the issue, but thought my work is relavant to the topic of RFID in general.
.05% if they used RFID in combo with their current tracking system. You can't imagine the cost of placing the wrong container on the wrong ship; we're talking easily 6 figures or more.
I'm in the shipping industry and although we're not the end-consumer, I can tell you that many container terminals in the US (and probably overseas) will likely be looking to RFID to further automate the process of container tracking and increase effeciency in yard operations.
I'm working on investigating them now in terms of feasability, etc. It's very interesting to look at the productivity and error reduction advances that can be made using RFID. The only challege we have is getting the container owner/leasors to put them on the containers and keep them there (i.e. they get damaged easily with the use of heavy machinery on the docks). Plus the longshoremen don't like the automation because it threatens their jobs and they'll try to damage the system if possible.
The biggest gain is reducing mistakes, which relates to how many retail places are looking at using them. I doubt anyone wants to track your sofa to you, but Ikea probably wants to know the history of that piece of furniture in terms of returns, etc. Plus they'd like to know where it is in their warehouse. There are some cool triangulation technologies out there which can find an RFID tag in a 3-dimensional space.
For us, we use what are called "top-picks" which are these wheeled or track based container lifts that can move over the top of a stack of containers and lift them and move them around. There is a terminal operator in LA who has a real-time 3d view of the stack for the operator, all based on what their TOS (terminal operating system) knows about that stack. They have errors, and they're thinking they can reduce the error rate to less than
Anyway, RFID tags have a role in manufacturing and operations such as ours. The cost is worth it (we estimate currently at $1-$2 per tag) because the gain in enormous. Additionally the optical technologies our there (OCR and such) just can't achieve the success rates (trying writing software to read the trucks beat up old license place). I think we'll see more and more of them, especially in the warehousing and retail world, as well as in the heavy industries like mine. I don't know about the whole "walk out the door checkout", thing as I think there's some margin of error there that the store won't want to take, plus the privacy issues (as pointed out over and over in other users posts) are of course a factor. However, consumers, espically in the US, continue to be blind to them for other technologies such as the grocery store "cards". However I don't believe poeple will willing get an RFID card for a store unless they have a financial incentive to do so, like the discounts the grocery cards bring to them.
Cheers,
Colin
"Ha! I laughed at my buddy a few years back when he said that the U.N. could fly over your house and scan it to see how much money is in it."
Don't laugh too hard. Cops in the U.S. can do this with a hand-held scanning device. I've seen it work, and can't tell you how the hell they do it. And, no, I didn't believe it myself untill I saw it.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
I just bought the C&C expansion pack, Zero Hour, and inside the CD case itself (behind the front label) was affixed the standard little rectangle (to trip sensors in case you try to steal the game) but underneath it was a 1.5x1.5 RFID patch. This is the first time I've seen an RFID tag used for videogames..
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
but how long does walmart keep the video on file? That's an awful lot of data. There are a dozen or more checkout lanes in a super walmart and the video from each lane over a 24-hour period had got to be several hundred gig. Multiply that by the number of wal-marts in the country and you're looking at multiple terrabytes per day. I just find it hard to believe that they keep all that data let alone transmit it all to a central location.
I'm sure they keep the reciepts, but the video too? Come on.
I go get $500, you go get $500, and some 6 other people we don't know go get $500 and we all go to a bar and exchange bills randomly...OK SO WHO's got what now...The rfid tage are not needed for counting, it is machine counted and serialized now. RFID readers have a range of what 8 feet or so MAX, and that is assuming the tag is plainly visible and not buried under 2 feet of interference, or powered by some larger battery, a 1 inch rfid tag can't have to big of a power source....
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
This seems a must to me; if one is embedded in my sofa, I definitely need something to knock it out.
I already have a wireless LAN and cordless phones (different freq's; I'm not stupid); the last thing I need is more RF crap to mess up my comms.
> My comment can be quoted whenever, wherever, so long as you bloody well provide attribution! >
On the faceof American bank notes is the phrase:
This note is legal tender
for all debts, public and private
I think you only have to start worrying if this phrase disappears.
