Please scan my towel
jerrygamblin.com
jerrygamblin.com
I used to have an rfid chip implanted in my hand. I had all these ideas of what I was going to do with it - log on to my computer by putting an rfid reader in my keyboard, build a magic 'touch the wall and music starts playing' thing etc. All of them turned out to be very boring and useless in practice. Logging into my machine - meh, turns out that it takes longer for monitors to come back on than to type the password. Building (useful) user interfaces based on rfid is very hard and doesn't add anything over a regular proximity sensor.
The only idea I have left is that in my current house, I have a place where I could put an rfid reader so that if I'd get a chip implanted in my gluteus maximus (my butt, essentially) I could activate an automatic door opener by bumping into it when I have my hands full. I just can't motivate myself to set this up and discovering again that it's a dud in real life.
This library lets visitors rearrange the books organically (if you pull out multiple books on a topic, you're encouraged to put them back on the shelf together instead of finding their old homes). The books are tracked with RFID so that they remain easy to find individually.
I can understand the experiment, the dewey-decimal system doesn't have to be the ultimate in organisation.
Source: the door-opening sensors at my college, many years ago, were all located at the right height for a key in the back pocket to activate them. I referred to it as the "buttprint identification system".
At my school, I had to jump up quite a bit (and I am 6' tall) to get them to read the card.
In many installations of both hardware and software, the actual usage of the system is quite different from what was imagined by the designers. Prox card installers imagine people holding up cards on lanyards. They mandate it not be carried in a wallet, because "the magnetic fields of a credit card can erase it" and it might break if it's bent. In real life, only freshmen carry lanyards, credit cards use high-coercivity stripes and aren't damaged by the prox readers or cards, and wallets with IDs and credit cards are stiff enough.
Talk to your users about how they use your product and what they need! You will learn something!
I think that story deserves a little elaboration.
EDIT: Wow, this is apparently a thing. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microchip_implant_(human)#Hobb...
It shows real commitment to the tech. And also, it looks cool when you can make machines do stuff with just a wave of your hand. Sorcery!
I went to a piercing study, girl stamped a hole in the upper layers of my skin, made a small cut to open it up a bit further, slid in the ampule (which had been autoclaved first of course). Band aid on it, done. It was strange being in a studio with a bunch of people with facial tattoos and horn implants and discs the size of my wrist in their ears - and them looking at me like I was a freak from out of space. I do have to say though that I had to search around a bit to find someone willing to do it. There are plenty of places that will take your money to suspend you from their ceiling with flesh hooks in your back, but that won't stick a glass pill under your skin. Go figure.
You can also buy kits online if you want to DIY - basically big needle guns that are used to tag cattle which you just jam into your hand and pull the trigger on, literally. That would've been a bit too hard core for me, tbh.
It's the same (exact?) thing as far as I'm aware; rice-sized glass bit with a tiny RFID chip inside.
More interesting, in my opinion, is "surgically" inserting a little magnet into the tip of one of your fingers, which then vibrates in magnetic fields such that your nerves can feel it.
This gives you a sixth sense - you can sense magnetic fields.
http://io9.gizmodo.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-getting-m...
My co-worker solves by unlocking the front door when the home server sees his phone's (and his wife's phone's) MAC address on the home wi-fi network. (But only during "waking hours" so the server doesn't leave the door unlocked when everyone is sleeping.)
Btw, I went to the demo of enerscore (which looks pretty interesting) and it wasn't working for me. I'm on Firefox last build and OSX if that helps. :)
You can reload the passes online, the lift attendants can check everyone's pass just by waving a scanner across a crowd (no more having to precisely line up a barcode), you get online stats and achievements at the end of the day, and if you have photos taken on the hill they automatically show up in your online account.
So ya, definitely some really cool stuff you can do with them. :)
Might be cool in a car.
...maybe that's how the batmobile works.
Well, boring for users perhaps. For people who like to track you, it is certainly not boring. It is more like fingerprint heaven!
Edit: said death meant birth.
My main experience with RFID is cloning tags onto T5557 chips, and I don't think I've ever come across a writable tag in the wild. It doesn't seem to make economic sense to spend an extra penny or two on every towel to put in a tag you are never going to change.
Turns out they didnt lock the tables' tags, so you could write urls and when people placed their phones down, had those urls open. (they used the tags for their food pager system)
That tag is about the right level of security for towel inventory. The big win in this is managing outsourced laundry costs. Knowing how many items went to the laundry, and how many came back, rather than just counting linen carts, matters a lot. ABS Laundry Solutions overview (with ominous music) [1]
Having designed the RFID tag system for a conference before, there's a real cost difference between crypto-capable NFC tags and ordinary ones, once you factor in the number of badges you need to print.
Then consider that (a) the conference probably has very little budget for an RFID implementation, and (b) the NFC tag isn't used for anything that's security-sensitive -- mostly checking in at vendor booths, attendance tracking, etc.
Given that, I can totally understand why RSA didn't use something more secure.
The BIG fail here is that the towel manufacturers didn't toggle the read-only fuse in the tags, which allows them to be overwritten by anyone with an Android smartphone.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/20/that-hotel-towel-youre-st...
NFC is a specific kind of RFID which uses the ISO 18000-3 band for communication over short distances. There are many other types of RFID, which can have much longer ranges.
On the other hand, theft by employees is something they are probably much more concerned about. Before this technology, you have to wonder how many hotel housekeepers had fully furnished their own homes with towels and bed linens at the expense of their employer.
You can get similar services for mechanics' overalls, door mats, chef's uniforms, and things like that. They'll even put the right uniform in the right employee's locker, if you like [1].
Often there will be different pools for different hotels, as well as different pools for different items and sizes. Good inventory management helps you get the customers' orders right; you don't want to deliver a Holiday Inn towel to a Hilton, or have a tablecloth in a delivery of bedsheets, or deliver 99 bedsheets when you promised 100. Also, if things are getting damaged or going missing you need to know where things are going, and when you need to order replacements.
Of course, bar codes are also in use [2] but in hotels particularly they like the markings to be subtle.
[1] https://www.phs.co.uk/our-services/managed-workwear/locker-s... [2] http://www.giltbrookworkwear.co.uk/operation/laundry-facilit...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11212357 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11207155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11217681
My previous workplace (an international organization that shall remain anonymous) had vending machines where you could "buy" an RFID key that acted sort of like a "wallet". You could refill it by putting it inside the vending machine and then inserting coins, or you could use it to buy goods from the machines. It used MIFARE Classic and was trivial to break, and the cash amount was stored as cents in a short integer. Fun stuff, you could even buy deodorant and panties.
Then, several towns in my country use RFID cards for public transportation payment. Guess what? Even systems implanted AFTER these cards were deemed highly insecure are using them.
I guess this is called progress.
The solution given by the government was to block the cards that were used with fraudulent refills on a weekly basis, but there is always the possibility of changing the ID or purchasing blank cards.
Of course the system was chosen years after the vulnerabilities were discovered, too.
My guess is that the only way to stop this is to replace all the scanners, which will be far more expensive than losing a few thousand paying customers per day.
There's also different kinds, for environments with high security demands you're not supposed to use DESfire cards, not Ultralight: https://www.mifare.net/en/products/chip-card-ics/