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Chemical, Printable RFIDs
Syre writes "The RFID Journal says that CrossID, an Israeli startup, has developed an RFID system that can be printed using an inkjet printer. The 'nanometric' RFID system uses tiny particles of chemicals with varying degrees of magnetism that resonate when bombarded with electromagnetic waves from a reader. Since the system uses up to 70 different chemicals, each chemical is assigned its own position in a 70-digit binary number. 'Previously, there has been no way to protect paper documents,' says Moshe Glickstein, CrossID cofounder. 'We have created the first firewall for paper documents.' The big advantage is that the tag can be printed on just about anything. 'It's as easy to create as a printed bar code. And we can print in invisible mode for extra security. Printing the tags cost less than 1 cent each.' Their FAQ
says that 'CrossID can be read from quite a long distance'. No word on whether it can be user-disabled..."
I fail to see the Humor in this.
Living in the country that tried to introduce CAPPS and CAPPS II and did pass PATRIOT but thankfully not TIA or PATRIOT II, or am I just the only one that could see the government trying to do this?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
photocopy it?
Anyone here optimistic enough to think that Congress will step in before we reach a point as catastrophic as, say, an era where all government documents are tracked and no whistleblowers ever succeed in bringing official misdeeds to light?
What a wonderful Democracy that would leave us with.
But, does this so-called chemical firewall prevent you from burning the paper with fire? I think not...
Whats to prevent people from copying it out by hand? So it has an "invisible" mode... visible or not, if there are chemicals, it can be read... Any hackers out there with biochemistry or chemical engineering degrees? Heh...
It does raise an interesting point though, these folks could very well become the microsoft of the photocopying world. Whats to stop them from making this sort of printing mandatory for copyright sake? Assuming they managed to get that in line, I cant imagine what'd happen to Xerox stocks when people are no longer able to freely photocopy.
I think I speak for everyone when I say, 'I refuse to live in a world without freedom to steal other people's intellectual property!'.
I'm no chemical engineer, but the chemical properties of this system seem easy to defeat by simply adding more chemicals to the mix and marking up the RFID. They used the system of chemicals ABCD representing the first 4 binary digits and only A and C present to form the binary value 1010, then properly adding chemical B after the fact should still produce a value of 1110 which negates the entire process.
"Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati" -- Red Green
What's to keep me from changing the "70 bit code" by spraying a few more chemicals onto the document? Then I'll just walk out of the protected area with a new hat or something instead of the "protected" document.
"Scary."
Why? What's a realistic scenario where this could be abused?
Let me define realistic:
1.) Not something that'd be against the law.
2.) Not something that would be way too expensive to implement.
3.) Not something that a company wouldn't want exposed. (I.e. They'd be exposed if they started calling people and saying "I'll tell the world you bought a porn DVD if you don't come to our sale on Saturday.")
I'm not trying to bust your chops here, I just haven't heard anything but really extreme examples that are borderline science fiction.
"Derp de derp."
I vote this invention as "Super Double Un-Good"
I can already see myself walking into a WalMart where a large sign reads "It is a felony to carry an RFID Jammer into a public store." Gotta love the promise of a battle of wits between the "RFID everywhere" camp and the inevitable industry of "jammers" and "cloakers" that will spring up. PS: Wait until paper money has this...
-Andres.
That would really be sad. Not to mention every paper cutter and shreader. Can you see a day when the oldest tool known to man ( a sharp bit of rock ) might be outlawed by the DMCA?
Crazy world.
But I'm allergic to chemical 37, and to Big Brother.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
... an Israeli startup, has developed an RFID system that can be printed using an inkjet printer...The big advantage is that the tag can be printed on just about anything.
Would you like that RFID printed on your left forearm, or your right forearm?
Two thoughts come to mind.
Firstly, this doesn't seem that different than the MICR numbers on checks and we already have that, only now it works over greater distances.
Secondly, I would think that you could do this with two types of ink rather than 70 by having the printer mix the inks in varying proportions before blowing it onto the paper. If you have one ink with a very low resonant frequency and another very high, you could create a printing that resonates at any frequency in between by mixing the inks in the appropriate proportion. Also, I would think that the amount of ink on the paper might affect the resonant frequency as well, so you could just print darker to get a lower frequency.
But I'm not a physicist and I could be wrong.
Unknown host pong.