Use a browser that allows to view cookies before accepting them (I like Opera best in that regard, for the fine-grained control of accepting; but something else may be as good.) Always view all cookies -sure, it's a bit more work to decide which ones to keep and which not, but you'll have blocked all the ad sites within a week. I as a rule don't accept any cookies, unless they're required for some sort of registration *coughslashdot* and I trust the site. If the site 'needs' cookies for creating dynamic content, I find another site. And I never accept 'last visit' cookies.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
>Try to microwave your couch.
Following Slashdot's written instructions, and in reliance on their good faith, I experienced the following adverse consequences.
Lifting the couch to the microwave caused a back injury which has limited my daily activities, interfered with my ability to earn a living, and caused continuing pain and suffering.
In order to fit the couch into the microwave, it was necessary to disassemble the couch. Some of the structural pieces have not gone back together properly. Slashdot will, I am certain, see the advantages of a negotiated agreement compensating me for the loss of use of my couch, and for the additional injuries suffered when I tried to sit on it after reassembling it.
An irritating smoke was released while microwaving the fabric and stuffing. I have had continuing respiratory symptoms and am suffering psychic pain over the fear that I may have been exposed to carcinogens.
Severe electrical arcing occurred near the springs while the sofa pieces were in the microwave. This started a fire which destroyed my house. I also expect compensation for destruction of property, and for living expenses while the house is being rebuilt.
Please contact my legal counsel with the address for service of process, and the policy number and name of carrier for your liability insurance.
(It's a joke, son).
Oh God they'll be able to know what couch I bought. Horror! Shock! Dismay! Wait, what's the effective transmitting radius of the RFID tags anyway (pdf here)? Won't "they" be able to see the couch at these sorts of distances?
And who the hell cares if they know what couch you bought? Can some rational person tell me why this is just so bad?
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
So let's start patenting all of the nefarious ways RFIDs could be used to invade privacy. Then we can block such uses, or at least get well paid.
Either that, or we'll bring about a revolution in the patent system, which I know many Slashdotters would welcome.
Put your mouth where your money is. Identify me, and (let's keep it easy) 10% of the inventory in my house. If it's as easy as you seem to think even you should be able to get at least a few things right.
And now, they want to make it illegal to sell tires that are more than six years old. So, look for this in the next six years!
The PROBLEM is that we have a democracy, that is too much governed by the majority. The majority will either want this (want the benefits of it) or else be complicit. Our country isn't supposed to be about freedom and rights for the majority, but for all, which is why government should do nothing but provide national defense, manage international commerce, and punish force and fraud. Some of those are even questionable... In any case, mobocracy is the problem here, not the solution. The Constitution is the solution, but we stopped listening to that long ago.
Well, part of your subject line is accurate...only that this could would ever happen in a bad dream. It will never happen in real life. Why?
1) I can trade/give away the goods I bought that had the RFID tags in them. There will never be a successful mechanism in place to report the transfer of assets. Can't sell the goods that are mine because we can't register the asset sales? Yeah, right. Like that would ever happen. So, I sell/give away a perfectly good set of tires because I want some others. Now, who is it that they can RELIABLY track those to and use against? I didn't think so.
2) So many premises of your argument are so far fetched that people would have to become total zombies and groups that fight for common sense laws would have to totally disappear for them to ever happen. Yeah, I can see that soon.
You conspiracy theorists need to wake up and take a big deep breath of reality.
Twin or more? ITA
Apache/Spring/La
Couldn't someone make a mozdev.org plugin for mozilla that would automagically add &partner=GOOGLE to all www.nytimes.com links?
Fellowship 9/11
I bought this house and you know I'm boss
Ain't no h'aint gonna run me off
I wonder how difficult it'd be to create your own RFID setup, at home? Are there tags that can be applied to stuff I now own? And what about receiver/scanners? Is there a way to set up a system that'll be able to tell me what shelf (scanner per shelf, intigrated with close range GPS?) a particular book is on or where my daughter's doll is? Hell, I'd like to put one on each socket and wrench (daughter likes to 'help' Dad fix things, usually grabbing tools when my back is turned). The final criteria would be a way to encode the RFID signal so that war drivers couldn't go down the street, seeing just what everyone owns and coming back later to help themselves.
