Friday, October 14, 2005

Scary RFID Games

Schneier's Blog.

Topic is an editorial in the Boston Globe on RFID tracking. Go and read the piece. There are some decent points about privacy, or lack there of.
It's one of the cutest of those cute IBM Corp. TV commercials, the ones that feature the ever-present help desk. This time, the desk appears smack in the middle of a highway, blocking the path of a big rig.

''Why are you blocking the road?" the driver asks. ''Because you're going the wrong way," replies the cheerful Help Desk lady. ''Your cargo told me so." It seems the cartons inside the truck contained IBM technology that alerted the company when the driver made a wrong turn.

It's clever, all right -- and creepy. Because the technology needn't be applied only to cases of beer. The trackers could be attached to every can of beer in the case, and allow marketers to track the boozing habits of the purchasers. Or if the cargo is clothing, those little trackers could have been stitched inside every last sweater. Then some high-tech busybody could keep those wearing them under surveillance.

Nervous yet? I wonder if there is a way to make a hand held scanner that is cheap enough to have at home so you can find and disable those chips?

I'm going to quote one of the comments from Schneier's Blog though, not because it's completely relevant, but because I find it so amusing.
Please notice that the guy riding shotgun in the semi truck is none other than Tracey Walter, who played Miller in "Repo Man." Miller is famous for the "plate of shrimp" monologue. "A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness."

Just another part of the lattice of coincidence.

I found this utterly funny, because I thought of Walter in the Repo Man character when I saw the commercial.

No comments: