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Innovative Uses of RFID Tags
Roland Piquepaille writes "When your newspapers write something about RFID tags, it's almost always about Wal-Mart or how these tags are threatening our privacy. But they often miss the important innovations brought by this technology. For example, in Florida, RFID drives highway traffic reports on more than 200 miles of toll roads. Or take DHL, which is tracking fashion with RFID tags on more than 70 million garments in its French distribution center. Elsewhere, in Texas, 28,000 students test an e-tagging system which promises better security for them. And what about RFID tags which could prevent surgical errors and have just been approved in the U.S last week? So, what do you think? Are these innovations promising a better future for us or not? For your convenience, this overview contains the essential details from the different articles mentioned above."
Last month at the local open source group's installfest, I was talking to one of the compsci teachers from a university. He had recently attended some sort of college fair or something, and someone (MIT?) had set up a nifty display using RFID chips.
You see, they had disguised an rfid reader as a tablet, and embedded rfid things into little plastic discs. On the discs were images representing english, math, etc. Someone tosses a chip on the reader, and a load of information is displayed on the screen about that course. Nifty, nifty...
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
RFID tags *could* promise a better future. But, like anything that provides potentially personal information to anyone with the right scanning device, RFID tags could be abused on a scale never seen before.
Have you seen anywhere at all that mentions anything about the ability to turn *off* an RFID switch?
Not to mention the possible side effects of having a radio transmitting from inside a human body for long periods of time.
Abuse by car insurance companies able to read your car's performance?
The chance of abuse is too great...
Julie Moult is an idiot.
- P2P - ooh it has legitimate uses (tho you have to look hard to find them in actual usage), you cant ban it
- RFID - ooh it can be used for bad things (but hasnt yet), ban it
I welcome this article, as it points out the many positive uses of RFID technology, so heres hoping it might change some slashdotters minds. Personally, I see RFID as a hugely positive thing, with a great potential in front of it (for good or bad, but thats the same for P2P).How about putting RFID tags in the end of footballs so that we can finally put an end to that oh-so-exact science of taking a timeout for a measurement?
Seriously! They just toss the ball wherever the ref thinks it should be, and those chains aren't exactly placed perfectly either. How about something that can actually work for once?
E-tagging students to provide them with security listed as a good thing? Roland Piquepaille, get the fuck out, you know nothing of geeks.
College is about drinking, sleeping late, cutting class and still passing because you are smart enough to do it all without getting caught. It certainly isn't about being tagged like cattle and herded from one carefully controlled, spoon fed 'educational experience' to another.
For all you Americans who don't want to suffer crap like that I suggest college in England where attending classes is a decision you make, and the consequences are entirely your responsibility. And to top if off it'll be cheaper (even with flights) and it only takes 3 years not 4 because you don't have to dick around with bullshit subjects just to jump your tuition fees up another thousand bucks.
Beep beep.
Did you know that you can use nuclear bombs to terraform mars? Or use snake venom to make antidote? Or use P2P networks for legit purposes? Everything has good uses and bad, it's just that the bad far outweigh the good for RFIDs. Or rather, they're so powerful that people WILL abuse them. Just like nuclear bombs, P2P networks and, err, snake venom.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
I work at a medical device company, and we're implanting RFID tags into the bases of our optical catheters so they aren't used for more than 72 hours. It's a liability thing, but it's just another instance of RFID. We track the product id of the catheter and the base station records the number and records how long it's been used in the body.
I know I'm going to be modded up on this
Can anyone point to technology that religion embraced in its infancy? I really would be interested.
Are you a good graphics designer?
Click here or here.
So...how much d'ya figure he paid for this one?
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
When your newspapers write something about RFID tags, it's almost always about Wal-Mart or how these tags are threatening our privacy.
/. thing.
t nG=Search+News
I don't know if newspapers signficantly differ from online news, but the Wal-Mart and privacy issues seem to be more of a
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=rfid&b
It cuts both ways. Back in the 70s and 80s, I recall seeing tons of conspiracy theories about how bar codes could be misused to observe whatever we did in our purchases.
Additionally, there's the whole so-called conspiracy about how "shopping club" members who bought a frequent shopper club card was having vast and horrible statistics collected about how much Mountain Dew, et al, they were purchasing.
Frankly, yes, it can all be used for wrong, but that depends on your definition of wrong. Do you spend sleepless nights wondering if your store is telling evil corporations how much Mountain Dew you drink?
Chances are it's just the caffeine.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Spam is bad. Rfid has nothing to do with spam. The only difference to using RFID to help spam is that you'll be getting targetted ads. But it has nothing to do with Rfid. Perhaps you should think about which chemist you go to if they send you spam.