I drank what? -- Socrates
You'd be surprised to the lengths criminals go to to be crooked. You'd think with all that effort and work, plus all that risk it's not worth it, better to start a legit business or find a proper job, but no these people spend lots of effort, take great risks, for what really isn't that much gain when shared amongst the participants.
Sure there are crooks who are making pots of money, but most people aren't rational or consistent.
But honestly. How long do you think it will be until someone makes an RFID detector and neutralizer? We will win this battle.
HI, MY NAME IS ISAAC.
Obviously, the solution is to light the couch on fire. This should destroy any type of RFID tag and thus render your couch untrackable.
Logically, it follows that you can simply burn everything you buy with RFID tags and thus maintain your privacy.
RFID tags for tracking things? Sure. Why not RFID for tracking people? As any good paranoid would point out, this is not a new idea!
"He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark... " (Revelation 13:16-17)
The coercion isn't there yet. The technology is shipping today though. In some countries today (Jordan for example), everyone must carry their national ID card with them at all times. How long till we have to in the US? It's certainly a matter of current policy debate. And how long until they decide that's too insecure because we might lose our national ID card or it might get stolen?
Somebody's playing a prank on you.
Seriously. I imagine there were a couple of guys like this one and his buddy back in the stone age. Some smart guy came up with the idea of "fire" and completely freaked the two of them out.
All they could imagine is people catching on fire, huts burning down, etc. And guess what, sometimes that happens, but we've decided that Fire Good!. It is part of progress, and the benefits that fire gives are big enough that they outweigh the risks.
The article intro says "It's basic, but worth reading as a milestone" as if the Slashdot audience was sophistimicated when it comes to RFID technology. Um... no. Most people here think that most tags can easily be read at 100+ metres. (Unless they're big active tags, they can't). Others claim they can only be read within a few centimetres (unless they're tiny ones with almost no antenna that's not true either). Almost everybody seems to think that they're smaller than a grain of sand... Well the IC might be, but remember the R in RFID stands for "radio", and a radio needs an antenna, and if your antenna is as small as a grain of sand, it won't work very well!
And I think in a few other cities.
You'll find a speeding ticket in the mail if you go too fast over based on the timing from booth to booth.
Neat huh?
I hate it when I feel the need to post a reply to a thread like this, but the disinformation about rfid tags is getting ridiculous.
Currently there are only 3 manufacturers of rfid tags and readers in the US. Two of them are following "standards" and one is not. Only one of
the manufacturers (Intermech) is creating tags that are re-writable. The other tags ARE COMPLETELY PASSIVE. Why does that matter you ask? Well for one thing that means when a retailer (or a vendor of a retailer) buys a batch of rfid tags they will have to have the tags encoded. Generally this will mean that a sku number, or just a general serial number, will be encoded onto the chip. This encoding will NEVER CHANGE. So all you have is a chip with a number THATS ALL. Even with the re-writable tags,they would have to be re-written at the POS to include ANY infomation about the purchaser. Even if you were to take your bag from one store to the another, the next store WOULD HAVE NO IDEA what the numbers on the tags you already have related to. Add to this that the technology and implementation of rfid is at least 5 years away (regardless of what Walmart and the DOD want). I've been involved with all the major manufacturers of these tags and they will even tell you the tech just isn't there yet. So let's put away our silly ideas of Big Brother caring what brand of cheese we eat. Or that the corporate witch-doctors at Walmart will no exactly how much toilet paper we buy.
These systems oughta do the trick.
I've found that my posts don't format quite right w/o a sig.
Yeah, just like when the politicans passed the PATRIOT Act, all of those will be voted out in next election... Right.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
Am I the only one who thinks people who drive quickly and recklessly SHOULD have higher insurance rates?
That speeding ticket actually used to happen at one place I know; see the Savannah River Site is bisected by one public highway (S-125, "Atomic Rd.") and back before they moved the guard shacks off onto the side roads there was a guard at each end of S-125. They knew the speed limit and your entry time; if you drove too fast they'd write you a ticket, if you took to long (like 15 minutes or somesuch) they'd send a security team out to find you.
(I should feel dirty for responding to such a blatant display of ignorance, but)
In any "little thing called democracy," the power lies not in the voting, but in the ballots.
