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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..."
*puts on tinfoil helmet covering forehead*
Seriously, this could be loaded into a tattoo gun, could it not?
I might not even know I had one if they knocked me out first:
And we can print in invisible mode for extra security.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
If it is built into the bar code, would the stores that carry said products have to reveal to their customers that RFID tags were in items? Scary.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
"No word on whether it can be user-disabled..." Im thinkin a paper punch would do wonders...
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
Seriously, though, if they worked it in as a watermark or into the text itself, probably not.
--- Bwah?
Just cover your paper in tin-foil!
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
I think this might do it.
That way all the 'cool' kids who get barcode tat's on their bodies can be serially controlled.
Think about it... if it's so easy and so cheap to produce RFID's, then what's to prevent us from printing out reams of the stuff, like a stack of paper where each sheet has a thousand RFID's printed on it, and then carrying whatever documents we'd like within that stack of paper.
This also makes it easy to forge RFID's, doesn't it? Why pay full cost at the local market when you can play "The Price is Right" using your printer at home.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
How much is a cartridge for one of these ink jet printers which can make these cheap RFID tags? Probably about $10o each.
"If you think nobody cares if you're alive, try missing a couple of car payments." Earl Wilson
"No word on whether it can be user-disabled..."
what about by using a strong magnetic field?
The printer is $99 after a 50 dollar rebate but they make it by up charging 75 bucks for each chemical refill.
I mean seriously, is there some problem this if really fixing, do we need to track paper documents? How many paper documents are just prints of digital documents?
They say it will work well on SKU tags but the article says it has some shortcomings in nasty (industrial environments). Most production factories I have been in were pretty environmentally nasty, so if it cannot stand up to where it would be most used, why have it.
Zebra printers printing bar codes on plastic tags have worked so much better everywhere I have had to put them including some factories that are as close to the depths of hell as I want to get to.
"We have created the first firewall for paper documents!"
Dude, it's called a safe.
Nothing will separate me from my tinfoil hat from now on!
DrkBr
Seems to me this could be easily implemented to be an anti-counterfeit measure.
Hmmmm....so if they install readers in copy machines, how about I just hand copy the document (or just the very important facts, figures, etc.)? How about a little hand scanner? How about an older USB scanner attached to my laptop?
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
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?
Do human beings count as water filled objects? Keep them from cheaply tracking US, if we can distort the waves with our bodies.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
If the goal is to steal one sheet of information, take a picture, memorize it, copy it, etc... all valid ways to subvert this system.
That is not very practical in the real world.
Most times one wants to steal a whole bunch at a time.
I am sure we have all read interesting things that
are left sitting in the printer unattended... that might have
value to someone else outside the company doors.
So that seems to be what this system might stop.
One cannot stick 100 pages of information in their
pants, covered by their shirt and just walk out.
At one cent a page, it seems very reasonable to install those
directly into your printer. I want one too. Well as long as it
comes in a normal printer as an added feature. Let the printer
company pay the license fee, and I will buy the special inks.
Profit.
By quoting the co-founder, I may have given the impression that this is just an RFID for paper.
Actually, they say they could print this on all kinds of materials, so it could be sprayed onto products before they are painted, etc.
I kind of doubt you could deactivate them by overloading them, as you can other RFIDs.
This could be a rather invasive and hard to counteract development...
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!'.
Considering regular inkjet ink is more expensive than champagne, how much will rfid ink cost? On par with liquid gold?
I am Jack's witty signature line
If this thing is so easy and cheap, I wouldn't use it as certification that confidential documents haven't been tampered with. The same scan that could be done to verify the papers were legit would also allow you to get the get the RFID, then just print the same RFID paint on your new documents.
It's just a RF barcode. It lets machines read things a little bit easier. There is nothing very secure about it, especially once it becomes widespread.
The biggest change I forsee is that the cashier at the grociery store - if they still have a job - won't have to touch anything. The conveyor belt will scan all the food as it goes down to the bagger, and probably your RFID Credit Card too.
The problem with RFID technology is that while it works well at close range with limited sensors, in a real world environment with noise, reliability goes down significantly. Companies like WalMart are already spending millions on research on RFID technology. We're still not at a stage when sheep or bees are equiped with unique rfid tags. Imagine having the power to ssh into a bee and mess with it's brain! Watch out for the new species of "killer bees"...
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.
I think geeks should unite and play up the "sign of the beast" angle, that way the fundamentalist christian crazies will resist it, and hence the republican party.... :)
It would appear that all you need to do to fuck this up is to have some extra chemcials on the paper.
They say that they have 70 different chemicals that all resonate at different frequencies, they assign each chemical to a certain position in a 70 bit string.
So if you want to mess with it, all you need to do is add a few drops of glue with (say) 15 of the chemicals in it onto the item, then the reader reads a 70 bit code with 15 extra 1's in it.... which is not the code that it's looking for, move along.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
With RFID built into currency as an anit-counterfeit tool, now they will be able to cross-reference my cash-on-hand with products in the store. As I reach for the overpriced Ben-N-Jerry's a voice will say "you can't afford it bud!"