My job is with a company that times races (i.e. runners) using RFID technology. We use ChampionChip products, but there are a couple of similar, up-and-coming solutions (AMB, DAG).
The whole system is really impressive and versatile. We time marathons with tens of thousands of participants (Boston, Twin Cities, Grandma's, Columbus, Indianapolis Mini) and the systems catch 99.99% of the runners. The chips are waterproof (for triathlons) and quite rugged.
Using RFID technology is TONS better than the old methods (tags and/or popsicle sticks, and lots of watching). If any of you has ever had to line up in chutes after a hard race, you'd know what kind of chaos can ensue when someone falls or gets out of line. Anyway, RFID means that runners only have to cross the finish line... then they can pass out as they please.
RFID has it's pro's and con's. It is great for doing shipping, I did a big report on it's uses for tracking products and controling distrubtion. IT could also be used for tracking people, which is bad. Everything in the history of this universe has both a good and bad side. If you can, please name just one thing that is only good or only bad. But for now, I say that when correctly implemented, RFID will be a great thing.
"Love is like a trampoline, first it's like "SWEET!!" then it's like *BLAMM!*"
I'm in a university society called the Assassins' Guild, which is a cross between roleplay and live-action Quake Deathmatch. The game we play involves hunting down other people playing the same game until only one is standing, and is cooler than it sounds (hey, we have girls playing!). The thing that's interesting with respect to this discussion is the excellent testing ground this gives for new technologies vis-a-vis the tracking of indivisuals.
Number one on the list is, surprisingly, static IP addresses on home-user machines. If you know your target's IP address, it is trivial in many cases to check whether he/she is in his/her room, and secondary information like lecture times (and hence the target's course) can be inferred.
On a more sophisticated level, it is possible to examine the movement patterns of a target by the public workstations he/she uses (they have to be regulars on the #assassins IRC channel for this to apply), although this is more easily maskable using screen/irssi off a unix server. The holy grail would be to scan the mobile phone command frequency band - one would only need to know one's target's phone number to triangulate his/her position. I don't know of anyone who's done this, but I'll be attempting it myself over the holidays.
RFID tags present an issue at a similar level, albeit with far greater possibilities for abuse due to their small size. If I were to have access to a reader (of the sort that, if this technology were to become widespread, would be available with no hardware hackery required), I would wait til the target were dumb enough to leave something outside his/her door and drop a suitably crafted tag in it. This would enable me to trail and ambush the target fairly easily when they didn't have any means of defense to hand.
This would be a slightly overworked solution for the purposes of the guild (albeit an excellent way of dealing with one of the more skilled assassins) but would come into its own in the hands of an actual stalker. Imagine someone you can't flee, can't hide from. Imagine what could happen if this technology were abused.
Imagine tags in designer clothes. An excellent way for criminals to know that yes, that coat is genuinely worth a hell of a lot. Imagine tags in young children. Do you really want paedophiles to know exactly when kids have run away from mummy's care? Imagine tags in students. Your grades are fine but you skipped too many lectures - you're out. Imagine tags in employees. Now your fundamentalist boss knows about your trip to the sex toys shop a block over from the office.
Imagine tags in you. Imagine anyone who wanted to being able to track your motions. How secure does that make you feel?
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Heh, in addition to the use of barcoding surgical instruments, what they leave out is, the original article assumes that the RFID in the instrument has been scanned into the database to begin with. I mean, surgical instruments being left inside people wouldn't happen if someone just counted the damn things beforehand, and then counted again afterwards to make sure they're all there. No scanning necessary.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
RFIDs are a robot sense. They tell robots where and what things are, where to look for them, and what to do when they find them. if find(rfid) and ! if find(rfid) are very convenient directors of robot behaviour.
Not, of course, that robots can run around wholly unsupervised; but with automation to hand for filtering and first-level logistics, all sorts of responsible people like cops, nurses and safety staff can shrug off their robotic chores and get on with making decisions.
We all ought to be playing with this stuff; but the app I really want to see is, nuclear power plants and fuel recycling plants, with every fuel and waste element and every component accounted for. This is one area with universal support for absolute security. We've held off development of civilian breeders for fear of terrorists getting access at some stage of the fuel processing cycle, among other reasons. But turning, say, a 99% safe cycle with 20 critical inspection points into a 99.9% safe cycle with 200 points, 180 automated, is surely not beyond out current means.
I also work for a timing company that uses ChampionChip. And one thing that the above poster would agree with is a chip alone is useless, you need some sort of database or software to relate the chip to usable data.
This is a major issue that people seem to forget about with RFID. A passive RFID chip can transmit just a serial number, but what does that mean? If I take my Mobil Speedpass and pass it over the ChampionChip system it reads it, sure, but otherwise it's useless data. There is no way the system can know...'oh. that's Jim's Mobile Speedpass' For this to happen all RFID systems would need to be linked together, and share all data.
