Look, fair use rights are not something corporations grant to us. They are what the government grants to us, the same government that also governs corporations.
It is not industry's place to "grant" us this. It is our right to do so regardless of their wishes.
Back when SARS initially broke out in the southern part of China, the Chinese government did what it usually did: It sequestered the area and communications to and from it so that people wouldn't start panicking. ("It's good to be the totalitarian regime.")
Of course, word got out anyway. Worldwide panic ensued. How? SMS text messages on cell phones.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. Technology has reached a critical mass where "idea guys" no longer control where technology goes; people figure out new ways to use it on their own, without regard for where it "should" be going. This includes both researchers like Alan Kay, big corporations like Microsoft, and totalitarian regimes like China.
Kay is still stuck in a PC-centric paradigm. It's a lovely paradigm, that. But why would I sit and change how I communicate with a personal computer when my phone's with me everywhere I go now?
You know, I actually agree with you that you can't just believe whatever I say. You're absolutely right. "I read it on the internet, it must be true," (wink wink, nudge nudge) and all that. Google != Reference and all that.
Now what's the basis for believing this is feasible? Oh, that's right... you read it on the internet. Well, it must be true then.
The fears are "tin foil hat" fears because there isn't any solid evidence out there suggesting that these devices are capable of doing what we fear. Note that I say "we" -- I'm concerned about privacy and our rights, too; I put my money where my mouth is by contributing to the EFF every month.
And to show you that I am not just some random shmuck hiding behind internet anonymity, I sign this with my real name. And if you have any further questions, you can e-mail me; my address is there for you to use. I'd be happy to talk about what RFID readers can and cannot do there.
First of all, I don't have $4K to lay out for a scientific experiment solely to satisfy my curiosity even if I would get it back later. And even if I did, all it would prove is that this particular reader does or does not exhibit the problems you claim it has. Secondly, it's your argument, you back it up. All you would have to do is point out a reference that backs up your claims. If you aren't willing to do this, then I can't take your claims seriously.
I'm making a claim? The whole reason we're having this discussion is because someone else said surreptitious scanning of RFID tags was paranoia that isn't backed by facts. I can't back up my claim because my only claim is: "These things don't do what you say they do." You're asking me to back up a negative claim. If I claim God exists, and then you say God doesn't exist, I can't then come back at you and say, "Prove your claim."
That's why we call it "tin foil hat" paranoia: You have no evidence, you ignore the evidence when it's presented to you, and you're not going to bother yourself to procure it.
There's a reason you can't find an experiment showing whether surreptitious tag reading is possible: It doesn't exist. There are barely any studies -- public and private -- showing the readers can even do what they're supposed to do, which leads right into this:
Meanwhile, if everything you say is true, then the technology is absolutely incapable of doing what WalMart wants to use it for, which so far no one else has mentioned.
Bingo. It's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to do per-item in-store tracking. The costs of the individual tags, the health risks posed by the long-range readers, the unpredictability of the environment, and the mere physics of the damned things aren't likely to make such things feasible, even for noble causes like shoplifting prevention and knowing when to restock bubble gum.
Wal-Mart wants to use RFID for other things, too.
In warehouses and manufacturing centers, you don't have aisles packed with men, women, and children; the people you do have are professionals who are trained to deal with a semi-dangerous environment. You can set up the pallets, products, and readers into predictable positions to obtain predictable behavior. In that way, RFID can save Wal-Mart and the US military costs in their supply chains by tracking pallets and shipments, much in the same way that Delta wants to track baggage.
This is useful. This will save Wal-Mart billions of dollars per year on its own. And it might even be feasible: http://www.buyrfid.com/rfidwizards/docs /tests/rfid _test_results_warehouse.pdf
The RFID industry is full of a lot of hype right now, and organizations like MIT's Auto-ID center are fantasizing about what the technology might be able to do for companies. Only very recently have companies like Delta and Wal-Mart actually begun to try the equipment out to see how well it actually performs, and you can expect that it most likely will not do everything people want it to do. Underneath the hype, the stuff just really isn't that cool.
(begin shameless plug) Now mesh networking, THAT's cool, and THAT's going to change the world forever, especially THIS company: http://www.kiyon.com/ (end shameless plug)
They are 30KW electric resistance heaters, but it doesn't matter. Heat is heat. Microwave ovens don't make things hotter with less power, they make things as hot faster. That's the whole purpose behind them: speed, not efficiency. It still requires the same amout of power to boil that water but a microwave can do it faster because it is transferring its energy directly to the water rather than to the air or the container first. There is a slight gain in efficiency, mostly due to a reduction in heat loss, but not enough to make a real difference.
Electric resistance heaters work by transferring energy to coils. The coils heat up, heating up the air around them, which eventually gets to you. The conversion to heat energy happens in the heater, and then has to pass through air, which is an insulator, so it takes a lot of power to heat a small area.