Unlike the current anti-theft technology where bulky visible tags are easy to spot and remove, the RFID tag can be a permanent invisible part of each product. The next time you wear any RFID tagged clothing back to the same store/chain, they can greet you ala minority report, aggregate your purchase history, sell such history to others. When you purchase items with your credit card, then you provide additional information useful to many people. The police could find you with scanners in public places such as airports by retreiving your purchase records from stores by determining where you bought your clothes from your bank transactions. We do not need a national id card when every retailer is going to tag the population for the government at no cost to the government. RFID scanners are much less obtrusive than the video cameras with face recognition. Add RFID tags to currency to prevent counterfeiting and trace illegal transactions. Am I being too paranoid?
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
Too late.
It's the original spam.
Everyone is into it.
It's so pervasive that
you don't even notice any more.
But some people are predictably taking artistic advantage
and some are merely advancing the art predictably
Maybe it'd be more obvious
if you could sell the old ones on eBay.
1) You try to board a plane but are strip-searched because you were somewhere other than church last Easter.
2) You get audited because you were scanned near an anti-war rally.
3) At your job interview, you are asked what movie you saw last week at the theater that was showing an action flick and a politically unpopular movie.
Ever visit a friend who is a druggie?
Ever visit a friend who is gay?
Ever interview for a job while you still had one?
Freedom of movment and freedom of association are very precious. When you can be tracked at all times and constantly live under the threat of being "categorized" by having your movements tracked, you give up a very important fundamental freedom.
How do they link what they're carrying to that particular person?
Probably similar to how you'd do it on a website.
The first time that person buys something with a credit or debit card, their name is matched up to every unique RFID on their person. After that, you could identify them any time they visit your store, just like using cookies to track when repeat customers come to your website.
Unlike cookies, there would be nothing to prevent a retailer from tracking the IDs of merchandise from other stores. Every time the same person goes into the store of the retailer that's tracking them with *any* of the ID'd items they've had in there before, the systems there can re-inventory them and add all of the new tags it picks up to the database.
If this hypothetical location was a grocery store or some other frequently-visited place, I could see building up a fairly accurate profile.
e.g. Ben Lincoln is 25, wears wears veggie combat boots, carries an umbrella from Nordstrom, buys a lot of soda pop - but nothing with caffeine in it, buys alcohol occassionally, other food shopping habits (etc.), probably has braces since he buys special floss at the drug store upstairs and then brings it into our store, probably is a gamer since we scanned him with Metroid Zero Mission (which he bought during the day and had in his shoulder bag from a defunct local manufacturer) awhile ago, probably is a sci-fi reader since we also scanned him with an Alastair Reynolds book at the same time, et cetera.
Once I've bought anything there, all they have to do is look for any of those IDs and can be pretty sure it's me. There would probably need to be some sort of pruning logic in case I gave my umbrella away or whatever (so that whoever ends up with it doesn't end up triggering additions to my profile if they visit the store), but it's not like the data they collect needs to be 100% accurate anyway.
I don't know if any retailer has plans for a system like this, but I could see it being pretty straightforward to design.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
'We have created the first firewall for paper documents.'
That is, until someone sticks his documents in a metal-lined folder or briefcase and walks away with them undetected.
Given the range of readability and the ease of reproduction, I don't believe this will ever become a keyless entry system. With the readable range they have, anyone could scan your RFID from a few feet away, duplicate the key on a bubblejet and walk into your home. It may be used to track individuals inside an office building, but the entry should be done with something far more secure than an RFID that can be read at a distance and reproduced inexpensively and easily.
"Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati" -- Red Green
True - there will be ways of detecting these... but consider blending legitimate and illegitimate purposes. You know that you have a RFID in your computer, your watch or the medical-entitlement tattoo that tells the ambulance crew to treat you (hey - that's capitalism), but how do you confirm who accesses this information. It's only a number that the chip emits. Now how do you know that the RFID in your car that you use to allow the police to return it to you when nicked, is not also scanned by the FBI, the taxman and the insurance company for other monitoring purposes?
I can see that different users of RFID might pool resources for monitoring (share recievers and transmitters) just like mobile phone providers share network bandwidth.
My point is that its not the detecting of these numbers (IDs) that matters, but the access to the database that contains that number. Of course, you could just avoid carrying any RFID tags altogether, but unless you can persuade the rest of society to join you, you'll have problems.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
That is until they make xerox machines detect the RFID's within a certain distance and refuse to make any copies of anything until the RFID is far enough away. Kinda like HP printers and adobe photoshop's currency copying protection. Gotta love a corporate amerika!
I don't have a sig, can I borrow yours?