There are plenty of cheap RF jamming products. And we could use Tin foil hat as an antenna! Don't laugh, I have done it!
Wow, if the article is right on and the tech is solid, this is something that will revolutionize the way we live.
With a 3-10ghz range wireless reader, these would be the most feasible types of tags to use as a security device.
When entering a secured facility, you could get a unique card printed up and be allowed or denied access to rooms/areas via installed card readers. I'd much rather have a throw away card over biometrtics any day. And this such much more reliable over all.
And what about home security?
These could act as keyless entry, and also allow you to tag your belongings so that if they were detected as leaving your premesis, the authorities could be contacted.
There are plenty of 1984ish applications such as embedding these into ID cards/Drivers Licenses, which could in the future be a very effective way to monitor peoples comings and goings. But, I'm sure there are hundred of tinfoil cap wearing slashbts who could delve into those areas for me.
"Back in 2010, Crayola introduced this RFID into it's standard box."
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.
You're right, you don't get it.
It makes the papers in your office (or a protected government facility) synonymous with items in a store.
If you try to take something you shouldn't out of a store, an alarm sounds.
Likewise, with these tags printed on paper, if you tried to remove the papers from the office an alarm could sound. Like a firewall for paper.
But I'm allergic to chemical 37, and to Big Brother.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
If this stuff works off of magnetic signatures, then a magnet can block it, and:
Nobody alerted us to a new use for our Alex Chiu immortality rings!
Everyone will start to cheer when you put on your sailin' shoes.
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.
Just print RFID, get a little Gecko Tape, pat the Boss on the back (Good job in that budget meeting Mr. Dumass). Then set up your readers at each end of cube isle. When RFID is detected pc gives audible alert, such as, Mr Dumass is coming! Then just quit playing game, surfing, or whatever, and pretend to be framing his new budget proposal! hehe
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.
I believe that this company's technology is a hoax. The description from the RFId Journal page is nonsense. The CrossID homepage is very vague and lacks any useful information (just read the last FAQ item at the bottom of the page.)
The description that the RFId Journal gives reads like pseudoscience. Here's an example:
The system uses "nanometric" materials--tiny particles of chemicals with varying degrees of magnetism--that resonate when bombarded with electromagnetic waves from a reader.
Some elements and molecules will resonate (emit electromagnatic energy [EM]) when exposed to EM radiation of a particular frequency, but only in the presence of a magnetic field! The process the article describes (without mention of the magnetic field) is that used by MRI machines. Why didn't the article or homepage mention the superconducting electromagnets necessary for the RFId tags to operate?
Even if the tag materials are magnetic (in which case its composition must be a ferrous metal, ceramic, or a magnetic plastic), then the very weak magnetic field is still not strong enough to cause the atoms/molecules to resonate in an EM field. Another sentence from article shows more inaccuracies:
CrossID is testing readers that operate at three to 10 GHz, which is higher than the frequencies commonly used by wireless LANs and handheld computers, although the company has not made a final determination on what frequency the readers will use.
They claim that 70 tag compounds are used which all have different resonate frequencies. Fine, the reader would use a wide-band receiver. I read the above as the tag reader using one transmit frequency. The trouble is that it is unlikely that those 70 compounds will all resonate when exposed to the same frequency EM waves. Anyway, it states that a "final determination" hasn't been made for what frequency to use! If the RFId tag ink exists then it MUST already be known what frequency must be used. This tech is bogus.
This article is just like the "Ubiquitous LED" article a few days ago. (if you want the reasons just reply) This article should not have been posted. It is not even wrong ;)
"Drug related crime" is a misnomer, "prohibition related crime" is the more accurate and correct phrase.
I see the only method to create something with characteristic frequencies distributed evenly in microwave band: Piezoelectric quartz nanoparticles that resonate on different frequencies due to different size. Let us estimate the size. Speed of sound in solids is somewhere 1.5 kilometers per second (plus-minus 1 order of magnitude), so 1 GHz resonator crystal is about 1.5 micrometers in size. Such nanoparticles are easily printable, but I still see no way to create them equal.
And the second: I hear the word "magnetic". But I have heard about some magnetic resonances such as used in magneto-resonant tomography - and they all require the specific ambient magnetic field.
Let us wait for more info. For instance, a lot of IDs sticked together will be a good jammer.
So that would seem to incline towards a control of the ink materials or production. I wonder how hard these chemicals would be to produce in a non-industrial setting?
I also wonder if the detectors could be improved to detect relative density -- of course that would just mean you need to do a little tinkering with the "eraser" so that it detects the signature and adjusts the masking mix . . .
Also, of course, having detectors capable of detecting relative density would increase the "namespace", though 2^70 already gives us ~200 million unique identifiers for each of 6 billion humans.
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?
In World-War II, despite laws to the contrary the Census Department's data was used to locate and round up Japenese Americans for "interment" (see here) And, while the truth has indeed come out as most sanctimonious defenders of PATRIOT Et al, insist it will, it came out 50 years later. The pendulum it seems is quite slow.