See for yourself what happens if you have an RFID implanted and go through an MRI machine:

via the comments over on Dedroidify

No, the MegaCorps don’t want to keep you uninformed and ignorant of how vulnerable you may be. Whatever gave you that idea?

via Cory@BoingBoing

See Also:

• Boing Boing TV: How to hack RFID enabled credit-cards for $8
• xkcd’s Unscientific

Wealthy Mexicans, terrified of soaring kidnapping rates, are spending thousands of dollars to implant tiny transmitters under their skin so satellites can help find them tied up in a safe house or stuffed in the trunk of a car…..Mexico ranks with conflict zones like Iraq and Colombia as among the worst countries for abductions….The company injects the crystal-encased chip, the size and shape of a grain of rice, into clients’ bodies with a syringe. A transmitter then sends signals via satellite to pinpoint the location of a person in distress.

Most people get the chips injected into their arms between the skin and muscle where they cannot be seen. Customers who fear they are being kidnapped press a panic button on an external device to alert Xega which then calls the police.

Outside of Mexico, U.S. company Verichip Corp uses the same kind of implants to identify patients in critical condition at hospitals or find elderly people who wander away from their homes.

But Xega sees kidnapping as a growth industry and is planning to expand its services next year to Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela.

Link via reuters.com.

Ready for some interface design pr0n? Then prepare yourself for Aurora:

…a concept video presenting one possible future user experience for the Web, created by Adaptive Path as part of the Mozilla Labs concept browser series. Aurora explores new ways people could interact with the Web in the future based on projected technological trends and real-world scenarios.

This is, to my mind, quite a linear extrapolation from current usage. A pretty fair guess at the world we will all reside in within a few years.

For more detail, click through to the site, where they have chunked up the video into four parts, with a helpful commentary explaining the technologies they see intersecting to accomplish the scenes depicted in the video.

UPDATE – Adaptive Path have put up some background on this in their blog, including the scenarios that were developed and how they workshopped this vision of the future:

Through a series of group exercises, we identified three major trends that we thought would have the biggest impact on the web:

• Augmented Reality: The gap is closing between the Web and the world. Services that know where you are and adapt accordingly will become commonplace. The web becomes fully integrated into every physical environment.
• Data Abundance: There’s more data available to us all the time — both the data we produce intentionally and the data we throw off as a by-product of other activities. The web will play a key role in how people access, manage, and make sense of all that data.
• Virtual Identity: People are increasingly expected to have a digital presence as well as a physical one. We inhabit spaces online, but we also create them through our personal expression and participation in the digital realm.

It seems like some researchers from Radbound University in The Netherlands took advantage of the recent Four Days Marches of Nijmegen walking race for a little experiment earlier this month, where they convinced ten volunteers to swallow an RFID pill as part of a study to monitor body temperature. Apparently, the pills recorded and transmitted the walkers’ core temperature to a receiver in their backpack every ten seconds, which in turn sent the data via Bluetooth to a GPS-enabled phone that then relayed it to the operations center at Radbound. With all that info at their disposal, the researchers were able to monitor each walker and alert them if their temperature was reaching a dangerous level, or even alert others nearby if they weren’t responding (which apparently wasn’t necessary). As you might have guessed, the researchers are already hard at work planning an even larger test for next year’s event, which they hope could eventually lead to the system being used at marathons and other sports events.

Link via engadget.com

Not a Biometr, yet.

Attendees at this weekend’s hacker-event-of-the-year in New York, The Last HOPE will receive RFID badges to improve physical networking at the conference.

…the Attendee Meta-Data (AMD) project will introduce a new location-aware social networking system to track and bring together hackers based on a huge array of matching interests.

The AMD social networking site lets visitors “tag” themselves based on a diverse set of interests. Old-school hackers, network security experts, cryptographers, political activists, law geeks, lockpickers, reverse engineers, bloggers, privacy advocates, and far more–visitors can label themselves with multiple interests, to become discoverable by fellow visitors from around the world with similar interests, in the same room or across the building. Attendees can then use email or text messages to “ping” the people they discover on the site–new contacts and old friends alike…

…participation is voluntary. And attendees who do participate can choose to reveal as much or as little personal information as they desire. Users can see other users’ handles, but contact information is not divulged until users send or reply to pings.

Link via core77.com

The first time I ever heard of Shenzhen and the “Special Economic Zone” was when I was working for an international information clearinghouse that should remain nameless. It came up when I was facing the possibility of transferring to our Pan-Asia branch and living there part time. However, over the years, other than being the place where, chances are good, any random bit of tech you have on your desk was manufactured (your iPhone’s been there, as have many other Apple and IBM products, Wal-Mart items and the like) Shenzhen only popped back up on my radar a few months ago as one of the birthplaces of the new surveillance culture.

