Related link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4721175.stm

There are real privacy and security considerations in the use of of RFID, but consider the following:

“It’s a very scary technology,” said Katherine Albrecht, a consumer rights analyst and founder of Caspian, a pressure group which opposes RFID.
“I would no longer be known as a living, breathing, spiritual person but become known as a single number that would be emanating from a chip in my flesh… essentially becoming a form of human inventory, rather than a human being.”
…
“A criminal could scan you surreptitiously, then use that information to access other information about you, and potentially do some identity theft,” she said.
“The other thing they could do is that, by scanning that number, it’s actually quite a simple matter to capture the number and create your own chip with the same number in it.
“You could simply programme a different chip, put it inside an encapsulated device, and put it in your own arm - and at that point you could pose as the individual whose identity you have chosen to steal.”

• RFID is Scary and will somehow effect her spirtually
• RFID will associate her with a number
• People can read her number
• People can use her number

I wonder if Ms. Albrecht uses a credit card? It’s much easier to do all of the things she describes with your credit card number. When was the last time she handed that credit card to a waiter who then walked off with it?

As for how the spiritual consequences of having an RFID tag differ from those of having a credit card, I can’t comment except to answer some of the charges that this form of identification somehow matches bibical prophesies. One of the actual scriptures this argument refers to reads:

so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. Rev 13:17 (NIV)

But what about the following scripture?

A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: “If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, Rev 14:9 (NIV)

This seems to describe a visible mark (otherwise why is it on the forehead or hand?) not an invisble chip inserted into the back of the arm or shoulder.

With that said, I should probably point out that I’m not exactly running out to have an RFID tag implanted in my arm. I do think there is merit in the argument that I should be able to turn the tag on and off or shield it in some way to disable it for privacy. Also, with such a fast changing technology I would be worried that any tag in the near future might become obsolete and need to be replaced. Also, Ms. Albrecht failed to mention the most obvious way of stealing the tag, either removing it (which might be thwarted by some sort of heat sensor in the tag itself), or kidnapping me and standing me close to the reader. In much the same way that more advanced alarm systems may have led to carjacking, an implanted ID could lead to “bodyjacking.” The application described in the article, identifying victims of catastrophes, does seem like a suitable application for an embedded chip, but statistically only a tiny percentage of us are likely to die in that manner, and by definition we can’t know which of us will be effected ahead of time. For now, I’ll stick with an tag on a keychain.

What about you? Would you get “chipped?”

There is probably something wrong with an industry when a Google search for one of its major products returns results that do not include the names of any of the big players.

Do they not care? Or is it simply not important?

Ah well, at Least Asterisk is where it belongs.

Is this relevant?

Related link: http://www.educatedguesswork.org/movabletype/archives/2005/07/why_voip_over_s.ht…

Many network engineers know that having multiple reliable layers is a waste of effort. (One classic essay is Why TCP over TCP is Bad Idea.) Eric Rescorla, one of the leading experts on SSL and a general all-around security guy, recently analyzed the problem of transmitting VoIP over an SSL VPN, which can be generalized into a set of problems faced when layering a streaming protocol on top of a reliable transmission protocol.

This is one of the rare cases in computing where reliability is an undesirable attribute. Reliable protocols retransmit data so that you can get all of the bits in the same order they were transmitted. The implict assumption is that it is better to wait a bit to get the data correctly and in order. In most cases, that assumption is true. I’d rather have the bits making up what I read or the pictures I see in the order they were transmitted, even if I have to wait slightly longer. For most types of data, you might as well give up if you can’t get the bits in the right order.

Streaming transmissions are a bit of a different animal. The stream must go on. The value of any particlar bit diminishes very quickly with age. If bits don’t arrive on time, you may as well just forget about them and move on. Retransmissions gum up the works by holding up the bits you want right now in favor of the lost bits you probably don’t care about any more. In the meantime, you still have to do something to keep the stream chugging along. In streaming protocols, the old adage “better late than never” does not apply. Instead, it becomes “better never than late.”

The quickly diminishing value of late bits is one of the big reasons that many voice packages use UDP. Lost data stays lost. The endpoints don’t use valuable network capacity trying to find it by retransmitting the lost data. Keeping lost data out of the picture is one of the advantages that IPsec has as a VPN technology for voice. IPsec is an unreliable (meaning no automatic retransmissions) protocol. If IPsec packets are lost, a higher layer protocol has to make the decision to retransmit, but IPsec will not throw sand in its own wheels.

