NFC will tell you when a Rolex is fake | Hacker News Reader

NFC will tell you when a Rolex is fake

extremetech.com

25 pointsmrsebastian32 comments

This sounds like a solution in search of a problem. Sure, there are a lot of knock-off products out there, but the people who care typically know how to spot the fakes. The people willing to spend $5k or (a lot?) more on products they know are often faked, haven't educated themselves on how to spot those fakes, and aren't buying from people they trust, are probably not going to put forth the effort to benefit from this anyway.

This market doesn't work exactly like other consumer goods markets. It doesn't make sense to apply the same kinds of protections.

That and RFID is really easy to fake.

Only if it's implemented poorly

Most systems are implemented poorly. However, even even with encryption as long as you don't authenticate with an online server somewhere once you have physical access to the device is almost impossible to prevent someone from copying the internal key's. You might end up producing 50,000 identical devices that are easy to track after the fact but they can be sold before those defects are noticed at which point they can just swap to the next set of key's.

Worse yet most 'secure' RFID systems just retransmit the same key every time and trust repeated use to be detected by other systems.

Does anyone see a problem with this from a privacy stand point? If a company said they were going to embed RFID tags in goods people would be up in arms. NFC on the other hand; that is a great idea to protect the consumer. Isn't NFC just RFID by a different name and if you bought one of these products wouldn't you be accepting being tracked whenever you wore it? Seems a bit like a physical manifestation of a Facebook 'Like' button. Innocuous on the surface but designed for a whole different purpose from the get go.

There's an RFID tag in every Kindle. I don't see Amazon bothered by this.

I bet 99% of kindle owners don't know that.

How does one track an RFID chip? It's not a homing beacon. One would have to be constantly bumping up against readers to get that effect.

I don't mean track in the sense of continuously tracking location. I mean track in the sense that you could put a scanner in an entrance to a store and as you walk through the door you'd be scanned. Sort of how an Internet tracking cookie identifies a visitor.

Muggers - you know the score. Risking life and limb and all you end up with is a moody rolex, Download Mugr from the android market to find out who's worth mugging!

Does anybody actually think street vendors are actually selling Prada bags? Unless you keep the NFC tags in your purchased items and invite your friends to scan you for authenticity, I think this is just a way for NFC vendors to rip off Prada.

This is really about informing the customers of legitimate stores that (unknowingly) sell counterfeit products at full price.

More importantly, do the people who buy them care? I'd wager that most of the people know they're all fake - my girlfriend certainly did - but the purse I bought her was nice enough to pass for one, and it's a nice purse regardless of whatever logo someone superglued to it in a garage.

People buying these things in the street aren't going to bother checking them.

It's a much bigger problem than that. Thousands of rich Chinese people travel to the US/Europe just to buy luxury items, since it's borderline impossible for them to be sure that the items they buy are legit if they buy it in stores in China. Fakes doesn't have to be poor quality, there are also a lot of top-notch fakes out there rivalling (or even sometimes beating) the quality of the originals.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/world/europe/eager-chinese...

Great. So now if I choose to buy a Rolex, there's a good chance that anyone with a halfway decent antenna will be able to find out that I'm wearing a watch worth stealing.

If you choose to buy a Rolex you would be probably already one of that kind of people who buy their shirts with extra short sleeves...

If you're going to bash someone based solely on their watch purchase, please at least do it with a coherent sentence.

"To prevent tampering, Inside Secure has created several options for higher-powered antennae that will allow the chip placement deep inside objects and still function"

If it's only in the real products, I don't see why people would want to remove it (except maybe once, to try and copy it.)

As a data point: I used to have an RFID based business and reading any sort of passive RFID tag took a pretty good antenna and close proximity (almost touching) or lots of power.

On a somewhat unrelated note... Web developers need to lay off messing with the scrolling of their mobile sites. I generally scroll a little bit at a time on my phone and the mobile version of this site tries to get fancy with simulated pages. This makes the page move back to the top of the page when you scroll a little bit.

I had my wife try the same page to see what she would do and I noted a similar fighting the interface problem because when she scrolled the page would move more than expected and she would lose her place while reading.

TL;DR - mobile sites on phones have many issues but scrolling is not one of them, don't 'fix' it.

Thing is, it's impossible to have native scrolling and a static header/footer on most mobile browser. So we end up resorting to these horrible hacks. I can't wait until position:fixed is implemented natively.

Wouldn't it just be easier and cheaper to print a barcode on each product and let customers use it to verify the authenticity of the product using a web site?

Presumably "easier and cheaper" implies "easier to fake" too. I guess the NFC solution has enough cost attached to it to make replicating it impractical for counterfitters?

I guess NFC only removes web site step. Meanwhile small producers on unique goods can use barcode approach. Isn't that sweat idea for new startup?

What if the goods with copied barcode got sold before the authentic one?

or what if there exist many goods with same unique barcode, scattered around the world.

this requires a mean to identify where the unique good is (if it exists at all). would rfid fix this? hmmm shrug

1 physical product (not class of products) = 1 barcode = 1 identification

E.g. in web system you can assign owner to barcode (product). Different scenarios if owner is known before purchase or assigned later. All other trials to validate product id as unique should fail and client might request return of money.

Barcodes can be copied visually, whereas chips can be made difficult to clone.

I don't know. Half the point of owning a Rolex is its fully mechanical nature without any microelectronics.

But could work fine for other goods.

I have met companies using qr codes to validate wine and perfume for authenticity.

I have been playing around with this idea for the last couple of hours now(seeing I actually need to study) and after my exams I'm thinking of building a prototype like this using qr codes. Do you maybe have company names I can Google for to see how the market looks and if my idea is "unique" as I think it is?

I hope there is some way to shut down the RFID chip once you buy the item

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