Chinese officials call it call it “The Golden Shield” and while it’s ostensibly a project of the Chinese Government, it’s being developed by familiar companies like IBM, AT&T, Nortel, Cisco, General Electric, Yahoo, Honeywell, and according to some reports, Google. What the Golden shield comprises is the largest integrated surveillance network in existence. It combines the existing “Great Firewall” which filters almost all net content into China with the “Safe Cities” initiative which includes cameras in all internet cafes, many entertainment venues, and in many cities (2 million cameras in Shenzhen alone by 2010) and a massive photo and biometric information database of all of China’s 1.3 billion citizens.

It’s a massive and lucrative project which is why Western companies are flocking to build a better democracy-free future for China, while here in the US they continue to sell a “freedom friendly” image. Meanwhile the “Golden Shield” has already been tested on examples like the Lhasa riots which recently left anywhere from 16 to 100 people dead as monks clashed with police. The Shield allowed CCTV footage to yield become identities and then locations of many monks and passersby involved in the rioting allowing Chinese police to quickly round up hundreds of people allegedly involved. The same security system is being used, of course, to protect the upcoming 2008 Olympics as well.

As Naomi Klein writes in the Rolling Stone article that many of my statistics are pulled from, these are the kind of companies doing business with China on the sly in order to testbed a new generation of biometrics technologies:

You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it “captures” more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security’s massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with “mobile iris and multimodal devices” so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department’s “largest facial-recognition database system”; and produces driver’s licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in “extremely general” terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company’s CEO would only say, “Stay tuned.”

The good news, though is that the American Government, as they learn about these technologies is only too eager to strip mine them for ideas:

The revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was “mined for ideas” by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools. For Walton, the most chilling moment came when the Defense Department tried to launch a system called Total Information Awareness to build what it called a “virtual, centralized grand database” that would create constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage from surveillance cameras. “It was clearly similar to what we were condemning China for,” Walton says. Among those aggressively vying to be part of this new security boom was Joseph Atick, now an executive at L-1. The name he chose for his plan to integrate facial-recognition software into a vast security network was uncomfortably close to the surveillance system being constructed in China: “Operation Noble Shield.”

Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men like Atick have already been put into practice at home. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the images collected can be mined for “face prints,” then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases. Although Total Information Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing to car rentals, and selling it to the government.

Check out the rest of that excellent article for far more detail on the topic of surveillance culture in China. My goal isn’t to poke at China in particular. For example the draconian national firewall around our old friend Dubai (as well as Saudi Arabia, and Qatar) is built and administered by U.S. based company Secure Computing a.k.a. Smart Filter. Now leaving aside the possibly vastly hypocritical clash behind some of their senior staff’s personal lives (Google boingboing, adult baby, and smartfilter, if you care to) and the technologies they develop to limit internet access for others, once again we have a Western company (this one more public about it since internet censorship is their raison d’etre) implementing and developing censorship technologies overseas.

What prompts this little link-filled rant, then? Well, today the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed. This act, for those of you playing along at home or abroad, first of all offers up immunity to Verizon, AT&T, and several other telecom companies for their part in assisting the National Security Agency with warrentless wiretaps before and after the 9/11 attacks. The act then proceeds to arguably weaken oversight of domestic wiretaps and information collection. The Bill passed with overwhelming support, granting retroactive protections for invasions of privacy by a collection of telecom companies.

These are some of the same telecom companies and their interests that, as we’ve seen elsewhere, have their hands on the rudder of a different Web 2.0. One that resembles the satirical USIdent integrated internet/entertainment/surveillance solution from Southland Tales more than it does the Web 2.0 of a thousand blog entries. While it’s easy to see mainly the utopian or fantastic applications of a lot of the technologies we discuss and trumpet on here, so many of them have an equal footing in a parallel version of the future being grown as we speak by some of the same companies produce the cool new future gadgets.

This is one of the reasons I take the “find outbreaks of the future” mandate so seriously. First of all, outbreaks of the future are not always pretty; but secondly, by keeping our eyes open and aggregating this kind of information, we’re at least increasing the odds of being able to pick our own futures. Because honestly? I don’t want the futures that the people are offering “liberation” with jokes about surveillance are selling.

At least, that’s what I tell myself at night.

Check out this BBC video of the German “Supermarket of the Future,” which appears to be an actual working supermarket, not some concept. Microchipped food packages, “intelligent freezers,” cell phone bar code interfaces, and even interactive games in the seafood section.

By far the coolest feature is that you scan items (with your cellie) as you collect them; at the end your phone produces a single bar code containing the prices of everything, so you run that over the scanner for a superfast checkout.

