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HP Provides Alternate Technology to RFID
NerdForceMaster writes "HP has unveiled a new alternative to standard RFID technology, a chip the size of a tomato seed that has 500KB of memory and can communicate at 10mbps. Lets hope this one is commercially availible soon." We beg forgiveness; dupe etc etc.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=191401&cid=157 32429
My blog: http://www.redcode.nl
Okay. Exactly how big is a tomato seed again?
What ever happened to standard units of measure? This is a tech crowd. How about a size in millimeters?
I tried googling "1 tomato seed in millimeters", but that didn't give me a useful number...
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
FTFA: "The hard part is building the ecosystem. You have to get your readers and writers, and I don't know how long it will take me to convince the cell phone companies to do this. How long has RFID been around and it's still not completely built out?"
/. as well as Bruce Schneier have both covered the RFID encryption [and other inherent weakness] topics extensively in the past)
Understatement of the week, for sure. I'm struggling to think of more than half a dozen consumer-exposed implementations of RFID. There are a few gas-station speedpass[tm] gimmicks, some high end automobiles use them in their keys, and various department stores use them to keep inventory from walking out the front door. And a few casinos are now using RFID chips to prevent various gaming schemes and track user play. I think that "not completely" built out is more than an understatement. For instance, the uspto currently lists 2114 patents including the keyword "RFID" versus 519515 including the keyword "OPTICAL" (if you think optical technologies are not a fair comparison, do your own search with your own chosen technology.. my point is simply that RFID has barely been explored by many industries)
Not that I claim to be much of an expert on RFID, but at least it appears technologies such as this will be less vulernable to the encryption problems that RFID currently experience. (previous link is just some random example i googled for..
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
I managed to lose my 2gb USB dongle within a few days of buying it a couple months ago...
I can't imagine how quickly I'd lose one of those!
your wallet is going to need at least three layers of tin foil now...
According to the article, the chips will be rewritable. So instead of just stealing your credit card/door key/passport information, someone will be able to erase it so that yours doesn't work anymore or worse. Imagine the 'splainin you'll have when your passport comes up with the name "O. Bin Ladin"?
Perhaps the "editors" should talk to each other?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I just want 15 foot range cheap RFID tags so I can tag everything I ever want to find again with a
unique ID. A detector with left and right LEDs would be enough. To never again go insane trying
to find my glasses, car keys, books, or remote (to say nothing of losing tools outside) would be huge.
Maxim
Lets hope this one is commercially availible soon.
Yeah, beacuse there is nothing better to stop a fascist-controlfreak-technology than another fascist-controlfreak-technology that will eat into its marketshare.
Big deal, given the seed size of this thing, I could to it, too.
Should be enough for all your needs!
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
Actually, no.
From the article:
"Information transfer requires actual physical connection to the Memory Spot and Taub says they designed it that way. 'We don't want to increase the range of contact,' he said. 'We think it's just right.'
Of course, the requirement for physical contact to transfer data means that these chips will be completely unsuitable for many of the applications RFID's seem poised to handle. For example, merchandise tags in stores. With HP's chips merchandise currently protected by security tags will still require separate security tags. With RFID tags the securty tags can be eliminated. The concept of being able to walk into a store, stuff your pockets with merchandise, and walk out and be automatically billed as you pass through the door won't work with these chips. That may appeal to some consumers, but not to the people running stores. Less shop-lifting and no cashiers is a pretty sweet deal.
I can see these chips being preferable for some applications though. Although a RFID credit card might let you walk out of that store with your stuffed pockets without slowing down, one of HP's chips may ultimately prove more secure even since physical contact is required for them to operate. (i.e. No RFID-sniffing, or whatever they wind up calling it.) Even if RFID proves perfectly secure, the requirement for physical contact will probably be perceived as more secure by most people anyways.
The storage capacity on HP's chips is impressive however, and will probably open up entirely new applications that RFID never had a hope of filling. Imagine whipping out your HP-ecosystem-ified cell-phone or other such gadget and being able to play short video clips and sounds about a product just by swiping it past your phone. This could range from movie previews from a swiping a movie poster while just outside a movie theater to instructions on how to wash your clothes from a chip inbedded in the tags. Of course, I'm willing to bet that after a while every chip you swipe will try to sell you something before it actually does anything useful...
You heard it two days ago in HP Announces Tiny Wireless Memory Chip. That may have been a bad summary, but it's the top article in the HP category, which is all of one click away from the article summary.
Go editors!
At the start of the year, the number of dupes were ridiculous. But Slashdot seemed to listen, and it's been months since I've seen a dupe. And now all of a sudden, there's been three in the past week alone. What's happened?
a chip the size of a tomato seed that has 500KB of memory and can communicate at 10mbps
Is that just the chip or the complete assembly? I don't care how small the chip itself is, I'd rather know how big the working unit is. No one uses just the chip so its size doesn't really matter.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
That really gets under your skin.... "What's in your pinkie?"