Microwaves work by bombarding a target with radio waves. Radio waves excite certain molecules, especially oil and water molecules, which then heat the rest of the target. In this case, the transfer to heat energy happens in the target, and the heat transfer doesn't have to fight the air between the transmitter and the target.
Science requires people provide evidence to back up their claims and none of the evidence I've seen supports your position.
I encourage you to verify my claims.
1. Obtain an RFID development kit. Go to http://www.buyrfid.com/ and pick one of the long-range readers. 2. RTFM. Note the copious warnings about being too close to the antenna. 3. Play with it for a couple of weeks with the provided tags. Notice how performance changes if you have multiple tags, or put yourself between the antenna and the tag. Notice how long a tag has to be in the antenna's range to be read. 4. Return developer kit for a refund.
If you do this, you will see that things are as I say they are, with little cost to you other than shipping. If you aren't willing to do this, then you have a closed mind and this discussion has been a waste of your time.
You're going to have to back this up. If a 4 Watt transmitter can noticably warm a human being, I would be very interested in knowing how since I routinely install 30KW heaters in spaces to do exactly the same thing.
Look, I'm only telling you the facts of what has happened with me, actually working with the buggers. Remember that the reader manufacturers' claims of reader performance are only going to list the best-case scenarios, because they want to sell their equipment. They're also going to minimize any health risks. However, if you download, say, the Alien RFID developer's kit and look at the setup instructions and the manual, you'll see a large number of warning listed there.
Are these 30KW microwave heaters?
The whole idea behind a microwave oven is that it heats up water and oil really quickly with very little power. 500W will get a cup of water near boiling in a couple of minutes. It works by sending microwaves at you. Now I'm not using 500W and I'm not inside an oven, but sitting in a cubicle for 8 hours a day with 4 Watts is enough to feel a difference.
That's what people are concerned about. It's looking less and less like "tinfoil-hat" paranoia.
Those antennas are really hard to miss; they're four feet tall and stand on both sides of you. You can easily spot them before you walk into the store, just as you can easily spot the four-inch-plus RFID tag antennas in most of what you wear.
There's another consideration that's important: Bags of water, of which you and I are two, absorb microwaves. You also walk through the antennas rather quickly. That and the fact that none of these systems that work for anti-theft use passive RFID.
Would you like a real-world example of passive RFID that already exists? Keycards for security. I imagine you have a high-tech job or know someone who does (This is Slashdot, right?) where they use these for entry. You have a card about the size of three credit cards layered together. You put it within an inch of a reader antenna and hold there for a good second or so, and then the gate opens. That's a real-world passive RFID reader in action. The tag readers I worked with all worked about the same way, although they did slightly better since I had the benefit of a controlled environment -- but they didn't do great, particularly in the presence of more than a dozen tags.
But I've said this all before, and you didn't believe me then, either -- and why should you? I only claim to have worked with the technology, which is not something you can verify independently. On the other hand, you have product brochures (the last bastion of corporate veracity) to back you up. So believe what you want.
"The point is the difference in power between being able to read a passive tag at 10 feet and cooking human flesh is several orders of magnitude."
Quick cooking, yes. Warming, no.
It takes a certain amount of watts to transmit a signal over a certain distance. The reader has to transmit more than an order of magnitude more than that for enough to be absorbed for the tag to send.
"Here's a reader that can read up to 2.5 meters away (roughly 8 feet) on 4 Watts of power. While it's not quite 20 feet, it's certainly more than a few inches and looks like it could fit in a shoebox."
What you don't see in that photograph is an antenna large enough to transmit over the 2.5m range and a power supply.
The antennae for 2.5m reading is about the size of a notebook -- twelve inches square by one inch deep. Once you combine the shoebox and the notebook together, you've got a bit of weight to lug around. On top of that, you'll need a car battery or two to provide sufficient wattage to power it if you want to lug it around.
Also, the maximum range is not going to read very reliably. You may be able to read a single tag with a rather large built-in antenna from that range after about a second of holding it there, but for the kind of performance you want when surreptitiously scanning an individual, you're going to want to be within a couple of feet. You'll need multiple antennas to get the whole body in range as well, or the large standing antenna pairs like they have at the exit of your local Home Depot.
"900MHz cordless phones have been transmitting much, much farther without cooking anything in between. There are 900MHz baby monitors which will transmit, through walls, from one end of the house to the other and even past it without harming the baby that's in the room."
Those items have ACTIVE TRANSMITTERS. That's like saying that since I require oxygen to live and fish require oxygen, then fish ought to be able to breathe out of water because of the oxygen in the air. As I said before, RFID tags in consumer items are passive; they use the signal from the reader to power themselves. In order to transmit that far at 900MHz, they need a certain number of milliwatts of power to transmit a certain number of milliwatts of signal to reach a certain distance. And that by necessity means you either need a VERY powerful reader, or a very short range.