I don’t know how much, if any, trouble the additional reliability causes. Most of the people I know using VoIP are either subscribers to a service (my provider uses UDP), or are encrypting the call with IPsec (which also refrains from retransmitting). I don’t have any direct expereiencewith VoIP over a reliable protocol. (For that matter, I don’t have any good indirect experience, either.) TCP is good at providing high average utilization, but it might deliver that capacity in bursts. TCP is not well suited to delivering small bits of capacity at frequent intervals. My guess is that the reliability causes more severe problems in the case of network congestion because it causes TCP to slow down and retransmit more often.

Do you send your voice over TCP, SSL, TLS, or any other reliable protocol?

More on Google Earth… with all the Google Map and now Google Earth “hacks” popping up you have to ask yourself, is this slick geospatial viewing tool much more than simply a viewer, and even more so, is it a very clever way to access and integrate licensed data and imagery within your own custom application without having to license the data?

Google will tell you that Earth is bringing geospatial data to the mainstream user’s desktop.. no question there. But I simply can’t figure out how clever users such as those at Prudential Chicago are legally allowed to serve up a custom real estate search application, with high-res imagery, and get away without paying licensing fees for the data… doesn’t everyone else have to pay for that data? There’s this implied vision that Earth and all the imagery available on the users’ desktop is free and without restriction. Naturally there’s an agreement that one must accept before installing and running Earth, however, that doesn’t seem to be slowing down programmers who are eagerly creating applications. As an example, Prudential launched their Chicago real estate search application just 3 days after Google Earth was officially made available. The crew at Prudential had apparently been working on a browser plug-in so that when a user opens their browser they would get a list of properties. When Google Earth launched June 28 they saw their chance and quickly designed the modification and created the Google Earth app.

Related link: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1836199,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

Piggly Wiggly, the inventors of the modern supermarket, are deploying a new thumbprint payment system in their stores nationwide. While not strictly RFID news, this is still one of the key supporting technologies for the “checker-less” supermarket we’ve all been talking about.

Under Farrell’s recommendation, Piggly Wiggly launched a pilot program to test Pay By Touch in a small group of stores last fall. The test run went so well it was quickly expanded to a companywide rollout.

Shoppers who signed up for the new payment system were able to open accounts that linked either to credit card accounts or to checking accounts. They could link all Pay By Touch transactions to their store loyalty cards as well, so they could get credit for shopping at Piggly Wiggly without having to carry the loyalty card.

Original story: Piggly Wiggly Finds the Right Touch from “Read My Mind!“.

Do you use loyalty cards or credit cards? Would you use a biometric payment system if you had the chance?

The concept of LAMP is an acknowledgement of the fact that a complete web solution can be deployed using open-source technologies. The viability of the concept is demonstrated by the fact that LAMP has emerged as the most popular way to deliver such things.

LAMP is essentially this:
L - Stands for Linux, but can also be any of the flavours of BSD
A - Is Apache, and little else (more on that in a moment)
M - Is MySql, but also, increasingly, PostgreSQL
P - Is PHP, Perl, Python or Pretty-much-whatever-language-you-like.

So what does all this do? It allows you to deliver web pages. OK, it’s clearly far more than that, but only to a certain point.

Here’s the concept that could shake things up a bit:

With the advent of open-source telephony systems (especially the darling of the media, Asterisk), the concept of LAMP takes an exciting left turn. What if we were to replace “A”pache with “A”sterisk?

Sound a bit far fetched? It’s happening right now.

Consider:
L - Asterisk runs on Linux
A - This one’s easy :-)
M - Asterisk has support for databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, ODBC . . .
P - Asterisk hackers love Perl, and the Asterisk Gateway Interface (AGI) allows you to script with any language that can communicate using STDIN and STDOUT

Suddenly, LAMP isn’t just about delivering web content, it’s about all the various ways open-source software can allow us to creatively communicate.

There are many of us who believe that the open-sourcing of telecom heralds a revolution. Just as Linux and the Internet changed the industry, so too will the ability to finally, properly integrate telecommunications with the rest of the services and applications we use to communicate across our networks.

This is going to get very interesting, very quickly.

How are you using Asterisk?

