From my Globe column this week:
“Talk about function creep.
A new product, the RosettaStone (www.personalrosettastone.com), guarantees that RFID will follow you straight to your grave.
The RosettaStone is a palm-size stone tablet representing the deceased. It bears an RFID tag that communicates with mobile phones — directing users to an Internet memorial archive.”
via New tech tracks you to the tomb – The Boston Globe.
Google’s got it covered:
The company recently joined the Internet Protocol Smart Object Alliance:
The IPSO alliance now boasts 53 member companies, including Bosch, Cisco, Ericsson, Intel, SAP, Sun Microsystems and Texas Instruments.
The news agency reports the undead will seek revenge, for their hasty burials:
Dumping the dead in hurriedly excavated mass graves without proper rites is seen as desecration in a country where many believe in zombies — dead bodies brought back to life by supernatural forces who could persecute the living.
via Haiti’s voodoo priests object to mass burials | Reuters.
Classic:
New ID cards are supposed to be ‘unforgeable’ – but it took our expert 12 minutes to clone one, and programme it with false data
Adam Laurie is no ordinary hacker. In the world of computing, he is considered a genius – a man whose talents are used by government departments and blue-chip companies to guard against terrorists and cyber-criminals.
via New ‘unforgeable’ ID cards cloned and reprogrammed in 12 minutes « Aftermath News.
All in it together. CC/Kenneth Lu
This item (excerpt, link, below) is about more than a cross-cultural exchange between two of the largest data-gathering giants on Earth.
I say, welcome to the Internet of Things. P&G wants all of its goods to bear RFID tags, which for the first time will match each of us to the individual items we purchase with credit or customer loyalty cards.
Google is also already in the locative business, through Google Flu Trends, and as the co-investor (with former CIA, Bechtel and Bin Laden family officials) in a company deploying a wireless grid over San Francisco.
Now, imagine a search engine, accessible to government agencies only, which could light-up a Google Earth map with everything you ever paid for, anywhere on the planet.
At Procter & Gamble Co., the corporate culture is so rigid, employees jokingly call themselves “Proctoids.” In contrast, Google Inc. staffers are urged to wander the halls on company-provided scooters and brainstorm on public whiteboards.
Now, this odd couple thinks they have something to gain from one another — so they’ve started swapping employees. So far, about two-dozen staffers from the two companies have spent weeks dipping into each other’s staff training programs and sitting in on meetings where business plans get hammered out. The initiative has drawn little notice. Previously, neither company had granted this kind of access to outsiders.
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No one is immune from the fret agenda. CC/Kerys
I’m starting this week on a new site for my new show, “Fret Level.” And when I read stories like this one, from the Las Vegas Sun (excerpt, link, below), I am reassured that my timing is good.
The show, streamed via Live 365 and downloadable via iTunes, will focus on the electronic means used by governments to control the behaviors of large populations. (Personal technologies, and ubiquitous computing devices are a part of that.)
Terror has served governments well: the fear of it, the witch-hunter’s desire to stamp it out, the corporations’ desire to capitalize on it. All are behind what is making us feel ill, with no apparent reason.
“We are bombarded with information about our alert status and we’re told to report suspicious-looking characters,” Penn said. “That primes people to be more paranoid.”
Traumatic events can make people more vulnerable to having paranoid thoughts. Since the attacks, Penn said Americans have been conditioned to be more vigilant of anything out of the ordinary.
While heightened awareness may be good thing, Penn said it can also lead to false accusations and an atmosphere where strangers are negatively viewed.
That can result in more social isolation, hostility, and possibly even crime. And it can take a toll on physical health. More paranoia means more stress, a known risk factor for heart disease and strokes.
Still, some experts said that a little bit of paranoia could be helpful.
“In a world full of threat, it may be kind of beneficial for people to be on guard. It’s good to be looking around and see who’s following you and what’s happening,” Combs said. “Not everybody is trying to get you, but some people may be.”
Photo: Courtesy of MasterCard
From my Boston Globe column this week, MasterCard says any bank can now issue computer codes, rather than cards, to consumers.–mb
I usually tap my RFID-chipped Citizens Bank card against the checkout reader to streamline the transaction. Once I’ve fished the card out of my wallet, and then out of its Identity Stronghold spy-blocking sleeve, that is.
Soon, I will not have to open my wallet: MasterCard-issuing banks can now set up their customer’s RFID phones to make wireless purchases at retailers with RFID readers.
via Headset takes calls from real world, too – The Boston Globe
RFID privacy sleeve-maker Identity Stronghold this week learned from NASA that the metal claps holding workers’ IDs in place can pop-out, damaging eyeballs, potentially, or delicate, space-bound computer hardware.
At least, that is NASA’s story.
Identity Stronghold founder Walt Augustinowicz tells Parallelnormal that “a NASA safety worker forcefully and incorrectly pried our badgeholder apart so he could remove the clips and then installed them backwards.”
(Sounds like NASA’s safety worker is a regular Homer J. Simpson.)
The space agency, Augustinowicz says, has only barred the shield on badges worn in a flight area clean room, where such bans are common. It might instead use another product from Identity Stronghold, which has no moving parts.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CmLsWav6-8]
NASA Security Badges are a Health and Safety Risk | Universe Today
Use of the badge holder, made by the Florida-based company Identity Stronghold, has now been suspended and a temporary clear plastic holder is being used in its place. The Stronghold design was chosen as it has an “electromagnetically opaque sleeve to prevent the card from being read at a distance and to give the user some control over when and where the card is exposed for reading,” according to the source Information Week article.
Also: See my Boston Globe writeup re: Identity Stronghold
Journalists “screw up” health story… trust business to fix the problem, says business blogger.
(RFID tags didn’t cause his heart attack. But arphids can make matters worse. Photo: Daubentonia)
from Mark
Widespread reports this week that RFID signals could kill you in the hospital are false, a technology business blogger is claiming.
The blogger, at the technology website ZNDet, makes this bogus assertion: that hundreds of news outlets are twisting the results of a disturbing Dutch finding (published by the Journal of the American Medical Association): that RFID tags and readers can cause livesaving equipment to switch off.
In fact, Vrije University researchers reported total switch-offs and other severe malfunctions in its tests of pacemakers, dialysis machines and ventilators, operated within about ten feet of RFID tags.
The ZDNet blogger, Dana Blankenhorn, employing a condescending “now let’s set the record straight” voice, ignores the central findings of the Dutch study. Instead, Blankenhorn says that hundreds of news reports, based on the JAMA report, “screw up” those facts.
Blankenhorn says a tweak in RFID standards — a process that could take nearly a decade, as today’s standards did (something he does not note) — is all that is needed to fix the EM interference problem.
But the RFID horse is already out of the gate: The tags are becoming as ubiquitous in hospital wards and operating rooms as they are on the street. (Click here for my Boston Globe report on RFID tags in hospitals.)
Lack of RFID standards leads to media panic | ZDNet Healthcare | ZDNet.com
There is a problem with RFID in hospitals. There is no standard that will tell hospitals what frequencies the tags are using. Thus they can’t tell when the frequencies being used by the tags might interfere with other gear.This problem is very easy to fix. The industry gets together on an RFID medical standard, which specifies which frequency is to be used. My choice would be the upper range of 802.11, around 5.8 MHz. Medical devices don’t run there.