It is capable for some passive chips and active chips to store data, but the reader would need to know what type of data it was receiving, and what to do with it. So some of these tin foil hat scenarios are just not possible.
The debate is how the consummers will organise to set limits on the use of it ; for instance refuse the rfid to be made PART of the good (molded in the plastic of a handle for instance), and force the producer to leave the possibility to rip it after purchase.
Where not possible (for rfid embeded into a ID card), the citizens should have a LAW passed to clearly limit the scope of use, with regards to WHO may know, and WHAT should be known. And make abuses criminal under the law.
Just my 2 .
Nobody is proposing to ban RFID, people here just don't want RFID forced on them. But hey, that wouldn't fit your argument so nicely, so I guess you can just ignore it.
Of course, by "no laws", I don't mean the usual blend of common law and a few odd state laws that protect everything from letters to phone calls to internet, etc. What I mean is that the only "privacy protection" you now have on the internet is that there is no feasible way to track each packet from users of interest. In other words, you have some privacy because your traffic gets lost in a sea of user traffic, and there's no easy way to fish out just yours across sessions.
If P-III ID tags were enabled, the enormous processing power and computational state it would otherwise would require to track individuals would be eliminated. Transactions would be tracked across sessions. Now, that's a key term: "across sessions". Just what do I mean by it? And why is that so important?
Consider, for example, that the police can observe your car on the street, and by consulting a computer, the cop will know it's your car, where you live, etc. But there's no way for the police to also know that 2 weeks ago, you were at the same intersection making a left. And that 34% of the time, you instead make a right. And that you usually blow through the light at 30MPH, even if it's raining. Your driving sessions are not tracked and correlated across sessions. The cop can see you just this instance, but we don't expect that we live in an old East German state where every little action gets recorded and reported to some authority.
Similarly, on the internet you can visit a web page and (if you remember to flush your cookies and use DHCP), there's no easy way for the site to tell that it's you again.
The key idea is that in accumulation small pieces of information add up, and infringe on a piece of liberty that we all hold dear: privacy. We reasonably expect that our actions, although observed and perhaps inspected in a given instance, are not tracked and correlated with all our previous actions.
So, while you think the P-III unique ID was a cool technical idea, it in fact was:
Consider that if a corporation tracks every piece of individual information you "leak" throughout the day, it's called market research. But if an individual did this to another individual, it's called stalking .
So, be thankful for us "privacy types". We and others see these social problems not as black and white, and perhaps a little grey, but as the complex hues they really are.
* * * If you or other readers appreciated my explanation, I'd be happy to write more, and submit a short piece for consideration by the editors (such as they are) of Slashdot.
I can be known by this key fingerprint: 2D57 1CCA 24C8 9AFE E35D F3B1 3665 B3F3 0E35 F221
This is actually part of a research project going on at the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering department.
Hoping to prevent the loss of a child through kidnapping or more innocent circumstances, a few schools have begun monitoring student arrivals and departures using technology similar to that used to track livestock and pallets of retail shipments.
I forget what 8 was for.
*RING*
Mister Jacobsen: Hello?
Voice: Hello, Mr Jacobsen.
Mr. J: Who are you?
V: Mr. Jacobsen, our records indicate that you checked into the Inn 'n' Out motel last night with your wife.
Mr. J: So? What's this all about?
V: We verified that your charcoal suit indeed proceeded from your office to that hotel, but Mrs. Jacobsen's housedress moved around your home all evening.
Mr. J: All right, who the hell is this?
V: It's your cleaners, Mr. Jacobsen. Don't you think you really should have that suit cleaned? We'd hate to have to call Mrs. Jacobsen and ask her about it.
Mr. J: No, no...that's okay...
V: We have a full clean and press special going on today only. May we pick up the suit?
Mr. J: *sigh* Yeah, it's at my office, corner of...
V: That's ok, Mr. Jacobsen. We'll have someone there in a few minutes. Thank you for your business!
*RING*
Mr. J: Hello?
Voice #2: Hi, Mr. Jacobsen! This is Eddie, from Lingerie Etc. We have a great special going on right now on black lace teddies.
Mr. J: What the hell? So what?
V2: Our records indicate that your last four mistresses all wore them. We just thought you'd be interested in our special pricing, in light of your recent...activities.
Mr. J: Argggghhhhhhhh
Yes, I'm scared of what the government *could* do with this technology. However, I'm even more scared of what the fucking marketeers will do. 1984? Hardly. More like $19.95.
http://xkcd.com/386/
TrustE's Watchdog Reports invariably results in a decision of "Issue Handled with no changes necessary to the Privacy Statement nor the Site". They get about a hundred complaints per month, but don't do anything. The last time TrustE made a site change anything was in 2002.