If it's buried in a tire or something else you can't get to easily, yes, it can be very difficult to find. And even if you can find it it might be impossible to remove without destroying the thing it's attached to. Especially if it's printed directly on it.
Granted. Large objects like tires and refrigerators will be harder to find the tags.
THIS [Link to RFID Journal] says you're wrong.
"This" is designed to promote retailers' adoption of RFID. I am someone who has actually tried to get the bloody readers to read the bloody tags without getting bloody baked, all the while nervously noting the warnings on the reader's instructions saying "BE NINE INCHES AWAY FROM THE ANTENNA!"
They aren't as far fetched as you would have people believe, but that doesn't change the fact that he didn't even let anyone voice their concerns before calling them paranoid. If he even knew what their concerns were, it would be obvious that they don't apply here.
It's obvious to you and me, because we're reasonably well-informed about the subject. Knee-jerk responses have been known to pop up on Slashdot from time to time. Microsoft sucks. Since when have all responses to articles been on-topic? This also isn't the first RFID article to appear on Slashdot where people have discussed the civil rights issues involved.
You're absolutely right that what Delta Airlines is doing is completely different from the concerns of what, say, Wal-Mart is doing.
Let's look at those two concerns.
1. Persistence: "the tags last as long as you have the item they are attached to and can be difficult to find or remove."
The kind of RFID tags that are cheap enough to go on ordinary items like clothing are passive. That is, they get their power from the reader's 915MHz signal. In order to get enough energy to transmit back to the reader from a distance greater than a couple of inches, the tags need relatively large antennas. The ones I've seen are about a quarter-inch wide and four to five inches long. Do you really think you're going to have trouble finding a tag of that size?
2. Surreptitious "the tags can be read without the knowledge of the person holding them."
The guy standing a few feet away could have disguised the antenna as a briefcase and could be acting like he's adjusting his load while waiting for the same bus you are. And maybe you don't quite notice the warming of your skin from the high-powered antenna because it's a hot day already; when I was working with readers in an air-conditioned office, I certainly noticed my body temperature rising! Reading the tags from further than a few inches away requires very high-powered antennas, and you're probably not going to stand around waiting while some guy stands around with an antenna, slowly cooking your body while he tries to read the RFID tags in your clothes.
You'll note that these aren't technological concerns -- there's not a technological way to alter them; these are based on the Physics of radio waves, which Scotty cannot alter -- you can't engineer around them: You're going to need an antenna of a certain size and a transmitter of a certain power to read from a certain distance.
The tags are small, but the tag antennas give them away. You can't see the radio waves, but if the would-be surreptitious reader has to stand three feet from you with a large antenna and beam you with enough signal to warm your skin, then it's not quite going to pass your notice. So the reason for the tin-foil-hat comments is that even the concerns you do list are pretty far-fetched.
I snagged a subscription back in '96 when two girls knocked on my door (hey, they were cute, I can't help myself) were doing that contest thing to see who can get the most subscriptions. I kept it when I discovered myself enthralled by articles even on the most mediocre cars and the dullest topics. I renewed my subscription regularly, and finally let it lapse due more to a lack of time than lack of interest. (It sure wasn't the cost.)
C&D is a worthwhile magazine based on the strength of its writers' ability to write alone. It's just fabulous writing. That's all I can say about it.
I can't say I'm surprised to see it listed here. It was the first magazine that came to mind from the subject. And I'm not what you'd call a "car guy."
That IS an objective fact-based introduction to the article: That statement is complete and accurate regarding what the law was meant to do.
Now even if you can say this is biased, is it a left-wing bias or a right-wing bias? Today, both hardcore conservatives and liberals seem to agree that the preservation of the Bill of Rights is a Bad Idea, because the preservation of civil liberties allows the other side to interfere with their agenda. And the hardcore left and right, by definition, don't want a fair fight. This law was brought into being by a Democratic president and supported by both parties. Is it left-wing to want to protect children from pornographers, or is it right-wing? I'd say it's neither. It makes sense; most people don't want their kids easily able to download porn. It's just that COPA and laws like it is like going on a diet by cutting off your head to keep you from eating. Yeah, it'll keep you from eating, all right... Unless you're Mike the Headless Chicken (White House Bound in 2004).
Even if you could prove that the placement of this statement at the beginning of the article somehow implied a bias, and you could demonstrate the bias one way or the other, a single excerpt does not illustrate a trend. So far this slashdot thread is filled with people who seem to have bought their own "Jump to Conclusions Mat." One story does not equal bias. Outside of legitimate research, you're not going to be able to demonstrate bias.
I even saw a guy bragging that he dumped a friend simply because the friend watched Fox News. "Stop disagreeing with me, or I won't be your friend any more!" What kind of childish bullshit is that? If you only listen to people who agree with you, it's the intellectual equivalent of giving yourself a lobotomy. If you're afraid of any facts that might undermine your precious beliefs, you're as bad as those nut-cases at The Institute for Creation Research.
