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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?"
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
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?
Just as an FYI for anyone considering this, implanted RFID have been known to cause a high incidence of cancer around the implantation area. There's research showing it in animal models, I found out after my pet had to have his RFID tracker replaced (they use this in pets to let vet offices identify your pet if it gets lost).
Apparently the body doesn't like certain subcutaneous implanted foreign objects and cancerous growths build around it.
The other issue I would like to point out is that putting RFID chips into people and treating them as cattle has for some time been a dream of the uber wealthy elite classes. This tracks back to the eugenics movement to present day. See Aaron Russo's documentary "America: Freedom to Fascism".
As such, I would not be in a hurry to usher in the era of slave I mean people tracking.
Liberty.
I was always curious why futurists and cyborg fanboys get RFID chips implanted underneath their skin. What's wrong with just wearing one on a ring or perhaps a chain around your neck? Maybe both for multiple redundancy. Does it really happen THAT often you go to the pub for a few pints and comeback so drunk you've lost all your possessions? Does that slim probability warrant tagging yourself like cattle?
What sort of emergency do you have in mind? No home security will deter a determined malicious threat from entering, but a gadgetted up house you could fully control with a device that fits in your pocket, could create enough of a distraction to escape.
>>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.
Known? Implanting "subcutaneous foreign objects" might cause cancer, see the quote below. And the research done on mice indicates it typically happens in one percent or two.
"It's important to emphasize that those studies are not necessarily sufficient to view these implants as known hazards. The data suggest that the devices foster cancer by causing inflammation of the tissues that encapsulate them. There is a large amount of scientific literature linking cancer and inflammation (the National Cancer Institute has some information on the matter). RFID tags turn out not to be the only form of animal tagging that causes cancer through inflammation; standard metallic ear tags can do so as well. That paper also notes that there have been a number of case reports where human prosthetic implants have induced cancers in the surrounding tissues.", taken from Ars Technica
and were planning to sell it to China.
The system contains everything you could imagine: in-house tracking system, motion detectors, remote messaging control and web-interface administration, integration with all electronic household appliances for whatever control you could think of doing, including but not limited to gardening and feeding your dogs.
He even got VC supports to build the actual products; but then, I asked him one question: "what about power outage, which happen so frequently in China?"
He thought briefly and said "We could include an fuel-powered, emergency backup power supply for my system."
"Well, when there's a power outage, those house appliances cease to function as well..."
He then thought more deeply and said "Then we must kick in a bigger fuel-powered, emergency backup power supply for the entire house!"
He's now selling household fuel-powered emergency backup power supplies and really good at it.
I've used the RFID kit he's installed on his front door before.
There is absolutely no encrypted handshake between the RFID tag and the reader. Hence an attacker could VERY easily conduct a replay attack using an easily duplicated tag. Given that the tag he uses is implanted into his arm, anyone that walks past him on the street could steal his front door key.
But I guess this isn't much of an issue for fellow geeks, because what sort of geek walks outside their basement and gets within the vicinity of other people in the first place?
For all those who are about to make wisecracks about this dude, by all means go ahead.
Just pause for a moment and admit to yourself that you were thinking what language *you* would be scripting the curtains with.
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
My understanding of "RFID" tags is that since they are powered by the energy broadcast by the reader, the tags themselves can't do very much in terms of computation. As a result, they are limited to parroting back a static serial number (though a long one, or part of it) that's determined when the tag is manufactured.
//in infrared ink//. Sure, you'd need fancy infrared optics to read it - but why the hell would you take that chance?
This means that the tags themselves cannot do any encryption at all.
If this is the case, why the hell would anybody want to use it to gain secure access to anything when anybody nearby the tag with an RFID reader can read the serial number and spoof the tag?
This would be like writing your credit card number on the front of your shirt -
Is my understanding flawed, here? Are there newer RFID tags that actually can do crypto (and are people like those in TFA using them)? I may be wrong in any number of ways, so I'm looking for some more solid info.
No, I said the OP claimed a HUGE percentage got cancer when in fact they don't. Secondly there was no research done on humans, and mice are not humans.
The fact that 1-2% could even possibly get cancer does not mean 30-60 million people will get it. Science is a bit more advanced than that. I'm not giving you any credit for your math skills. In fact it's probably unlikely they will get cancer at all from this "potential" threat. You are just making outrageous claims from no evidence what so ever.
I would take those odds, they're really quite good, but I don't want to be tagged none the less.
This is still MY basement !
Your mother
"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?"
/joke
Because you'd like to attract women at some point?
stuff |
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.