We've
discussed it before, but
RFID, that fun-loving little radio transmitter that can be attached to everything from that stereo system to a carton of milk, is plowing ahead faster than you can say "unregulated." Earlier this year, Wal-Mart
issued a mandate that required its top 100 suppliers to include RFIDs on their merchandise by 2005, bringing new meaning to the phrase
"panties in a bunch." (Incidentally, Wal-Mart was also the benign corporation
that ushered in bar codes for mass consumption in the late 70s and early 80s.) With no regulations on the table, the
New York Times reports that
the Defense Department plans to issue a statement requiring all suppliers to use RFID.
Hitachi has even offered to put it in your currency. Imagine a store a few years from now that can track all of the objects in your cart, and that, thanks to a microscopic RFID stuck to your shoe when you slide through the doors, can determine how many seconds you or your children react to a display. Imagine a world that tracks exactly where each one of your dollar bills go. (So much for the anonymity of johns and porn enthusiasts.) Is this the kind of world we want to abdicate to large retail corporations? Is this the kind of information that governments or private institutions are entitled to know? Discuss.
posted by ed
on Sep 29, 2003 -
96 comments
Microsoft unleashes Palladium,
an intrusive doozy of a feature involving specially secure AMD/Intel computer chips and cryptology provided by Microsoft. Newsweek's head-bobbing Steven Levy, the first to get the story,
remains taciturn, failing to call into question Microsoft's
security sins of the past.
Geeks run scared while
digital rights and GPL concerns are wholly ignored by the mainstream media. Is this yet another example of a malcontent media that will never possess the balls to actually question a new feature put out by Microsoft? Even
Wired can't seem to read between the lines of a technology that "stemmed from early work by engineers to deliver digital movies that couldn't be pirated."
posted by ed
on Jun 25, 2002 -
16 comments