The immaturity evidenced by the highly-moderated posts on this thread is astonishing.
In the barren wasteland of my hometown (Amarillo, Texas, USA), 1974, a bored rich man, Stanley Marsh 3, paid some artists to bury a handful of classic Caddys nose-first in the dirt, all in a line.
http://www.libertysoftware.be/cml/cadillacranch/ ra nch/crabtr.htm
It's the sort of thing you'd expect to see only in a Douglas Adams model. It's the kind of thing a Vogon could truly appreciate. It's batshit insane. It's goofy. It's just South of I-40 on the West side of town.
Be the first to send your photo! I can't; I'm from Texas.
I mean, it's all and well and good to express doubt behind any new technology, but without some reasoning or facts behind it, it's just mindless FUD. You can believe what you want, but you'd better be able to back it up.
Give some reasons why it'll be in the "distant" future... and what exactly you mean by "distant."
I agree it's too early to pronounce it DOA. The guy's obviously trolling for readership; things like this aren't going to work overnight.
As far as what you've seen work, he does make a good point: Once you get a bunch of people trying to use it at once, things are going to become an issue, especially with the limitations of Access Points.
The future is mesh networking, where rather than an access point, all of the 802.11 devices run in ad hoc mode. Then, routing software, such as AODV, will automatically generate routes with failover.
I work for a company called Kiyon that has been doing ad-hoc mesh networking for a couple of years. By dynamically generating routes between nodes, we can extend range through multiple hops and reliability by changing the route mid-stream. The lightweight nature of the protocol improves latency as well!
So we're pretty happy about what we've got. It'll solve a lot of the problems of VoIP out of the box.
"Thank God somebody is thinking about the children!!!"
hahahaha!:):):)
Bizarre factoid:
During the 2000 campaign, a Republican strategist observed that women respond to the phrase "for the children" positively, regardless of context. (Within reason, of course.)
So, for our children, we must ensure the continued propagation and promotion of the Linux kernel!
I make my living doing work for Linux. Linux created job opportunities for us that didn't exist before it, and has created far more opportunities for the software industry than it has destroyed. Brown seeks to destroy my livelihood, and from what I've read, he's willing to lie, twist, and distort to do it. In fact, that's all he seems able to do.
When it comes to a choice between trying to reason with a liar and defending our ability to feed our children, we'll take the children every time.
So I apologize to you, since we're not exactly being calm and polite about this.
That's a great idea, and now that we know their motives, we know to whom this book should be addressed.
My God, reading this thing... Ken Brown assumed his conclusion from the start. He has a rabid religious fervor to his response; I can see the spit flying from his lips just reading the text.
What's clear is that like all True Believers, Ken Brown will do anything possible to win, and he will never give up. He will not rest to his dying days to fight what he has started. He has put himself in a position he must defend. He is going to shout what he wants to anyone who will listen, and as most people are ignorant of the issue, many of them will.
The only proper response is to educate the masses with the truth before Ken Brown can spread his lies.
This decade is for Microsoft what the 1980s were for IBM.
Look at the parallels.
New technology (PC/Internet) rapidly embraced but not quite understood, instead used to burgeon old business (Mainframes/OS & Office software), while failing to understand the new, true standard (Intel & ISA/TCP & HTTP) that they don't control. Meanwhile, fighting off anti-trust suits, agreement among techies that they are basically evil.
IBM didn't die; they eventually reinvented themselves to take advantage of the new world. They no longer even bother with PCs much any more, other than Thinkpads; the PC is a commodity now, anyway! Soon, so will be the OS, the browser, and the "office" application.
Microsoft won't die, but they'll be has-beens by 2010 or 2015, much like IBM was in the early 90's, until they face the reality of their situation and change. By 1990, IBM was already on the path to change, but it took them a while. Microsoft isn't.
"There's a good reason that most of corporate America is still running Windows 2000. It's one of Microsoft's most solid versions, probably the most stable one since NT 3.51."
Then why do we have issues with Win2k's TCP stack, where we don't with Linux? (Haven't tried XP yet.)
Apple's got issues with their networking code, too... but the difference is, we were able to get a hold of Apple and get them to fix it. (And if we hadn't, we could have just downloaded Darwin source and fixed it ourselves.)
Slashdot Mirror
Look, fair use rights are not something corporations grant to us. They are what the government grants to us, the same government that also governs corporations.
It is not industry's place to "grant" us this. It is our right to do so regardless of their wishes.
Back when SARS initially broke out in the southern part of China, the Chinese government did what it usually did: It sequestered the area and communications to and from it so that people wouldn't start panicking. ("It's good to be the totalitarian regime.")