Photo and link via core77.com

See the video from the BBC News.

- image via core77.com

PingMag recently visited Tokyo’s RFID Expo and instead of taking the usual 1984 angle, like RFID tags embedded in school uniforms for teachers to monitor, they put together a geeked out photo collection of some of the more interesting chip designs. It’s always fascinating to get a look into the culture of any creators who are working in a purely functional industry, more so when they use an opportunity to subvert or be humorous.

Link and photo via core77.com

From Natural News:

A Rhode Island school district has announced a pilot program to monitor student movements by means of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips implanted in their schoolbags.

The Middletown School District, in partnership with MAP Information Technology Corp., has launched a pilot program to implant RFID chips into the schoolbags of 80 children at the Aquidneck School. Each chip would be programmed with a student identification number, and would be read by an external device installed in one of two school buses. The buses would also be fitted with global positioning system (GPS) devices.

Parents or school officials could log onto a school web site to see whether and when specific children had entered or exited which bus, and to look up the bus’s current location as provided by the GPS device.

I am all for the future, but not when it is being driven by Fear.

That being said, it would be cool to have a screensaver that shows your child and pet running around on a GoogleMap.

thanks for the tip-off Ryan Jarrell!

- image via makezine.com

Wow, this could grow into something quite awesome. Pachube is -

a web service that enables people to tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices and spaces around the world, facilitating interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. The idea is to make it relatively simple to “plug” together interactive projects and buildings around the world, as well as to create embeddable graphs of sensor feeds.

Only eighteen feeds conected at the time of this post – but the datastreams are already quite interesting – from a Japanese living room to a swing in Sweden. Head over to the site to learn how to connect your own sensor/stream – Pachube Thanks, Chuckster!

Link and image via makezine.com

- image via technabob.com

The “take a seat” chair is a robotic chair that follows you around! The user has a library card embedded with an RFID chip, which the chairs use to find and follow their target. Also, it’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.

The video is fun to watch as you get to see the chair in action, following this guy around the library. Somehow the chair is cute enough that it doesn’t seem too creepy that it’s always right behind you.

Dutch designer Jelte van Geest created the chairs for Openbare Bibliotheek Endhoven, a library design project. He says. “Robots are often seen as mean machines. However, they do have a more friendly side, which should have a more prominent place in our society.”

Link, video and picture via technabob.com

- image via engadget.com

RFID has long since been a pretty common find in your modern day hospital, but now GE and CenTrak are teaming up to make the technology even more useful in those long, winding hallways. Simply hailed as RFID “virtual walls,” the creation enables venues to “track tagged mobile medical equipment down to a portion of a single room.” By providing sub-room-level distinction, personnel can locate hardware within a monitored area as tiny as 6- x 8-feet, and although it’ll likely be used to locate cardiac defibrillators and portable ultrasound machines, patients could theoretically be tracked, too. The new tech will be shown off at the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) Conference in San Jose next week, though there’s no word on how soon the duo will roll this stuff out en masse.

Link via engadget.com

- picture via blog.makezine.com

- picture via blog.makezine.com

Welcome to the cat future, all doors will scan your cat’s microchip (RFID) and if it’s your cat it can come inside…

Keeps out unwanted cats by using your cat’s existing microchip number without the need for a collar. Automatically detects light levels and can keep your cat in at night. Designed by a vet.

Link via blog.makezine.com

From MAKE:

…a conveyor belt that has an RFID reader underneath. When you place a wooden icon tile for a website (which has an RFID tag on it), it brings up that page on your web browser.

John Edgar Park’s RFID Conveyor Belt – video powered by Metacafe

Not only is this a righteous hack, but it has some great real world applications. I can see it being adapted to get children, the intellectually-changed and just plain old folks online and/or using specially tailored computer programs.

Objects of Desire is a Neo-Situationist’s walk in the company of capricious spimes through an invisible city of electromagnetic waves. The play-map constitutes of real names of wireless access points, found during a “WIFI-Sniff” through the city of Gijon. Names of actual urban WIFI zones (my favourite was called Familia Alvarez) are mapped and tagged like street-names in the exhibition space while aether waves with the same subjective names are also superimposed on the arts space, as playground.

I asked Ludite Margarete Jahrmann to give us more details about their game:

How does the game work technically? Does it use rfid?

Yes, each object is tagged with a RFID tag. Our self-built LS-Gerät can sniff each box and based on the RFID number and cabbalistic numerology rules the object’s desire will be appointed.

On the other side, we hide a couple of WIFI network clouds (some openWRT hacked linksys routers) in the exhibition space by which each player is located through the built-in WIFI function of Nintendo DS. The clouds are named and geographically located like access points in Gijon-city.

