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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?
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
So...how much d'ya figure he paid for this one?
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
Can anyone point to technology that religion embraced in its infancy? I really would be interested.
The Printing press
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Technology embraced in it's infancy? Other than the printing press?
Anything having to do with construction (building churches, etc), communication (radio, tv, the internet) and transportation (bussing those seniors in for Sunday Mass).
Julie Moult is an idiot.
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.
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"!!!
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