Of course, word got out anyway. Worldwide panic ensued. How? SMS text messages on cell phones.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. Technology has reached a critical mass where "idea guys" no longer control where technology goes; people figure out new ways to use it on their own, without regard for where it "should" be going. This includes both researchers like Alan Kay, big corporations like Microsoft, and totalitarian regimes like China.
Kay is still stuck in a PC-centric paradigm. It's a lovely paradigm, that. But why would I sit and change how I communicate with a personal computer when my phone's with me everywhere I go now?
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You know, I actually agree with you that you can't just believe whatever I say. You're absolutely right. "I read it on the internet, it must be true," (wink wink, nudge nudge) and all that. Google != Reference and all that.
Now what's the basis for believing this is feasible? Oh, that's right... you read it on the internet. Well, it must be true then.
The fears are "tin foil hat" fears because there isn't any solid evidence out there suggesting that these devices are capable of doing what we fear. Note that I say "we" -- I'm concerned about privacy and our rights, too; I put my money where my mouth is by contributing to the EFF every month.
And to show you that I am not just some random shmuck hiding behind internet anonymity, I sign this with my real name. And if you have any further questions, you can e-mail me; my address is there for you to use. I'd be happy to talk about what RFID readers can and cannot do there.
Jimmy Rimmer
First of all, I don't have $4K to lay out for a scientific experiment solely to satisfy my curiosity even if I would get it back later. And even if I did, all it would prove is that this particular reader does or does not exhibit the problems you claim it has. Secondly, it's your argument, you back it up. All you would have to do is point out a reference that backs up your claims. If you aren't willing to do this, then I can't take your claims seriously.
s /tests/rfid _test_results_warehouse.pdf
I'm making a claim? The whole reason we're having this discussion is because someone else said surreptitious scanning of RFID tags was paranoia that isn't backed by facts. I can't back up my claim because my only claim is: "These things don't do what you say they do." You're asking me to back up a negative claim. If I claim God exists, and then you say God doesn't exist, I can't then come back at you and say, "Prove your claim."
That's why we call it "tin foil hat" paranoia: You have no evidence, you ignore the evidence when it's presented to you, and you're not going to bother yourself to procure it.
There's a reason you can't find an experiment showing whether surreptitious tag reading is possible: It doesn't exist. There are barely any studies -- public and private -- showing the readers can even do what they're supposed to do, which leads right into this:
Meanwhile, if everything you say is true, then the technology is absolutely incapable of doing what WalMart wants to use it for, which so far no one else has mentioned.
Bingo. It's going to be very difficult, if not impossible, to do per-item in-store tracking. The costs of the individual tags, the health risks posed by the long-range readers, the unpredictability of the environment, and the mere physics of the damned things aren't likely to make such things feasible, even for noble causes like shoplifting prevention and knowing when to restock bubble gum.
Wal-Mart wants to use RFID for other things, too.
In warehouses and manufacturing centers, you don't have aisles packed with men, women, and children; the people you do have are professionals who are trained to deal with a semi-dangerous environment. You can set up the pallets, products, and readers into predictable positions to obtain predictable behavior. In that way, RFID can save Wal-Mart and the US military costs in their supply chains by tracking pallets and shipments, much in the same way that Delta wants to track baggage.
This is useful. This will save Wal-Mart billions of dollars per year on its own. And it might even be feasible:
http://www.buyrfid.com/rfidwizards/doc
The RFID industry is full of a lot of hype right now, and organizations like MIT's Auto-ID center are fantasizing about what the technology might be able to do for companies. Only very recently have companies like Delta and Wal-Mart actually begun to try the equipment out to see how well it actually performs, and you can expect that it most likely will not do everything people want it to do. Underneath the hype, the stuff just really isn't that cool.
(begin shameless plug) Now mesh networking, THAT's cool, and THAT's going to change the world forever, especially THIS company: http://www.kiyon.com/ (end shameless plug)
They are 30KW electric resistance heaters, but it doesn't matter. Heat is heat. Microwave ovens don't make things hotter with less power, they make things as hot faster. That's the whole purpose behind them: speed, not efficiency. It still requires the same amout of power to boil that water but a microwave can do it faster because it is transferring its energy directly to the water rather than to the air or the container first. There is a slight gain in efficiency, mostly due to a reduction in heat loss, but not enough to make a real difference.
Electric resistance heaters work by transferring energy to coils. The coils heat up, heating up the air around them, which eventually gets to you. The conversion to heat energy happens in the heater, and then has to pass through air, which is an insulator, so it takes a lot of power to heat a small area.
Microwaves work by bombarding a target with radio waves. Radio waves excite certain molecules, especially oil and water molecules, which then heat the rest of the target. In this case, the transfer to heat energy happens in the target, and the heat transfer doesn't have to fight the air between the transmitter and the target.
Science requires people provide evidence to back up their claims and none of the evidence I've seen supports your position.
I encourage you to verify my claims.