Basically, it is a very speculative motion tracking, like a triangulation with cell phones, virtual and real. Anyhow we used them as an inverse surveillance for each player. Each move is logged ;)

Link via we-make-money-not-art.com, article by Regine.

NTT has begun selling a device that transmits data across the surface of the human body and lets users communicate with electronic devices simply by touching them, the company announced on April 23.

The new product, called “Firmo,” consists of a card-sized transmitter carried in the user’s pocket. The card converts stored data into a weak AC electric field that extends across the body, and when the user touches a device or object embedded with a compatible receiver, the electric field is converted back into a data signal that can be read by the device. For now, Firmo transfers data at 230kbps, but NTT is reportedly working on a low-cost 10Mbps version that can handle audio/video data transfers.

Firmo is based on NTT’s RedTacton human area network (HAN) technology, which is designed to allow convenient human-machine data exchange through natural physical contact — even through clothing, gloves and shoes.

NTT initially hopes this human area network technology will appeal to organizations looking to boost convenience and security in the office. Obvious applications include secure entrances and keyless cabinets that recognize employees when they touch the door handle (thus bypassing the need for card-swipers and keys), or secure printers that operate only when you touch them.

Link via pinktentacle.com

Immediate benefits – no lost luggage. (Yeah, sure)

Slightly longer-term? Stick an RFID in or on your person and you’ve got another part of the recipe for ultra-precise augmented reality.

It’s inevitable that RFIDs will soon work there way into our homes. Just as you will probably soon be able to google your shoes, so will your own mobile device or PC know exactly where you are.

Because just as WiFi Signal strength is now being used for medium-level geopositioning to supplement GPS, RFID Readers like this will give us the last level of granularity needed to perform the real-time tracking required to realize Augmented Reality, as demo’ed in videos like this:

Removing the need for those QRCodes you can glimpse scattered around the room; an ugly kludge to give the camera some idea where to place the virtual characters, but no uglier than the rough, prototyped equipment.

Yes, this raises the whole Privacy issue again. At the very least the early versions of this will probably be homebrewed; bits of OpenSource code tied together by Perl or Python, and stuck behind a powerful firewall.

But once the commercial applications start coming out (think LARPs meet MMORPGs) well, to say some strict measures will need to be enforced is an understatement. Because every kid on the planet will want to play, but could you imagine convincing a parent that someone other than them should be able to record their child’s precise location.

Even more importantly though, where’s the other part of the tech needed for Augmented Reality; functional (and non-ugly!) HUDs?!

Ok, we’ve been reading about RFIDs here for a while now. So it’s probably no surprise to learn that University of Washington researchers are busy ‘prototyping the future’; namely mucking around with RFID tags and getting paid for it.

Yes, clearly I wouldn’t mind that job. However, they’re not just running around tagging things. This is where it gets interesting:

They created an application called RFIDDER that lets people use data from radio tags to inform their social network where they are and what they’re doing. The feature can be used on the Web and on a mobile phone, with a connection to the social-networking service Twitter.

Borriello can let Welbourne, the project’s lead graduate student, see where he is all day, or he can modify settings so Welbourne can only see where he is within 15 minutes of their scheduled meeting. The system is transparent, so each can tell if the other has checked his whereabouts.

The lab’s Personal Digital Diary application detects and logs a person’s activities each day and uploads them to a Google calendar. Users can search the calendar to jog their memories about when they last saw someone or how, where and with whom they spent their time.

That’s freaking excellent. A service that is constantly and automatically answering the question “Where Am I?” (as opposed to Twitter’s “What Am I Doing?”).

For starters, that makes an awesome addition to one’s personal lifelog.

And that information is conditionally shared with the members of your network? Nice.

Because you’re going to need a lot of control to prevent information overload. Just as most of us disable replies in Twitter for those we don’t follow, so would we really not care where person-X is all the time.

I’m thinking something like notify me when:

1. my Contact changes Location (ie new City)
2. when we have an appointment (integrates with GoogleCalendar, etc)
3. I’m about to unexpectedly run into them.

And throw in a broadcast mode for good measure; just so you can say look at where i am!

But why else would you want to be constantly updated whenever your Buddy goes to the toilet? Unless you’re uber-stalking person-X. Or they’re your child or something.

Of course, all of this is nothing compared to massive ambitions of that South Korean experiment, New Songdo City . But it’s still pretty neat.

via Futurismic

Check out the latest episode of Boing Boing TV wherein:

hacker and inventor Pablos Holman shows Xeni how you can use about $8 worth of gear bought on eBay to read personal data from those credit cards — cardholder name, credit card number, and whatever else your bank embeds in this manner.

I’ll sure be shopping for a stainless steel wallet when my credit-card company inevitably forces me to upgrade to it’s “new and improved” technology.