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HP Announces Tiny Wireless Memory Chip
Hewlett-Packard researchers have developed a memory chip with wireless networking capabilities that is roughly the same size as a grain of rice, the company said Monday.
Prototypes of the Memory Spot chip developed by HP Labs contain 256 kilobits to 4 megabits of memory and can transfer data wirelessly at speeds up to 10Mbps. There are eight bits in a byte. This amount of storage allows the chips to hold a short video clip, digital pictures or "dozens of pages" of text, HP said, adding that the chips do not require a battery.
Memory Spot chips get their power using a technique called inductive coupling, which allows power to be transferred from one component to another through a shared electromagnetic field. In the case of Memory Spot, this power is supplied by the device that is used to read and write data on the chip.
Data stored on Memory Spot chips could be accessed using a variety of devices, such as specially equipped cell phones or PDAs, making them suitable for a range of applications, such as adhesive attachments applied to a paper document or printed photograph, HP said.
(end of post)
Thanks for the refresher there HP.
Seeing as how Memory Spot readers must be "positioned closely" to access the data stored on the chip, wouldn't these make a better choice for passports? I think this would alleviate a lot of fears.
http://religiousfreaks.com/It is an improvement (for certain applications). Do you want people accessing your private data from far away?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I thought this was exactly what the passive RFID chips do, except that RFID chips tend not to have this large a memory (though is there a technical reason why that's the case?)
For lots of applications, it is a perceived improvement, it gives a sense of privacy.
To implant information in a person and access it remotely. This is just bringing us closer to governments requiring chip implants.
Got MILF? It does a body good!
Just in case you forgot.
At first is sounded like this could compete with Zigbee http://www.zigbee.org/en/index.asp or Z-Wave http://www.z-wavealliance.org/content/modules/Star t/ technologies. Then again, what is this good for? The battery is...wait, no battery. Power comes from the device that reads/writes this grain-of-rice sized wireless/memory device...
check out my webpage, it's on a server embeded under my skin and shares power with my pacemaker.
/.ing of something so close to your heart? ;o)
Do you really want to risk the
Don't take the above poster too seriously. He doesn't.
...before DHS requires all Americans (and visitors, for that matter) to have one implanted in their hands or elsewhere in their bodies?
...where all the articles link to some kids blog instead of the original story from a national newspapers site...
Yeah, I'll be surprised if IDG ever amounts to anything...
This guy's the limit!
RFID features longer range and a small uniform, pre-encoded response. (e.g. ID Badge at work) HP's new chip features shorter range and a larger response, selectable from a large pool of responses, and probably the pool of responses is changeable even after deployment.
As another poster said, the short ranges at which this thing would work will alleviate a lot of people's privacy concerns. Still I gotta say that tagging people is still tagging people.
mooooo...(NOT!)...ank
...so afraid of disorder, we turn it into a God... (Bruce Cockburn, Gospel of Bondage)
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Steve Jobs: Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to announce the smallest iPod ever, the iPod Flea.
Rhapsody in Numbers
I still don't understand why RF readers and things of this sort aren't included on every cell phone, along with an easy, common standard to interface with.
Pointing your cell phone at a product for price comparisons and technical specs, or getting a small video on an item in a museum, or collecting e-mail addresses on College Night, or brochures at a convention, or any other sort of "Additional Info" normally not available at the point of contact, seems to me to be an extremely sustainable business model at a minimum of cost and input.
RFID might not be a commercial utopia, but it's a good start in a direction we could've been taking 10 years ago.
Here is more info on this topic from forbes. I think they did a better job covering the story. Plus they have a picture.
All you need to increase the range is to come up with some sort of pringles can for your memory reader.
liqbase
Case in point: I wanted to build a cat door that would read the chip embedded in my cat's skin before opening to let him in. The range on reading that thing is a matter of a centimeter or so, so I'd have to teach him to rub a reader in just the right way to get the door open, which seemed like more of a PITA than it was worth. His feline nature makes him virtually untrainable. He doesn't wear a collar, so the larger antenna versions that look like a name tag were out. This thing might help matters. Of course, if it could read his tag while he was out in the yard and open the door for some neighborhood cat peering in the door, that would be bad, too.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
It's difficult to see what these chips can do that smartcards, mini flash chips, and so on can't do... I think the main drivers are going to be cost and size and accessibility to ordinary developers.