1. Obtain an RFID development kit. Go to http://www.buyrfid.com/ and pick one of the long-range readers.
2. RTFM. Note the copious warnings about being too close to the antenna.
3. Play with it for a couple of weeks with the provided tags. Notice how performance changes if you have multiple tags, or put yourself between the antenna and the tag. Notice how long a tag has to be in the antenna's range to be read.
4. Return developer kit for a refund.
If you do this, you will see that things are as I say they are, with little cost to you other than shipping. If you aren't willing to do this, then you have a closed mind and this discussion has been a waste of your time.
You're going to have to back this up. If a 4 Watt transmitter can noticably warm a human being, I would be very interested in knowing how since I routinely install 30KW heaters in spaces to do exactly the same thing.
Look, I'm only telling you the facts of what has happened with me, actually working with the buggers. Remember that the reader manufacturers' claims of reader performance are only going to list the best-case scenarios, because they want to sell their equipment. They're also going to minimize any health risks. However, if you download, say, the Alien RFID developer's kit and look at the setup instructions and the manual, you'll see a large number of warning listed there.
Are these 30KW microwave heaters?
The whole idea behind a microwave oven is that it heats up water and oil really quickly with very little power. 500W will get a cup of water near boiling in a couple of minutes. It works by sending microwaves at you. Now I'm not using 500W and I'm not inside an oven, but sitting in a cubicle for 8 hours a day with 4 Watts is enough to feel a difference.
That's what people are concerned about. It's looking less and less like "tinfoil-hat" paranoia.
Those antennas are really hard to miss; they're four feet tall and stand on both sides of you. You can easily spot them before you walk into the store, just as you can easily spot the four-inch-plus RFID tag antennas in most of what you wear.
There's another consideration that's important: Bags of water, of which you and I are two, absorb microwaves. You also walk through the antennas rather quickly. That and the fact that none of these systems that work for anti-theft use passive RFID.
Would you like a real-world example of passive RFID that already exists? Keycards for security. I imagine you have a high-tech job or know someone who does (This is Slashdot, right?) where they use these for entry. You have a card about the size of three credit cards layered together. You put it within an inch of a reader antenna and hold there for a good second or so, and then the gate opens. That's a real-world passive RFID reader in action. The tag readers I worked with all worked about the same way, although they did slightly better since I had the benefit of a controlled environment -- but they didn't do great, particularly in the presence of more than a dozen tags.
But I've said this all before, and you didn't believe me then, either -- and why should you? I only claim to have worked with the technology, which is not something you can verify independently. On the other hand, you have product brochures (the last bastion of corporate veracity) to back you up. So believe what you want.
"The point is the difference in power between being able to read a passive tag at 10 feet and cooking human flesh is several orders of magnitude."
Quick cooking, yes. Warming, no.
It takes a certain amount of watts to transmit a signal over a certain distance. The reader has to transmit more than an order of magnitude more than that for enough to be absorbed for the tag to send.
"Here's a reader that can read up to 2.5 meters away (roughly 8 feet) on 4 Watts of power. While it's not quite 20 feet, it's certainly more than a few inches and looks like it could fit in a shoebox."
What you don't see in that photograph is an antenna large enough to transmit over the 2.5m range and a power supply.
The antennae for 2.5m reading is about the size of a notebook -- twelve inches square by one inch deep. Once you combine the shoebox and the notebook together, you've got a bit of weight to lug around. On top of that, you'll need a car battery or two to provide sufficient wattage to power it if you want to lug it around.
Also, the maximum range is not going to read very reliably. You may be able to read a single tag with a rather large built-in antenna from that range after about a second of holding it there, but for the kind of performance you want when surreptitiously scanning an individual, you're going to want to be within a couple of feet. You'll need multiple antennas to get the whole body in range as well, or the large standing antenna pairs like they have at the exit of your local Home Depot.
"900MHz cordless phones have been transmitting much, much farther without cooking anything in between. There are 900MHz baby monitors which will transmit, through walls, from one end of the house to the other and even past it without harming the baby that's in the room."
Those items have ACTIVE TRANSMITTERS. That's like saying that since I require oxygen to live and fish require oxygen, then fish ought to be able to breathe out of water because of the oxygen in the air. As I said before, RFID tags in consumer items are passive; they use the signal from the reader to power themselves. In order to transmit that far at 900MHz, they need a certain number of milliwatts of power to transmit a certain number of milliwatts of signal to reach a certain distance. And that by necessity means you either need a VERY powerful reader, or a very short range.
If it's buried in a tire or something else you can't get to easily, yes, it can be very difficult to find. And even if you can find it it might be impossible to remove without destroying the thing it's attached to. Especially if it's printed directly on it.
Granted. Large objects like tires and refrigerators will be harder to find the tags.
THIS [Link to RFID Journal] says you're wrong.
"This" is designed to promote retailers' adoption of RFID. I am someone who has actually tried to get the bloody readers to read the bloody tags without getting bloody baked, all the while nervously noting the warnings on the reader's instructions saying "BE NINE INCHES AWAY FROM THE ANTENNA!"
