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Do Your $20 Bills Explode In the Microwave?
msaulters writes "After repeatedly setting off RFID scanners in a truck stop, the author discovered the culprit was a wad of $20's in his back pocket. In a paranoid attempt to keep the government from tracking him, he attempted to fry the embedded chips in his microwave, with interesting results." Alex Jones has interesting theories about a number of things, but evidently a lot of readers were interested in this one.
From the article:
So we chose to 'microwave' our cash, over $1000 in twenties in a stack, not spread out on a carasoul.
Now, looking at the second picture, and knowing a bit about how microwaves heat stuff... looks to me like the approximate center of the stack charred up nicely in the microwave. Notice the bills near the top and bottom of the stack are nearly untouched. The reason the center of the bills charred in the same place in all the bill is because it was the center of the stack.
I sincerely hope this article is intended as a joke, or at the very least "we did something really dumb and we're going to at least make it funny" situation.
And for the record, I just zapped a $20 bill for 20 seconds and it's barely even warm, on Jackson's right eye or anywhere else.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
$20 bills burn in a microwave.
Ergo, $20 bills have embedded RFID tracking chips.
More likely, the metallic anti-counterfeting strips just formed a dipole resonant near the frequency used by the truck stop's anti-theft tag scanners.
Move along, nothing to see here, just some idiot with more money than brains.
Looking around the website, one can find this choice quote by Alex Jones:
AJ: And that also happened- where you aware the New York Times and Chicago Tribune reported this in '93, the FBI cooked the bomb and trained the driver[s] and had an Egyptian security agent doing it for them, had two retarded Muslims, literally retarded, drive the truck and park it, let the bombing go forward. At Oklahoma City, the same company that destroyed the remnants of the World Trade Center, blew up the remnants of Oklahoma City [and] had that buried under machine gun guard at a private landfill to this day. And they hauled the rubble away from the W T C to China! They wouldn't let you take photographs. Yes, exactly.
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There could be a simple explanation for that. If you microwave a single bill heat is still produced but it's easy for it to get out. If you stick a bunch togeather and microwave that more or less the same amount of heat is produced per bill meaning a lot more heat, and paper is a good insulator, so the middle gets really hot and starts burning. Note how the amount of burning seems to have a progression from large to small.
This chip doesn't have collision avoidance, though. So a stack of bills wouldn't be individually readable.
So the technology isn't quite here yet to do it right, but it's getting close. Currently, you can get collision avoidance or tiny size, but not both. Good collision avoidance combined with fast data transfers is hard, and it's wanted by retailers, who want to be able to read out each box in a carton individually. That could be thousands of items. That's do-able, but not with the low-cost tags yet. Retailers want to get tag costs down to around $0.02. Realistically, today RFID tags cost upwards of $0.25.
True public key challenge/response hasn't made it into the smallest tags, either. Challenge/response is available in keyring size and in credit card size, and is used for access control applications. But the low end tags can't do that yet.
Two more years, and this will really be happening. But not yet.
From the article:
We could have left it at that, but we have also paid attention to the European Union and the 'rfid' tracking devices placed in their money,...
Maybe in X-files country, but here in real life, euros do not have 'rfid tracking devices'. What they do have is a metal strip which makes it more difficult to counterfeit.
Of course I fully expect now to be told that my government only wants me to think that that's just a metal strip... :-)
The only thing that would be against the law is defacing currency and attempting to use it in commerce. So we learned in Business Law.
Actually, what's illegal is attempting to use it in commerce after defacing it in a way that would let it be passed as currency of higher value.
You're entirely welcome to deface it in a way that doesn't promote fraud. In particular, some defacements are legitimate political speech and protected by the first amendment as interpreted by the courts.
My favorite defacement is to give the portrat of Hamilton on the (old) $10 a Hitler moustache and hair. Hamilton is the founding father who was the ideological head of the Federalists - the group that promoted the changes to the US central government that eventually led it to become the powerful and often oppressive machine it is today.
Not so much deliberately, of course. For instance, his opposition to the Bill of Rights was predicated on the idea that explicitly acklowledging certain rights would create the expectation that the government could stamp out any others. The proponents of the Bill claimed that, absent an explicit list of those that are particluarly important, the government would have no guideline and would stop 'em all. (Of course they were both right.)
But you know what they say about good intensions and paving.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
the issue that this guy has run into has to do with metalic particals suspended in the ink. the particals are used to give the bills a magnetic signature. to my knowledge this is used in many bills around the world. This has nothing to do with rfid, or the goverment tracking you, this isin't even a valid arguement if it were, the bill has a serial number that can be read by machine.
The store tracking sensors that this guy is talking about aren't even rfid, and only have a fleeting resemblence, all they can tell is the presence of a tag moving through them. The system is called electonic artical survalance and most are made by sensormatic to my knowledge the only thing that these machines keep track of is the number of times they're triggerd daily.
the only way to get the effect that this guy got would be to do just what he did, microwave a big tightley packed stack of brand new bills. once they're not stuck together they won't burn nearley as well, as for the exploading thing, they look more like they caught on fire from getting too hot, not like they blew up.
I'm not terrorably concerned with the goverment tracking the movement of money, they do allready. The real concern that we need to have with rfid is that we can be essentially fingerprinted based on the unique blend of objects that we carry around with us every day.
anyone correcting my spelling should find something better to do.
Well art is art isn't it, but then again water is water; and east is east; and west is west; and if you take cranberries
This article at CNN's website was the closest article to the topic introduced here that I could find on CNN, Google News, or Yahoo News. Given the popularity of the RFID issue in the United States technology realm, I would expect it to be in a larger news source such as these. I don't know much about this www.prisonplanet.com place, but I don't have any reason to believe it's highly professional. I get the impressino that it's somewhat of a conspiracy theory website.
/.ers have tried the same microwave experiment, with no ill effect to their bills. Personally, I'm more inclined to believe my fellow /.ers than this story.
The most apparent points of conjecture about this story, in my mind, are:
1. Why, if these tags are in $20's all across the nation, are not people setting off alarms for "no reason" all across the nation?
2. It appears that other
Perhaps these bills were part of a scheme, or an elaborate set of counterfeits with a specific devious purpose in mind. Or perhaps they were never microwaved at all.
The power of Christ compiles you.
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What happens when you stack a bunch of metal strips on top of each other with a fine gap in between? How about rolling them up? ... Congratulations, you just made a capacitor!
Now place in a magnetic field to have it possibly resonate at the frequency that it resonates at.
Or like others suggested, a leftover security strip in the wallet.
People really should learn how to troubleshoot properly. Which reminds me of a story... in short, grad student doing research on fleas, trains his flea to jump when he yells out "Hop!". After much testing and mutilation, one by one, all of the legs get pulled off the flea. He yells out "Hop!", and nothing happens. Hence he begins to write his conclusion:
"When all of the legs are pulled off the flea, the flea becomes deaf".
-- Robi
Mightn't the fact that we judge him to sound crazy have quite a bit to do with the total lack of evidence and fact?
As a trivial example, this article presents no evidence or fact that RFID is at all involved, but is instead portrayed that way to mislead others. For those not quite so easily mislead, the author sounds like a nut job.
I've had this sig for three days.