Think about it. Parents often give their children the illusion of choice by asking them to pick either of two choices that are equally acceptable to the parent.
So go ahead, vote Democrat or Republican. Either choice will be equally acceptable to those in power. Or do like me and vote Libertarian. I'd rather "throw my vote away" than use it to support the present corruption. But the outcome is certain before the first ballot is issued.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
...that if you bury your head in the sand deeply enough, it will block the RF (and all these other problems in the world, too.)
- Hail to our fearless misleader! Fool speed ahead!
As far as cookies go, that is. Not sure what browser you use, or which browsers have this feature, but Mozilla and Firebird have an "ask me first" setting for cookies. Whenever a site tries to set a cookie, an "allow or deny" dialogue pops up, with a "remember" check box. So you can let a trusted site set login cookies, and deny tracking cookies.
Will this happen? Quite possibly, and it will be double the nightmare for the honest people who will drive around with tires registered to themselves. But it'll be just a nuisance to the criminals, real or political, who will simply use somebody else's tires.
Criminals will simply buy tires directly from that not-so-honest dealer who doesn't check their ID when registering; or they'll get a "clean" friend to buy the tires for them; no clean friends who'd cooperate? well a little blackmail never hurt noone; or they'll just visit the guy-in-the-alley and buy a set of stolen IDs guaranteed to be clean.
If they want to plug the "use RFID to find item X, catalog item Y", would it not be intelligent to simple sell the RFID devices in bulk themselves, directly to the consumer. Those that want to use them can, those that don't aren't forced... sounds pretty simple to me.
As far as ID'ing devices... it might be useful for my TV remote, but as with the aforementioned furniture, if you can't find your couch I think it's time to cut back on the beer/weed.
How many, in truth, wouldn't mind buying RFID tags to affix to items for personal use, but would prefer not to be tracked out of a store? The only concern I see here is buying used items and not knowing if they're RFID'ed (but a portable scanner would fix that?)
Companies will just take a page from the Software manual, and start licensing 'STUFF' for use, not ownership. For $200, you have the right to wear this pair of jeans for 50 years, or until they wear out, whichever comes first. Every jeans sevice pack may have an adverse effect on your pants as well.
> Am I the only one who thinks people who drive quickly and recklessly SHOULD have higher insurance rates?
As long as high speed is not equated with recklessness, I am with you. But where I live, the roads are choked with imcompetent %^&*heads driving SUVs, pickup trucks and minivans at speeds equal to or less then the speed limit, with no regard for such things as the painted lines on the roads, stop signs, turn signals, etc.
Yeah, this is off-topic, sorry.
I'm more worried about Joe Schmoe, who with a home-made or Chinese-manufactured scanner would be able to calculate your net worth at the very moment he passes you on the street. This is a hypothetical guy who would be able to magically divine that you were carrying a 40gb iPod, a top-of-the-line Thinkpad, a cameraphone, PDA, Coach wallet, Cartier watch, and mark you as the fattest target on the block even though you have none of these things in plain view.
Mobile-phone scanners have existed for the purposes of hijacking and cloning mobile phone numbers, so I can't see it taking very long for an intrepid, technically proficient miscreant to take advantage of this great new technology which identifies individual items.
Anyone who's spent a couple of years in NYC knows that you don't count your money out in the open or wave expensive things around in the air. Imagine if they put RFID tags in our paper currency. You'd be able to tell how much money someone was carrying, without their knowing it. Just the same, someone else would be able to peer into your wallet, and even know what brand your wallet is. Same said person would be able to walk down the block inconspicuously scanning the trunks of cars in the hopes of coming across a stash of goodies, and any packages left on doorsteps, any mailboxes he passes along the way. How scary is that?
Am I missing something? Is the idea that just about *every* consumer-goods-item will have an RFID tag?
Wow... just wanted to say that was an awesome point I never thought of. Seriously. Imagine getting a hold of one of those and walking down the street, too? You could tell what kind of panties some girl is wearing (a NULL value there would be nice!) and you could tell how much cash is in a wallet. A successfull mugger could lower his risk by mugging one person a day and getting a few thousand dollars with just the one mugging. Spend the rest of the day eating out and sleeping in your hotel room!
the amount of money they'd spend on enforcing no-resale wouldn't get them to break even on the lost sales. And we all know how reliable predicting lost sales is...