But it could be fun to build memory into ordinary objects. You would not need any electrical contacts. All you need is a universal reader that can presumably be cheaply added to PDA, notebooks, etc. On top of that it'd be easy to write software that reads and writes these to do interesting things:
- smart business cards and ID cards
- smart locks and other innovative security systems
- data collection systems (e.g. cardiac monitors, sensors, etc.)
- contactless public data sources: smart signposts in cities (touch your mobile phone to get a map), etc.
It may be that the wireless aspects eventually become much more useful than the memory itself.
But on the whole I think this technology will not have any market traction until it can be exploited by the adult entertainment industry.
My blog
Talk about the ultimate spy device.
Simply find your cohort, stand next to him/her in the subway or bus or whateve and recieve the information without doing anything.
Hell the chip could be implanted in shoes so my left show is my chip my right show is a reader so when standing on the left of the spy I recieve his data and when we leave I can transmit my date to him.
GENIUS! this will only serve to help terrorists! I hope GW bush carpet bombs HP headquarters in a preemptive strike against this!
Never felt my sig more in place than in this topic. :D
Seriously, somebody NEEDS to put a human interface into the transponders
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
rfid, so what.
"There are eight bits in a byte." Really?? When I started programming, you could select the byte size. Now we're forced into 8 bit bytes. What a horrible loss of freedom. I blame Canada. And terrorists. And global warming.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Why not put it in his foot/lower leg and put the reader under the mat? If you made the reading antenna mat-sized he'd be sure to stand on it to get in.
Then again, maybe you thought of that and I'm missing something obvious.
That is not rice!
Man, I'd sure love me the complete PDF of a book that I just bought embedded into the back cover.
I can assure you, the best way to get rid of dragons is to have one of your own.
It's only a matter of time that the government will want to implant these into humans to thwart terrorism. It will start small: just tag ex-cons, then sexual deviants, and then the carnies. Next, you are unpatriotic not to have one install in every member of your family.
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a socialist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me--
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
- Martin Niemöller
Another step towards the day when I can upgrade my computer by simply pouring a bag of crap through a hole in the top of my case. ...Hey, I sould patent that! (Link barely has anything to do with the comment, it just came up in a quick google for toilet patent.)
[an error occurred while processing this sig]
Is that the size of long grain or short grain rice? Wild or cultivated?
Actually, did anyone see the parody iPod Flea - this chip would be the perfect way to actually build such a thing. You could just grab a handful of chips dump them in hopper on the top of a portable player and get an instant random playlist. It would like a combined Hour-Glass and Media Player.
All those stamps in my passport were getting annoying. Maybe they can put one of these in my passport, maybe when they get those RFID things working, so that I can just download where I've traveled. It'd be handy and I can't see anything that could go wrong.
- Tash
Vrooommm...
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The chip is already in him, between his shoulder blades. It's the standard PetID chip that's implanted in thousands of cats and dogs. I suppose I could get another one put in ($30), but after watching the vet use a reader to get the info, it just doesn't seem practical to use this particular type of chip. She had to rub the reader back and forth a couple times to read the chip, and it's not hard to find.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
"roughly the same size as a grain of rice"
Would be interesting if you could raid these thing, need more storage just dump a handful in to the pot next to you computer.
Would be hell to try to find one that had gone faulty but I expect you could just turn it off.
My only concern would be the non-technical collage room mate who drunk and looking for food at 2 am try to cook you rice and then eat it. Brings a whole new side to data recovery.
Ahhh... great...
We're now only years away from these things being everywhere. I can see being in the checkout line at a grocery store- items will have these chips on them so they can store video and advertise products to you based on what you buy as you stand in line.
I can see these secretly being put in green cards and passports and devices at land marks "saving" where you've been. Because everyone with a green card is a terrorist and needs to be tracked- why I blew up 3 buildings today- and it's not even lunch yet.
THIS IS RFID. There is no difference. RFID can have small or larage data sizes, small or large coils (which determine how much power is needed to read/write it), and read-only or read/write ability. This is RFID.
All the concerns people have with RFID technology apply here.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
No useful text here whatsoever.
