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Bugged Canadian Coins?
tundra_man writes "CBC has an article about RFID type devices in Canadian coins found on US Contractors. From the article: 'Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada, says a branch of the U.S. Department of Defense.' The report did not indicate what kinds of coins were involved."
coins track YOU!
At least this Globe and Mail report thinks so:M .20070110.wspycoin0110/BNStory/National/home
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGA
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Canadian coins containing tiny transmitters have mysteriously turned up in the pockets of at least three American contractors who visited Canada
With RFID chips costing a fraction of a cent apiece, the addition of such a chip must at least triple the value of whatever canadian currency you add it to.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Makes ripping off Canadian vending machines just a little bit tougher?
I also read the article and thought WTF.
I seriously doubt anyone managed to mung currency and insert a real RFID unit.
What I do think however is that in a small percentage of coins they resonate at the same frequency as an RFID which would appear as though they were magical.
If you did infact hollow out a bit of a coin and replace some of the metal with an electronic bug the weight and bounce (striking against a piezo sensor) would cause such a difference any coin mech you inserted it into would reject it.
liqbase
These RFID coins are clearly the work of Canadian Terrorists trying to harm the American people.
As the world knows it is cold up here in the Great White North eh! There is usually lots of snow too, eh! Well I can tell you from experience that with all our socialist programs we pay lots of taxes and as a result we don't often end up with folding money, eh! So when your coins go missing it really hurts, eh! Like when you lose a handful of coins in the deep snow, eh! So with RFID coins you just get the portable reader out and scan for the coins to find them, eh! Or, you scan your couch to see if you can afford to order in a pizza with back bacon, eh! You walk in to Harvey's (like McDonald's but much better) and they scan you on the way in and let you know what you can afford, eh!
i see a trend here, eh.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That is a commemorative coin marking the 60th anniversary of D-Day, and the 90th anniversary of WWI. The poppy became the symbol of remembrance of our war dead through the poem In Flander's Fields, written by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian battlefield doctor in World War One.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
RFID does not require a processor or battery. Consumer RFID devices for
implantation in animals (Pet-ID, HomeAgain) are about the size of a grain
of rice.
Although it doesn't say what kind of coin was involved, I would guess it's almost certainly the two dollar coin. Mainly because I'd guess it's easy to pop out the center part of it that is a different metal. Even if you put plastic in there, the metal frame around it would make it feel pretty similar to a normal coin. There is also an advantage that when you cross the border you can't unload $1 and $2 coins. You can try to pawn off the small change to people who aren't paying attention (a problem in itself for northern states), but no one is going to take the big change - some won't take American dollar coins for that matter. Anyway that means they are more likely to keep the coin at least until they return to Canada.
Also it's better if vending machines reject the coin. If you can't spend it in a soda machine you're going to just keep the coin, and probably try another.
For the life of me, I can't figure a reason that somebody would do this. Coins change hands quickly and RFID has a pretty limited range.
If you RTFA article closely you'll see that the souce told the press that transmitters were found in coins.
Then (in paragraph 11) reporter notes that the type of transmitter was not disclosed. In paragraph 12 he starts speculating about RFID. The rest of the article (and possibly part of the preceeding section - along with the Slashdot headline) is based on the unfounded assumption that the transmitter IS an RFID-type device.
Which strikes me as totally bogus.
IMHO it's more likely that the "transmitter" found is a remotely-powered area audio bug, like "The Great Seal Bug", the martini fake olive bug, or the "diodes in the wall" bugs. Planted on a person it would bug his conversations and those around him until he spent it - hours or days later. (As you can imagine from the martini-olive bug, which is only useful while the spy is toting the martini, in some situations long-term bugging is an unnecessary bonus.)
Such bugs can be simple: A shaped cavity with a flexible membrane over it is one way to do it - the cavity resonates, giving a strong reflection, while the sound modulates the cavity's effectiveness, AMing the reflection. Another is just to fasten a diode to something that can be vibrated by sound. The diode frequency-doubles the reflected signal or mixes two of them to produce the sum and difference frequencies (sorting the diode's reflection from most ordinary reflections) and the vibration of it along the line between the bug and the monitor phase-modulates the return with the local audio. No fancy circuitry or local power supplies necessary.
I presume this one did involve at least a diode, or some semiconductor circuitry, since it was found in a radio scan - which is often done by looking for the frequency-multiplying and/or frequency mixing effect of diodes / semiconductor junctions. Finding a pure cavity resonator bug - or even identifying what it is when you have it - is a bitch.
Bugging the audio at a conference, or the conversations of a contractor at work on classified projects, would be worth planting a bug on him and having it there for only a few hours. After that, if he "spends" it, so what? (At least until they are noticed and a way found to identify them BEFORE the conversations to be monitored.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
That's funny, Spanky... when *I* was homeless I was FAR more interested in staying fed, getting a job, and getting back to where I was now. So were most of the guys at the shelter.
My question: Did you have a big helping of WhiteBreadNess this morning, or do you watch too much cable?
Assuming you're not limited to RFID limits, in theory how much power could one of these spit out? What distance could they be tracked from?
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
You need to change pants more often.