Turns out that a 1991 patent covers off that technology and as a result some legal action is being taken against a real estate agent. Imagine if this one flies? Do you realize how many real estate agents have implemented similar functionality into their website? What about companies like RealBird who also have commercial products based on the same premise? Details of the patent are below:

The U.S. Patent (No. 5,032,989), “Real Estate Search and Location System and Method,” was granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in 1991, at a time when the commercial use of the Internet was in its infancy. It covers a mapping system “for locating available real estate properties for sale, lease or rental using a database of available properties at a central location and remote stations which use a graphic interface,” according to the document. The patent also includes a “drilldown” feature, under which specific areas can be displayed in greater detail — The PR is also listed in detail here http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/6274/

What’s your take on this? Imagine holding a patent on searching for hotels, parks, or ??? Seems kind of crazy if you ask me

Problem

A colleague is trying to call you while you’re in a meeting. You can’t answer the call, and need a way to signal your availability besides just dumping the caller in voice mail.

Solution

With a trivial modification, you can use your phone to send a canned SMS message back to the caller. This requires a change to the phone’s software, but will be easy to do. In some cases, such as Palm and PocketPC devices, you might be able to do this hack yourself. In others, you’ll need to wait for the device manufacturer to implement this. In either case, it is a very simple trick, and so there is no reason not to do it.

I have a Treo 600 smartphone. When I receive an incoming call, the phone displays the incoming call information, along with two prominent softkeys, one labeled Answer, and one labeled Ignore. This display would be modified to display three buttons, with a third one labeled Ignore w/ Message.

When I push Ignore w/ Message, the phone diverts the call to voice mail, and then displays a menu with several large buttons, each corresponding to a canned SMS/text message (e.g. “I am in a meeting now, I saw you just called, and will call back in a while.”). You push the desired button, and then the phone goes off and tries to send an SMS message back to the calling party. The caller will receive the text message, and will then know your status.

This system will work well for mobile-to-mobile calls, but will not work for land lines, since no SMS capacity exists for most landlines. However this should work quite well for calls from other mobile phones. It’s a simple enough trick to implement, so especially for smartphones, this would make a lot of sense.

Related link: Where 2.0 - O’reilly notes Hackers are teaching the industry

From Tim O’reilly… “Google maps with Craigslist is the first true Web 2.0 application, neither of the sites was involved…a developer put it together,” he said. “Hackers are teaching the industry what to do.”

O’reilly also noted that all the killer apps are now using open source

See the blog here

Also regarding google maps… this discussion gets real interesting. Participants in the discussion are Yahoo!’s Jeffrey McManus and ChicagoCrime.org’s Adrian Holovaty (Google map hacker) - Why the Yahoo! Maps API is Better Than Brand X Maps API

Speaking of Google.. how about this new Send to phone extension

I’m constantly amazed by the things developers are cracking into with the APIs that are available. Now Google has a send to phone extension (for firefox). It’s an extension that enables you to send short text messages of web page content to your mobile phone. How cool is that?

Just wait until some google map hacker taps into this and develops an app that will send driving directions to a mobile! Imagine, you get lost so you call home and get your wife to tap google for directions and the results are sent to you via SMS… nice!

See http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/extensions/sendtophone/

Also, if you’ve been following our Google maphack section you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve been constantly adding developer tools and links to new maphacks - see the feature HEre

Related link: http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/6198/140/

The site hasn’t got much “meat” at the moment and it appears to be focusing on simply reposting image captures of cool places discovered using Google Earth.. a cool idea I guess, although not really a “hack” nor rocket science.. actually, if I’m not mistaken I believe that as part of the license agreement with Google Earth, screen grabs are actually a big no no and not allowed.

On the flip side, the website did point me to an interesting developer document now available from keyhole - the Google Earth KML Document - http://www.keyhole.com/kml/kml_tut.html - The document reveals everything a developer (or map hack) needs in order to create and share information with a Google Earth client.

Related link: http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/6215/

The NCTC has been designed structurally to withstand tremendous force and the focus of the center is to support counter terrorist activities and help stakeholders share data.

As the cameras panned around the facility during today’s special sneak-peek at the facility, viewers saw special meeting rooms, analysts sitting in front of multiple screens of information, and perhaps most notably, video screens and monitors showing maps, satellite imagery, and other spatial data products. It quickly became apparent to me that at the heart of the center’s UI was GIS. This was no surprise to me (or many other viewers I’m sure), however, it’s great for us in the industry to once again see that geospatial technologies are being recognized as a crucial tool, particularly in securing our nation. Interesting to note, intelligence operatives from not only the US but from allied nations will also cooperate and share information at with the NCTC.

This description comes from President Bush after a recent tour of the facility… “The NCTC plays a key part in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It’s a crucial part of making sure that we can say to the American people, we’re collecting intelligence and information and we’re sharing intelligence and information across jurisdictional lines to better protect the people and do our most solemn duty, which is to protect America.”

See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/06/20050610-4.html