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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.
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
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...
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.
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.