??? Felines are as trainable as any other domesticated animal. They may be stubborn but they're not stupid. Just because you can't get the cat to do what you want it to do when you want it to do it doesn't mean the cat won't figure out how to get what it wants. I'd wager you'd need to show your cat the location of the reader at most once.
Think of it this way: I'm guessing your desire for a cat door developed from having to manually open the door to let the cat in and out. I'm also guessing your desire for a cat door indicates some acquiescence to the cat's will--you don't throw the cat out when you want it out; you allow the cat out at its request.
Now, how does the cat let you know it wants to go out? Maybe scratches at the door, perhaps some meows, and some being with opposable thumbs opens the door. If you haven't been able to train your cat, at least your cat has done a decent job of training you.
As with bluetooth, rfid, or any wireless, it is not hard to create a device that can wardrive. Even easier than that is fabrication of a targeted scope, which may extend the range of a signal many times greater than it is advertised. See below:
2 1236 - 'BlueBag' PC Sniffs Out Bluetooth Flaws/ 13/2146221 - Build Your Own Bluetooth Sniper Rifle
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/08/12
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03
The only secure way of tagging people, is to not!
good to see somebody besides microsoft making some progress, it would be kooler to see them make money too.
Yeah, as subject says, instead of printing a ultra high resolution picture one could store 100+Mpix image into "paper embedded chip memory" and print it with current technology. What would be the point to use high dpi printing when its possible to bypass it with this invention. Then just read it with your RFID scanner and start looking for the androids that have escaped..
when they start mass producing these in China next to the rice paddies
Probably gonna get creamed for this suggestion, but:
store all your passwords on it - make them all 128 bits or better randomly generated, then embed the chip in a fingertip. Include handshake verification of authenticity and a pin for added security and that should greatly reduce identity theft
until someone starts harvesting fingers...
1 bit is a very short video :o
They should have used the LOC metric
NEW HP CHIP = 4 * 1024 * 1024 bits
1 LOC = 10 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 * 8
therefore the new chip will hold 1 / (10 * 1024 * 1024 * 2) LOC
or
4.7683715e-8 Libraries of Congress
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Wow, these things sound like the "localizers" that Vinge describes in "A Deepness in the Sky"... although not quite as advanced, certainly a major step in that direction. Curiouser and curiouser... I may sound like an old guy, but seems that science is in some areas keeping good pace with science fiction... and conversely, that hard SF is having to adapt even more rapidly than ever before.
crappy triceratops
Have you ever looked into the architecture of some of the non-8-bit machines? They're always hideously weird with seemingly arbitrary byte, word, register, and pointer sizes.
Just look at the CDC Cyber for example. Georgia Tech used to use one of these monstrosities for their registration system. They were once innovative and powerful designs, but I can't image how horrible programming for the things must've been.
Apparently 6-bit or 9-bit bytes and 36-bit words were common in the early days of computing because it was close the the minimum number of bits (35) needed to represent a number out to 10 significant digits (for scientific computing).
I'm glad that the nice, logical progression of powers of 2 won out.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I wouldn't normally feed trolls, but this thread is somewhat allegorical to system design problems, so I'll respond to what you've said.
The cat has a door of his own, a simple flap that he pushes open when he wants in or out. The problem with this very utilitarian, simple to implement solution is that it's not very discriminating. Another cat in the neighborhood, an un-neutered tom, figured out that he could come and go through the same door and get the same food as our cat. Along the way, he decided that it was a good idea to mark this new-found territory as his own.
Now, in a twisted bit of irony, this very indescriminate port of access is installed in a window. Most neighborhood cats don't seem to care about it, and politely pass it by. But there's this one that sneaks in and wrecks the place, steals resources, and then leaves before we can do anything about it. We can't entirely close the access point because then our cat couldn't get in and out when he needs to, and there's no litterbox (his process requires a remote resource, you might say).
So, I was searching for something of a firewall for cats, but found that the system I had in place didn't support that kind of upgrade. Different infrastructure is required. So now I'm monitoring the technology market for developments that will support what I'm trying to do and dealing with the situation at hand as best I can in the short term.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Now the pointyhaired ones are able to print out emails and attach the attachments to it via sticky tape. Horrors!
