Slashdot Mirror
Australia's Geekiest Man
An anonymous reader writes "Why have a key to open your front door when you can have an RFID tag implanted in your arm that will do the trick? Computerworld has a story up about the outgoing Linux Australia group president's hacked home, in which just about anything from watering the lawn, to opening his blinds, or checking the mail can be controlled through a software environment. Jonathan Oxer is an electronics and coding whiz who apparently has an RIFD tag implanted in his arm that opens his front door, and his front gate is hooked up with gigabit Ethernet — able to tell him when someone enters the property or send him a virtual email or sms to say he has real mail. Apparently the iPod Touch has just inspired him to begin linking all his little hardware hacks together into the one single, software controlled handheld touch device. I wonder if Steve Jobs ever thought the Touch would end up being used this way?"
What exactly is a virtual email? Can the system send him one when he gets a real email too?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
How long until someone freaks out irrationally about it?
>>Why have a key to open your front door when you can have an RFID tag implanted in your arm that will do the trick?>>
I can think of a number of reasons.
1. You can give your key to a trusted associate, for example to housesit or run an errand for you. Giving your arm to a trusted associate is computationally intensive, destructive, and irreversible.
2. You can, for the cost of less than one hour's salary, revoke the key tied to a compromised lock, and then issue a new key. If unforseen circumstances should cause the RFID lock to require revoking, well, bad news bears...
3. Key/lock devices are well understood, hardly ever fail due to them having few moving parts which are almost never in operation, and are robust against almost all unforseen environmental conditions (i.e. power outage). Arm/RFID reader interfaces are poorly understood, by necessity have to be polling constantly, and are dependent on several fragile systems to maintain the key requirements that you be let into your house promptly any time you desire and that unauthorized users be rejected 100% of the time.
4. You have designs of ever having a romantic relationship. ("Honey, I know preparations for the wedding have been a bit busy, but we'll have to schedule your surgery sometime this week...")
5. A diligent attacker attempting to compromise your lock/key interface has no reason to attempt to compromise your shoulder/arm interface with a hacksaw.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Yeah perhaps I didn't think that one through completely, but I'm just not comfortable with security measures being implemented or disengaged simply by proximity.
Speaking of your distraction scenario, and clearly because I read too much /., I had a vision of all TVs and computer screens splashing goatse on the would-be evildoer. Something tells me that would at least confuse most anybody's plans.
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
but you could just have a regular old key as backup. It's just a theory, though. Like evolution.
And gravity.
Please stop stalking me, bro.