They aren't as far fetched as you would have people believe, but that doesn't change the fact that he didn't even let anyone voice their concerns before calling them paranoid. If he even knew what their concerns were, it would be obvious that they don't apply here.
It's obvious to you and me, because we're reasonably well-informed about the subject. Knee-jerk responses have been known to pop up on Slashdot from time to time. Microsoft sucks. Since when have all responses to articles been on-topic? This also isn't the first RFID article to appear on Slashdot where people have discussed the civil rights issues involved.
You're absolutely right that what Delta Airlines is doing is completely different from the concerns of what, say, Wal-Mart is doing.
Let's look at those two concerns.
1. Persistence: "the tags last as long as you have the item they are attached to and can be difficult to find or remove."
The kind of RFID tags that are cheap enough to go on ordinary items like clothing are passive. That is, they get their power from the reader's 915MHz signal. In order to get enough energy to transmit back to the reader from a distance greater than a couple of inches, the tags need relatively large antennas. The ones I've seen are about a quarter-inch wide and four to five inches long. Do you really think you're going to have trouble finding a tag of that size?
2. Surreptitious "the tags can be read without the knowledge of the person holding them."
The guy standing a few feet away could have disguised the antenna as a briefcase and could be acting like he's adjusting his load while waiting for the same bus you are. And maybe you don't quite notice the warming of your skin from the high-powered antenna because it's a hot day already; when I was working with readers in an air-conditioned office, I certainly noticed my body temperature rising! Reading the tags from further than a few inches away requires very high-powered antennas, and you're probably not going to stand around waiting while some guy stands around with an antenna, slowly cooking your body while he tries to read the RFID tags in your clothes.
You'll note that these aren't technological concerns -- there's not a technological way to alter them; these are based on the Physics of radio waves, which Scotty cannot alter -- you can't engineer around them: You're going to need an antenna of a certain size and a transmitter of a certain power to read from a certain distance.
The tags are small, but the tag antennas give them away. You can't see the radio waves, but if the would-be surreptitious reader has to stand three feet from you with a large antenna and beam you with enough signal to warm your skin, then it's not quite going to pass your notice. So the reason for the tin-foil-hat comments is that even the concerns you do list are pretty far-fetched.
"I foresee that Atari will be back with their own portable media player; ..."
How about this: Atari comes back, and failing to have learned from ET, yet again makes too many copies of a crappy game rushed to market?
I mean, my God, it's not even the same people, and they're doing the same stupid things over again.
I snagged a subscription back in '96 when two girls knocked on my door (hey, they were cute, I can't help myself) were doing that contest thing to see who can get the most subscriptions. I kept it when I discovered myself enthralled by articles even on the most mediocre cars and the dullest topics. I renewed my subscription regularly, and finally let it lapse due more to a lack of time than lack of interest. (It sure wasn't the cost.)
C&D is a worthwhile magazine based on the strength of its writers' ability to write alone. It's just fabulous writing. That's all I can say about it.
I can't say I'm surprised to see it listed here. It was the first magazine that came to mind from the subject. And I'm not what you'd call a "car guy."
That IS an objective fact-based introduction to the article: That statement is complete and accurate regarding what the law was meant to do.
Now even if you can say this is biased, is it a left-wing bias or a right-wing bias? Today, both hardcore conservatives and liberals seem to agree that the preservation of the Bill of Rights is a Bad Idea, because the preservation of civil liberties allows the other side to interfere with their agenda. And the hardcore left and right, by definition, don't want a fair fight. This law was brought into being by a Democratic president and supported by both parties. Is it left-wing to want to protect children from pornographers, or is it right-wing? I'd say it's neither. It makes sense; most people don't want their kids easily able to download porn. It's just that COPA and laws like it is like going on a diet by cutting off your head to keep you from eating. Yeah, it'll keep you from eating, all right... Unless you're Mike the Headless Chicken (White House Bound in 2004).
Even if you could prove that the placement of this statement at the beginning of the article somehow implied a bias, and you could demonstrate the bias one way or the other, a single excerpt does not illustrate a trend. So far this slashdot thread is filled with people who seem to have bought their own "Jump to Conclusions Mat." One story does not equal bias. Outside of legitimate research, you're not going to be able to demonstrate bias.
I even saw a guy bragging that he dumped a friend simply because the friend watched Fox News. "Stop disagreeing with me, or I won't be your friend any more!" What kind of childish bullshit is that? If you only listen to people who agree with you, it's the intellectual equivalent of giving yourself a lobotomy. If you're afraid of any facts that might undermine your precious beliefs, you're as bad as those nut-cases at The Institute for Creation Research.
The immaturity evidenced by the highly-moderated posts on this thread is astonishing.