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
A system such as the one you need already exists, but it requires the cat to wear a collar with an integrated chip. A friend of my parents has one for her cat and it works like charm. Your cat just needs to get used to the collar (which is thin and lightweight anyway).
"Words of wisdom: drop that zero and get with the hero" -- Vanilla Ice
If I really wanted to be a troll, I could say access control should be based on something your cat knows, something your cat is, and something your cat has.
Teaching frisky the special meow won't be easy. And getting him to stand still for the eye scan could be a challenge. But real trouble starts when you realize your cat has no belt loops or shirt pocket on which to clip a badge.
But seriously, if we're talking about an rfid or similar device implanted in the scruff of the neck or between the shoulder blades, it shouldn't be beyond the cat's ability to associate putting a shoulder against the detector with opening the door. That sort of rubbing is a natural action for a cat.
There may be technical issues preventing you from setting up such a system, but I don't think his feline nature would be an obstacle. If anything, your challenge is to teach him to rub up against the detector ONLY when he wants to use the door.
Not only do I think this can be done on the feline behavior side, I think if you can work out the technical issue this is a product that would be carried by every pet store in the country.
If you're thinking about rigging up a power door with a garage-door-opener type switch, cats do learn from watching each other. Your tom 'hacker' would likely have such a system figured out after a couple rounds of shoulder surfing.
Someone please put this in terms I can understand.
-Ted Stevens
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Have you thought about a tunnel in front of the door? An enclosure about shoulder height (or a little lower) and about 12 to 18 inches long should be big enough for Mr. Bigglesworth to get through, but restrictive enough to force the chip to come close to a detector in the roof of the tunnel.
Training should be a non-issue if the enclosure is placed in front of the existing door. If you relocate the door, set up a flap door at the new location until kitty learns the door has moved, then install the access control system.
My only reservation regarding such a system is the enclosure could become a hiding spot for other animals. You don't want Heathcliff coming home from a night out with the boys to find Pepe le Pew waiting on the doorstep.
BTW, your analysis of Brokeback Mountain is 100% spot on.
I sure hope that the production version of the chip will contain some default very strong encryption. Talk about an open door for viruses, or even id-theft!!
And you thought BlueTooth viruses were bad. Wait till you have the ability to directly modify the OS kernel.
the barcode can't store any significant amount of data
Depending on the barcode used, lots more data than you realize can be stored in a bar code.
The chips from the article (and many RFID chips) can contain the entire PDF brochure of that lawnmower you're looking at
There are many technical problems you are glossing over like transmission rate, storage limitations/configurations and reading a PDF on a mobile phone screen.(?)
What about the organizational problem of getting your phone service provider to make this work? Lots of really useful technology dies on the vine for this reason.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
NO! I know the ISPs and network hardware people have already redefined things to be in bits, not bytes, but you do NOT get to pull the same thing for storage! It's bad enough when a gigabyte is a billion bytes, instead of 1073741824 bytes, as every piece of software on the planet defines it.
BAD, BAD HP. NO COOKIE.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It will be in your spiffy new shoes, your handbag, clothing, tires on your vehicle, etc. anything that could come in close contact with something that could be a reader. Made in China, Bugged in the US. (oh hell China will prolly bug em for us:)
- Gronk!
No kidding? Really?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'd like to see it inductively couple with my microwave oven.
5 seconds max, I reckon.
About enough to hold an MP3. I like where this is going ...
"iChip: music in the palm of your hand ..."
Your last sentence is my exact complaint. This is an organizational problem, not a technological one, and from a free market perspective, that's just asinine.
When are we going to see a system where our mobile phone or a chip in our thumb or our memory sticks themselves simply detect when they are in range of the PC and just plain work as a normal USB thumb drive?
Sure the speed might be slower but damn that could be quite handy.
Since it gets its power through induction, I can imagine that it wouldn't have a large range. Combine that with the larger capacity, and it makes it more suitable for payment systems, like the wireless credit card stuff that RFID proponents have been hailing (since you wouldn't want somebody reading your chip from faraway, and the bigger the "number" is, the harder it is to copy to another chip).
Maybe cellphones will come with holders for these, and all you have to do is swipe your cellphone across a register to pay.