Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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RFID for Commerce is Surveillance?
 
Computer Pioneer Bob Bemer
 
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The Ever-Shifting Tide of Communication and Civil Literacy
 
We Must Like Blogger Because ...
 
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Lady Bugs for RFIDs?

Lady Bugs for RFIDs?

I'm chatting with Vicki over breakfast and I mention that I am gathering information on RFIDs (pronounced arphids). "I guess you're not talking about little green bugs that infest the rose bushes?" she responds.

I'm dumbstruck.  Of course, what we need are lady bugs for RFIDs.  What a great symbol.  Little lady-bug lapel pins that eat arphids.  This could be the greatest thing since the pet rock and lead-lined underware.  I am thinking that we need a tasteful nano-lady-bug design with nice fluorescent sparkles when it is being scanned. It could even have, you know, an RFID jammer or virus build into it.  Or, we could say it does.  The stick-pin is the antenna.  [Or it is an arphid and scanner spotter, an even more promising option for the executive model -- see the updates below.]

Stepping back into the aluminum-foil headgear department, I was wondering how RFIDs are discriminated.  If they are all over the place, how does a sensor discriminate the responses?  I need to see how they probe and deal with response collisions, but it makes me wonder if RFID congestion is a problem.

That has me thinking about RFID safety garments.  We could collect RFIDs, and keep them like butterfly collections, stitching them into our underwear or creating something like RFID merit-badge scarves (and headgear). People can proudly wear their collections and claim records of various kinds. You know, confirmed RFIDs from Indonesian child-labor sweatshops found in your last pair of running shoes. When you have a healthy pelt of these things, wear it shopping.  At, say, Wal-Mart.

It could happen.

[added 2004-06-27-20:20Z]:  Arphid Accessorizing!  Wait, there's more.  How about affinity arphids, little lady-bug pins that have designs that express community identity: "John Q. Public," "Jane Q. Public," "Silent Majority," "I Gave at the Office," "Swing Vote," "Republicrat," "Demican," "Apathetic," "Bipartisan," "Independent Voter," "Librarian," "Homeless Neoconservative," and that great geek cloak, "Anonymous Coward."  And every arphid for a single affinity has the same identity.  Be the first in your neighborhood to collect and wear the entire set.  Have meet-ups where what you have in common is the same arphid identification.  You Are Legion.  Heh.

This could be the greatest thing since cabbage-patch kids.  I wonder who knows how to make these things . ... Do you think that, if I pull this off, I can be in the next Michael Moore movie?

[added 2004-06-27-20:47Z]:  Then there's "The Borg," "Jane Doe," "Kinky,"and "Cruisin'" when you're on the prowl.  Teens will love arphid scanners built into their video-cellphones. Ear-jewelry can be incorporated into whatever that 3-holes in the left, 1-in the right ear is intended to signify.  Kids, make your folks crazy at a whole new level.

Think of it, treasure hunts for hidden arphids.  Arphid Lotto!

Not to mention that if business firms let their product-tracking arphids into the wild, they may find that their operations are just a wee bit more transparent than intended.  After all, it is just gigantic data aggregation, a great exercise of peer-to-peer computational grids.  We have the technology.  "Big Brother, we are watching you."

You gotta love it.  Open-source arphid-defeating lady-bug grids.

OK, I'm done.  The comment section is open.  Keep it anonymous.  This is a watchbird watching Google.  This is a watchbird watching you.

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This little appendage is provided to force Blogger to see this article as having changed.  There's really no new content.  I am making this modification so that the Atom feed will supplant the previous modification that was published as a result of this defect.

posted by orcmid at 6/27/2004 11:01:36 AM