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

Recent Items
 
BloggerBuzz: Blogger Support Appreciation Day
 
Serious Hand-Wringing: The Borrow-Spend Death Spiral
 
Honey, Where'd You Put the Bloggo?
 
Simple Geek Pleasures
 
Pictures from Home
 
Seeing Double
 
Candling Phish
 
Pent up Blogophilia
 
All-Clear #1
 
Microsoft Scores for Respecting Its Customers

RFID for Commerce is Surveillance?

RFID for Commerce

We're discussing RFIDs in my Security Engineering class and I am clipping some resources about it.

ACM News Service: Embedding Their Hopes in RFID.  The economic realities of RFID employment, along with the privacy concerns, are featured in this blurb.

The Seattle Public Library seems to be using RFIDs in their automated check-out systems (similar to the automated check-out systems in some stores, except you just lay the library books down on an opaque surface).

Although there is a lot of attention on item-level tracking, most commercial use of RFID is for container, not item, tracking.  The little RFIDs are still too expensive to put on everything, and reader/scanner range is limited.  Those are all parameters that can only improve, though.

Jonathan Krim's 2004-06-23 Washington Post article (registration required) seems scarier to me.  His first example is on gaming chips in a gambling casino.  Prescription drugs are another example.  This main article is extensive, and there are some accompanying links.

At home, our cats are tagged (the expression is "chipped"), and your dentist will chip your kids.  In the article, there is an application to permit the subcutaneous tagging of people, initially as a kind of Med-Alert system.  It is clear what the benefits of these applications are, and it is not for surveillance as much as for identification and a kind of protection.  With RFIDs, one could plant chips on someone, and I think that is also how we are looking at the prospects for surveillance that the commercial use of RFIDs provides, in terms of the movement of products being tracked as we use them.

Future Now: Couple RFID-related articles.  This short blurb links to two articles: One in Technology Review that requires a subscription (or a minimum $4.95 US and then you have to cancel it to keep it from going month-to-month). The other is from Economist.com and is free for now.

Impact of RFID and other monitoring has four entries that I gleaned on 2004-02-24.

No Hiding Place.  A January, 2003, Economist article, involving science-fiction writer David Brin, on living transparently in the internet society.

I searched through this blog archive and I didn't find any other occurrences of RFID.  I suspect that a search on "privacy" might be more successful.

---

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 6/25/2004 01:10:48 PM

Computer Pioneer Bob Bemer

Computer Pioneer Bob Bemer

I just learned of the death of Bob Bemer.  I think he'd be pleased to know that he was slash-dotted.  It is also odd the things people are remembered for, although Bob was tickled to make sure the ESC code was in ASCII, and other things.  Only one person who knew Bob seems to have chimed up, and I added my footnote.  I need to say it again in this quieter place.

I worked in one of Bob's teams while he was Director of Software at Sperry Univac in the 60's. He was a lot of fun.  He kept calling me "Bub."  I ran into him at standards meetings a few times after he moved on to GE and Honeywell, but we did not stay in touch.  I re-encountered him later on the web, just prior to Y2K ,as the result of an article reporting that he was suggesting a Y2K repair that would not require people to remap existing file records. He wanted to pack the numbers tighter and intercept date accesses in running programs, buying some time.

I exchanged e-mail with him a few times in the last few years, and I had a chance to acknowledge the inspiration he was for me while he was still around.  I don't know that he would hang out on slash-dot.  When I last exchanged e-mail with him he was frustrated about what it took to maintain his web site.

I guess he was a geek at heart.  I had produced a fast decimal-to-binary assembly-language algorithm for a character-oriented machine that didn't have a built-in converter but addressed in binary and calculated in decimal (making subscripting hard).  He was the only one of his entire organization that worked it over and took more cycles out of it, and then I took out more using his ideas.  He thanked me for giving him a chance to play.

Beside paying attention to those little details that can mean a lot, like character sets and extension techniques, he also worried about improving programming languages, training software developers, establishing software forensics, and making software engineering an activity that exploited reusable piece parts, anticipating components by a good 30 years.  He funded Peter Landin and Bill Burge's work on Functional Programming in the US because he saw the possibility of applicative languages as the ultimate in piece-part composers.

Bob's web site is loaded with reminiscences.  Some of Bob's recollections are a little off.  When I arrived at 315 Park Avenue South, Al Paster was already there, working for C.L. McCarthy. Bemer hadn't shown up yet. I don't remember what the lag was.  I know Bob was there in 1962, because I remember him talking to my wife, Bobbi, at an employee party that he initiated to have all of us become better known to each other.  But who was already there in 1961 when I moved from Seattle to Manhattan was Bill Lonergan, one of the architects of the Burroughs 5000.  Univac was definitely looking to make a move.  (It was Lonergan's connections that led to my getting to work with Don Knuth in the summer of 1962.  Along with building a Fortran compiler for us, Don said he had some ideas for a definitive book about programming.)

One thing I liked about Bob was he thought he hired me and he liked to tell people that. I was there ahead of him, but as far as he was concerned, I was his find.

Another fascinating thing is that he recreated his years at Univac by going over his expense reports for the time. Dang, I wish I had thought to keep mine over all this time. What a clever way to associate and recall events.

With regard to managing people, Bob didn't believe in burning out developers and he thought there was a lot of life to be had outside of the office.  I'm pleased to learn that he was active to the end.  I'll never forget him.

The key to immortality is living a life worth remembering.
-- end title to a Bruce Lee film
Who we are is the remembrance for the immortality of those who touch our lives
-- me

---

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 6/25/2004 02:05:50 AM