Proof positive that reality and H2G2 have merged:
/ ra nch/crabtr.htm
In the barren wasteland of my hometown (Amarillo, Texas, USA), 1974, a bored rich man, Stanley Marsh 3, paid some artists to bury a handful of classic Caddys nose-first in the dirt, all in a line.
http://www.libertysoftware.be/cml/cadillacranch
It's the sort of thing you'd expect to see only in a Douglas Adams model. It's the kind of thing a Vogon could truly appreciate. It's batshit insane. It's goofy. It's just South of I-40 on the West side of town.
Be the first to send your photo! I can't; I'm from Texas.
Lucky limey buggers.
The EU won't last anyway. Why do we care what they think?
Why not?
I mean, it's all and well and good to express doubt behind any new technology, but without some reasoning or facts behind it, it's just mindless FUD. You can believe what you want, but you'd better be able to back it up.
Give some reasons why it'll be in the "distant" future... and what exactly you mean by "distant."
I agree it's too early to pronounce it DOA. The guy's obviously trolling for readership; things like this aren't going to work overnight.
As far as what you've seen work, he does make a good point: Once you get a bunch of people trying to use it at once, things are going to become an issue, especially with the limitations of Access Points.
The future is mesh networking, where rather than an access point, all of the 802.11 devices run in ad hoc mode. Then, routing software, such as AODV, will automatically generate routes with failover.
I work for a company called Kiyon that has been doing ad-hoc mesh networking for a couple of years. By dynamically generating routes between nodes, we can extend range through multiple hops and reliability by changing the route mid-stream. The lightweight nature of the protocol improves latency as well!
So we're pretty happy about what we've got. It'll solve a lot of the problems of VoIP out of the box.
"When laws stop making any kind of sense or justice, I stop obeying them."
Or as Thoreau stated in "Civil Disobedience," when a law is unjust, it is the duty of the just man to break that law.
"Thank God somebody is thinking about the children!!!"
:) :) :)
hahahaha!
Bizarre factoid:
During the 2000 campaign, a Republican strategist observed that women respond to the phrase "for the children" positively, regardless of context. (Within reason, of course.)
So, for our children, we must ensure the continued propagation and promotion of the Linux kernel!
I think Linux has created far more jobs than it has destroyed.
It's kept me employed for the past 2.5 years.
I think that's a big reason why this is such a hot-button issue for me.
Perhaps you're right.
I make my living doing work for Linux. Linux created job opportunities for us that didn't exist before it, and has created far more opportunities for the software industry than it has destroyed. Brown seeks to destroy my livelihood, and from what I've read, he's willing to lie, twist, and distort to do it. In fact, that's all he seems able to do.
When it comes to a choice between trying to reason with a liar and defending our ability to feed our children, we'll take the children every time.
So I apologize to you, since we're not exactly being calm and polite about this.
That's a great idea, and now that we know their motives, we know to whom this book should be addressed.
My God, reading this thing... Ken Brown assumed his conclusion from the start. He has a rabid religious fervor to his response; I can see the spit flying from his lips just reading the text.
What's clear is that like all True Believers, Ken Brown will do anything possible to win, and he will never give up. He will not rest to his dying days to fight what he has started. He has put himself in a position he must defend. He is going to shout what he wants to anyone who will listen, and as most people are ignorant of the issue, many of them will.
The only proper response is to educate the masses with the truth before Ken Brown can spread his lies.
This decade is for Microsoft what the 1980s were for IBM.
Look at the parallels.
New technology (PC/Internet) rapidly embraced but not quite understood, instead used to burgeon old business (Mainframes/OS & Office software), while failing to understand the new, true standard (Intel & ISA/TCP & HTTP) that they don't control. Meanwhile, fighting off anti-trust suits, agreement among techies that they are basically evil.
IBM didn't die; they eventually reinvented themselves to take advantage of the new world. They no longer even bother with PCs much any more, other than Thinkpads; the PC is a commodity now, anyway! Soon, so will be the OS, the browser, and the "office" application.
Microsoft won't die, but they'll be has-beens by 2010 or 2015, much like IBM was in the early 90's, until they face the reality of their situation and change. By 1990, IBM was already on the path to change, but it took them a while. Microsoft isn't.
"There's a good reason that most of corporate America is still running Windows 2000. It's one of Microsoft's most solid versions, probably the most stable one since NT 3.51."
Then why do we have issues with Win2k's TCP stack, where we don't with Linux? (Haven't tried XP yet.)
Apple's got issues with their networking code, too... but the difference is, we were able to get a hold of Apple and get them to fix it. (And if we hadn't, we could have just downloaded Darwin source and fixed it ourselves.)
It's even worse for my company; we're doing wireless networking and we have to support all three desktop OSes.
:P
So we're talking about Macintoshes, and Medium Access Control, frequently in the same sentence.
"Point of order: Can we refer to them as 'Apples?'"
Of course there's a certain music label that might have an issue with that, too...