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
Here is the link (prolly /.'ed to heck and back by now, but give it a try!)
:) (Don't try it at home...the cat likes not being crispy on the outside)
Microwave gun
http://www.powerlabs.org/uwavexp.htm
Let's say I'm carrying my couch with me to keep the dog off of it while I'm gone during the day. Why, they'd be able to track my every move!
I'll either have to take up woodworking or get rid of the dog....
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
A pig is "legal tender," for crying out loud. So is a lump of lead.
All that "legal tender" phrase means is that, if you want to give it and I want to take it, then it's LEGAL. In other words, there's no law forbidding the exchange of Federal Reserve Notes (FRNs) to discharge debt. If an employer chooses to pay his employees in cash, and they are also content with that situation, then no law can compel otherwise.
If an employee works under a contract that specifies pay in grams of gold, and the employer decides to substitute FRNs for the gold, then the employer is clearly in default of contract. As long as the employee refuses the FRNs, he can sue for breach of contract and win. But if, on the other hand, the employee voluntarily accepts the FRNs, then the employer is protected by their "legal tender" status. At that point, the employee has no legal recourse, even though the employer has fraudulently substituted worthless scraps of paper for real money.
The Web is like Usenet, but
the elephants are untrained.
I think trying to find a store that won't charge to remove them will be like trying to find an ATM that doesn't charge a service fee. Hint, they all do, they just differ in how much they charge you.
Debunking the "59 Deceits"
Really. And what if I paid cash for my damn tires? Wouldn't it make more sense to attach them to the car's frame instead of a tire? At least the car is registered to someone. Unless the 'T' in BATF stands for 'tires' I don't see this happening around here anytime soon.
IE, and now Mozilla/Pheonix, can view cookie contents. I like IE's handling of session cookies; i just allow all 1st party session cookies. They go away after you close the browser. I don't think Mozilla differentiates between the two types...
There are (and will be) other ways to destroy the tags. One that comes immediately to mind is those multi-thousand volt stun-guns or shock-wands, used in self-defense applications. Once the tag is located (using the appropriate reader), just zap the crap out of the area and see if the tag is still readable. Repeat until you no longer get a response.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
If they are doing it, it will be useful for about 16 seconds because that's how long it will take the plate-swapping people to figure out to swap the tires too.
So let me get this straight. Joe Greasemonkey at the goddamn gas station where I buy tires is recording my car's license number and sending a correlated list of plates and rfid's to the feds? Um, sure.
Tire swapping is marginally harder. It just becomes yet one more thing that Customs can look for. What about the dumbasses who forget to change the tires? D'oh! Ask your local cop: the vast majority of criminals aren't going to be thorough and meticulous.
Little Debian: America's #1 Snack Distro!
While people right now are afraid of RFID for privacy reasons, the main reason there's nothing to fear right now is that it'll be incredibly difficult to process all that data.
.
Imagine a Wal-Mart. It's got a few million unique items inside it. Each one of those items is read every 25 seconds (or minute, or 2 minutes, whatever resolution you decide). that means you've got a few million data points whacking your server every
There aren't very many systems that can keep up with that kind of data flow. Plus there are many, many problems with RFID. What happens if one tag is read by multiple readers? What if the tags interfere with each other? What if some tags get corrupted and only return parts of its ID?
This is in a relatively controlled environment doing a relatively simple task: a store that's using RFID for inventory management. It'll be even more difficult if the store wanted to actually do anything exciting with the data, like read item tags that are on your body (a lot of them being partially obscured by your RF shadow) and are moving from reader to reader. If they ever got the data, they'd also have to figure out what to do with it - and given the processing that needs to happen just for simple things, well, it's unlikely that a store would be able to do more than, say, automatically print a coupon for you at the register.
It's good that people are worrying, but a lot of the scenarios people are worrying about are relatively far off.
Today, companies are going to move to RFID because it'll save them money.
I've held and triggered the device myself.
Ask yourself this question... How do the cops know which vehicle to pull over on a busy highway, one that has a lot of cash in it? Just dumb luck?