"can communicate at 10mbps"
Isn't 10 millibit/second pretty slow?
yippeeee yay ! "hp invent" has finally invented something in 2006.
fifteen jugglers, five believers
Despite the misleading summary and lede, inside the article it explains that you need CONTACT with this "tomato seed" to read its data. I can see this as solving some of the same problems as RFID, like the Passports, for example, that you don't want to be read at a distance. But for other problems, like determining how many widgets Acme Co. has in their warehosue, it's not much better then a bar code.
The EU Commission is proceeding to an Open Consultation on RFID. From the PR: "We need to build a society-wide consensus on the future of RFID. We need to ensure that RFID technology delivers on its economic potential and to create the right opportunities for its use for the wider public good, while ensuring that citizens remain in control of their data."
Animoog.org
>>> 1. But does it run Linux? (hint: no)
...
Maybe it runs GNU/Hurd - ask Mark, as he should know by now... maybe... or is he overpaid?
I can find my underwear with no problem and I don't need to mark it with a permanent marker
since my wife can tell the difference between mine and hers.
Now all I have to do is find out what frequency these new-fangled tomato seeds react to, and
see if I can adjust my rig and amplifier appropriately. Last I heard the RFID chips were
around 433.2 MHz - I'm kind of bored today, so it's time for another trip to Wal-Mart to
watch the lights flash and hear the horns blare. CQ CQ CQ
These are the points with barcodes, RFID and tomato seeds. The more data you pack there, the faster you can access them and the smaller you make 'em, the more troubles you'll have and the more subtle the malicious actions can be.
For example, we all know that printing a brand new barcode to cover the ligitimate one is as easy as a snap.
I'd like to see what happens if I stick an adesive RFID right over the ligitimate one or if I shield it before covering.
And with access speeds like the ones shown by the tomato seeds, I'd wonder what happens if I move the good fast enough!
What if I have more than one seed into the same good?
And, as far as privecy is concerned, why storing that much data in a "label"?
Infos are to be stored in protected databases. The label should just contain the search key for those data.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
It's useful to keep in mind the distinction between passive and active RFID. Passive RFID includes only an RF receiver, is read-only, and has a minimal read distance (effectively, about 5 meters). Active RFID tags have a transceiver and are therefore limited only by their power source (and size considerations). Some RFID experts have estimated that between six and twenty cents (USD) is the maximum cost for passive RFID that provide ROI. This makes HP's technology between five and sixteen times greater than the cutoff for ROI on passive RFID.
HP Sauce has unveiled a new chip the size of a tomato seed that has 500 calories and can feed 10 people per bag.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Just wondering... how many encyclopedias fit in a device the size of a tomato seed?
...chip the size of a tomato seed that has 500KB of memory and can communicate at 10mbps
In the future, your tomatoes will scan themselves. Unfortunately, they still taste like plastic.
...when technology to track us gets better?
Just wait until the checkpoints need to read all of those 500 Kelvinbytes of data at that whopping 10 millibits per second! Anyone here have any idea how long that would take?
I believe you forgot I, for one, welcome our new tomato-seeded, super-RFID'd overlords.
BTW, exactly how many tubes are there in these ten mega-something tomato seeds, and how long would it take for them to send an internet?
Also, from the HP press release:
Apparently these need contact with the reader, so won't be much use as tracking devices, unless the victim is very cooperative :)
I thought the distinction between passive and active RFID was that 'active' tags had a continuous power source. Passive RFID tags get their power, typically via induction, from the reader and therefore are relatively limited in transmit power and reading distance. This does not preclude them from having receivers and being read/write.
The little glass vial RFID tags made by TI come in both Read Only and Read/Write. http://www.ti.com/rfid/shtml/prod-trans.shtml#lowf req
Of course the HP device requires contact so it's not really an RFID tag at all. :-\
Not *alternate*.
No kidding! And does your model complain when you "accuse" her of moving your stuff (i.e., ask her where it is), based on the completely silly reasoning that there are only two of us that live here, and it isn't where I left it...
Man, if it wasn't for the sex, cooking, cleaning, yardwork, extra income, companionship, day-to-day tasks splitting, good advice, and sex, I don't know if having a wife would be worth the hassle.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
I am very pleased to see an editor apologise for a dupe. Kudos to him
"A tomato seed is, as astute readers of the last embodiment of this story will remember, almost exactly the same size as a grain of rice."
tomato seeds are small, even smaller than sesame seeds - if you have things the size of rice in your tomatoes, they aren't seeds, they're maggots - what's weird is that a tomato is too acidic for maggots to hatch so.... WHY ARE YOU PUTTING MAGGOTS ON YOUR TOMATOES YOU SICK FREAK!?!?!?!