In the early days of TrustE, their seal actually meant something. But they've totally sold out.
There's also the Commerce Department's "Safe Harbor" list. No enforcement action has ever been taken under that.
So don't believe any "privacy certifications" associated with RFID tag use. They're meaningless.
For those who don't know, he posts a lot of rehashed news on his blog and then by some act of god (or Benjamin Franklin) gets his stories constantly posted to Slashdot, which gets him massive ad revenue.
I recommend that nobody visits the links in the story to deprive him of this ad revenue.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
This still does not eliminate the obvious falicy of the argument to begin with.
The use of RFID in any capacity for surgury is a cruch that is not necessary.
ID the paitent? How about doing a hand geometry check to see if the paitent on the table is the right one for the charts that have been brought up?
Tools count? (I.E. don't leave surgical tools in the paitent you did surgury on) As the grandparent of this missive points out, it might be a good idea to take a count of how many tools have been brought to the paitent, and make sure that many tools left the paitent (except for those elements that are expected to be installed, such as replacement hips.)
For that matter pretty much every situation where you can envision using RFID tags, there exists alternatives.
The one thing that I can think of that an RFID tag may provide fundamentally better result than the existing alternatives is in counter-shoplifting. As it is, not a day goes by when people walk past the panels at the door of their store, and some tag that didn't get erased at the checkout counter doesn't trip the system. Likewise I have personally purchased products at one store, successfully passed their system, only to walk into the store next door, tripping theirs.
A system that asks for all the rfid numbers, and checks to see if they are in the sold catagory would tend to reduce the number of false hits. Likewise if it isn't in the inventory to begin with, you wouldn't trip an alarm either.
While that does give a positive use of the technology to the very same retailers who are doing their best to take advantage of it, I am not sure that it passes the cost/savings benifit for just that, and I know it sets up a prime example of the very same arguments that people specifically hate aboute retailers using this technology, in that Every time you walk in or out of the doors of that retailer, the possibility exists for them to track you, track your interests, and collect marketable information tied directly to you that may be sold or even used internally in ways you don't want it to be used (Bill always selects Lavoris over Scope, He's walking down the mouthwash line, send a signal to the Lavoris display to bump the price up 5 cents.) and in other ways that neither you, nor I can predict today.
Granted that's my opinion, and I accept that I can be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
I used to believe the PIII serial number was a good idea. It would have made network management a lot easier as tracking by computer name or ip address is not real reliable on some networks.
That was then...
I spend about half my time cleaning up spyware off of peoples computers. The people that write this crud would have looooved to get serial numbers. And they would have. Even with the systems that required a reboot to 'activate' the serial number. Most people don't even think twice about a random crash. Make the config change (bios or os), make it look like something bad happened and reboot (or just be patient and wait for it). Presto, on your way to a hugely correlated database. Yuck!
I have the same problem with rfid. It's wonderful technology and if the rfid tags get burned out when you're done, great. But the *same* problem exits:
People with a clue will Own the People without a clue.
I keep on seeing all this neat stuff and then i ask the question: how can this be mis-used?
Here is a wonderful example: There is a goal of putting rfids on bulk bottles of medicine (in the caps? which could end up on the wrong bottle? did it matter which cap went before?). ok, I see the advantage for inventory and quality control, as you really do want people the get the proper medicine. What about the dark side? If I'm am understanding this correctly, you can use sensitive scanners that allow for greater distances. Does your pharmicist want anyone to know when the next 1000ct bottle of Oxycontin gets there? (any maybe where in the store to look for it?) Does this mean rf shielded storage?
If the problem people have with being phished is any indicator, RFID is just going to be a disaster.
eric
I can see the security guard at the front doors now: "Whoa, hold on there sir, you can't leave the hospital--you have the wrong spleen. That's right, the RFID tag identifies it as the wrong one. Just hand it over nicely, sir, and we won't have to involve the authorities..."
Here's a fascinating application that I came across. This little company is making big waves in the music instrument manufacturing sector. They're doing some cool R&D on tracking technologies that combine GPS and RFID as well.
http://www.snagg.com
Houston Real-Time Traffic Map. It reports on freeways as well as the tollroads. There's electronic signs along the roads informing you of traffic conditions ahead. You can view the signs online, first check the "Message Signs" option in the Map Control box on the lower left, the click a sign on the map to see what its currently displaying.
How hard is it to get elected to Congress?
I want to serve the people, by passing laws to protect personal freedoms, privacy, free speech, and consumer rights.
This is the feeler of interest for my campaign; the real campaign will take place in about 10 years.