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
-- So let me get this straight. Joe Greasemonkey at the goddamn gas station where I buy tires is recording my car's license number and sending a correlated list of plates and rfid's to the feds? Um, sure.--
...
Nope, Joe Greasemonkey is going to write down your Lic. # on his work order just like he has been for the past 30 or more years. Ever look at your bill? And speaking of it being a bill, did you pay for that with your Credit Card?
Look, I don't honestly think that currently the Gov is trying to REALLY crack down and track everyone. BUT. I *DO* think that it's coming. You can't boil a frog by tossing it into boiling water, it'll just jump out. Put the thing in warm water and increase the temp a bit at a time? Voila! Boiled Frog. It's the same with people.
"They didn't take away our rights. They just locked them up for safe keeping"
Your mind is like a parachute. It works best when it's been opened.
Hey, dumbass. NO ONE PUTS MY TIRES ON MY CAR BUT ME. GOT THIS YET? You take the rims to the store, they mount the new tires on them, you pick up the rims, and you put them on your car when you get home. Why would anyone do this. SO YOU DONT HAVE TO TAKE 2 CARS TO GET YOUR TIRES DONE, OR SPEND 5 F'N HOURS WAITING FOR THEM TO MOUNT THE TIRES. Good lord, get a brain already.
*There's Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off Jim!*
I'm not going to remove the tag. I'm going to fry it with a magnet of a few Tesla.
No, I'm New Here
1) I can trade/give away the goods I bought that had the RFID tags in them
Yes, that would seem to be one way around it. But do you ever plan on using a parking meter?? They already have systems that photograph your license plate number and instantly check to see if the owner of the car has any oustanding unpaid fines/oustanding warrants.
This system is not fiction, it is fact . So how incredibly easy would it be to add on rfid sniffer on the meter maid's vehicle as well??? I work in electronics and know that doing such a thing is trivial in the extreme.
So as the meter maid rolls around and simultaneously photochecks your license and sniffs your tires. What, your tire rfids don't match to your plate??? time to pull out the wheel locking device and attach it to your car.
2) So many premises of your argument are so far fetched that people would have to become total zombies and groups that fight for common sense laws would have to totally disappear for them to ever happen. Yeah, I can see that soon.
You know, this will not happen overnight. It will happen little by little, and will be imperceptible to the average person. In order to get the neccessary laws passed, there will one day be a need to pass a massive funding bill to keep the government running. This giant bill will be a huge "omnibus funding" bill that will have a lot of pressure on getting it signed and it will have a huge number of other laws thrown in along with an rfid enabling one. Or there will be a "safe water drinking act" that will have an rfid enabling law attached to it at the last minute so there is no time to debate it.
Don't think this will happen?? I got news for you, you must be a total hermit because I lead a sheltered life and I am fully aware that this is how congress routinely operates.
As a final example, may I submit to you the DMCA and CTEA laws. There was a large number of groups, scholars, librarians that showed up in front of congress to tell them that these were bad laws, and not in the public's interest. But yet they passed in the middle of the night by a voice vote while everybody was wondering what that stain was on Lewinski's dress.
So you are right, the groups will not disappear. Neither will all the special interests that our congressmen are beholden to and form the basis of most of our legislation today So I am no conspiracy theorist to mention that insurance companies spend money on high powered lobbyists to make sure that their views are heard in congress.
So, who do you think congress is listening to these days, corporations or public interest groups????
Much like the DMCA has "anti-circumvention" sections, there will be an rfid "anti-tampering" section to the law.
Am I still a conspiracy theorist???
The new show on the history channel "guts and bolts" actually had an interesting piece about the cameras at intersections that catch traffic infractions (speeding and running red lights). It is located in California, but I'm sure it will be coming to a busy intersection near you. The system is very refined and the evidence incontrovertible.
They showed all the working pieces (even behind the panels) to the system. Then the host gets in a corvette and tries to "beat" the system running at top speed.
No matter how fast he went they managed to get a clear picture of his license plate.
The system cost millions, but manages to pay for itself in six months.
So this raises the question, is such a system used to enforce laws or is it used as revenue source for the state??
