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Communicator Clothing
coondoggie writes "The crew of the classic science-fiction show's Starship Enterprise wore small devices on their chests that they could tap to communicate instantly with their colleagues. Such communications technology is now closer to reality thanks to a Finnish company which this week demonstrated high-tech clothing that can send and receive messages via satellite. The demonstrator antenna, built by the Patria Aviation Oy company, looks like a simple patch of cloth but is capable of operating in the Iridium and GPS frequency band as part of clothing. The Iridium satellites allow two-way voice and data communication, while GPS provides positional data to the user. Iridium could also relay the position of the user."
Every now and then a 'designer' unveils a jacket or whatever with some kind of technology built into it (for the past ten years at least), and says that its 'new' and 'amazing' or whatever, and that its going to change the world.
IT WON'T. People DON'T WANT that stuff built-in to their clothing. It's uneconomic to build that stuff in to clothing. Not only do you have to manufacture the device(s) in question; you have to build them in to garments of differing styles, colours, sizes etc etc, and that utterly destroys any economies of scale.
Anyway, what happens when you need to wash this jacket? What about if you want to use the tech on a warm day? What if you want to wear a different jacket that day?
This is a substitute for a clever sig that fits within the maximum number of characters.
You don't have to send the message directly to your target. You send it through a wire (or over a wireless system with a 1m range) to a node which then sends it to a major node and so on, with 256 bit encryption and dummy messages constantly being sent so a wiretapper wouldn't know when someone was actually sending something. It's conceivable.
So, we can finally abandon the ancient, hoary plot device of the movie bad guys ripping open somebody's shirt to reveal a 1970's Radio Shack bug microphone/transmitter taped to their chest? Since a bug can now be anywhere *inside* the shirt material itself (or pants for that matter), important Mafia business will now be conducted in the nude?