It is not a far stretch to imagine rfid's used in such a system, because they will be used to bring the cost of the system down. So there still might be the cameras, but because rfids are used, less components needed (fancy car sensors that compute speed), less human intervention will be needed (somebody to look at th
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
By pushing for RFIDs everywhere, there is no need to try 'push' people into a cashless society.
If I buy a book that might be construed as inappropriate by the powers that be (say 1984?) I use cash. But with RFID tagged cash, as soon as I withdraw it from an ATM there is a paper trail to everything I use it for.
I bet the various government agencies in the world are delighted. Hey, will we not have to do tax returns anymore?
"Store security are on the lookout for a shop-lifter wearing nothing but underpants and carrying several fridges... The lobby elevator has detained a suspect carrying matching RFIDs...."
But the possibilities are boundless:
"I'm sorry, you are not permitted to use Adidas Frequent Buyer points whilst wearing Nike shoes..."
"Hey Sir! did you know you can get lingerie to match the suspender set you are wearing in this Victoria's Secret store!"
"Dear customer, the price of the VCR you just shoplifted has been deducted from your credit card"
"I'm sorry, you are not wearing exclusive enough clothing to enter this store"
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I worked in a warehouse, and the benefit for a warehouse operation is obvious. I've never worked retail, but the benefits for retail is just as obvious. To be able to track each individual item inside a store or warehouse would make keeping up with inventory cheaper and would probably lower costs to end consumers. For this reason, I support the use of these tags, but only in those two environments.
We need an ironclad, no-exemption law in every country that these tags will be disabled permanently at the point of purchase. Once an item has been purchased, it ceases to be merchandise and becomes private property. The former owner of an object has no legal right to track it after transferring their ownership.
Only on
As for busisses requiring it, look at the rise of zero-cash businesses..there are zero cash "club" gas stations that accept only their credit card for service. I'd expect the Wholesale Group warehouse clubs owned by certian large retailers to be the next to go to this innovation. Sure, they have to take cash, but that doesn't mean that the manager's not going to just make change from his wallet for you [or the store's small stash, because he don't carry money] Look at travel, try making any type of reservation without a Credit card [or other electronic id] it won't happen, they won't gaurantee you anything.
One day all the 'dissenters' from this stuff will magically vanish. The world will actually be a happy place...for a while. All the big ideas about "controling" people and being "one world" no matter what will happen almost overnight. Then the whole thing will turn into a huge mess just as fast. I won't be here!
Yeah, just like when the politicans passed the PATRIOT Act...
Also, they named that bill knowing fully that the majority of people can't even get past the title. "It says 'patriot,' so it must be good for the country." (remembering that 50% of people are less intelligent than the median, too).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I'd rather "throw my vote away" than use it to support the present corruption.
Exactly. A vote is also a voice spoken. A vote for a Libertarian is a clear indication of disapproval for the two mainstream parties. A growing number of those votes eventually gets noticed. Even with less than 5%, Nader was able to get ample national press coverage for the Greens, for example (unfortunate, though, the Greens have too many conflicts in their platform--decentralization and universal health care...they can't have both).
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
But you won't be able to remove it anyway, without destroying the tire, as it is purposefully integrated with the "steel belt".
What about driving a nail through the tire at a strategically chosen location? Will tire repair kits also become illegal?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I bet like there is an "anti-curcumvention" clause for the DMCA there will be an "anti-tampering" clause for the rfid laws. Which means even if you _could_ remove it there would be infrastructure in place to deter and detect it's removal.
I certainly imagine that even if you could find the rfid in the tire it would be like trying to drive a nail through a grain of rice embedded in jello. The rfid tag could be attached to the wire with the wire acting as an antenna for the rfid! This would also have the side benefit of not being able to pinpoint the location of the rfid too. They could surround it with a dab of JB-weld like substance attached to the steel wire.
What this would mean is that removing the rfid would be an exercise in futility. Being attached to the steel belt in a secure manner means that removing the rfid means destroying the tire, or seriously degrading it to the point of being unusable for any amount of time.
But my tale is meant more of a thought exercise rather than a specific example that will be implemented. You could extend this to any physical object (including people) that corporate or government interests might want to track. Rfids have the potential to become that prevalent.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"