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
 
What Programmers Do
 
The Comfort of Open Development Processes
 
Abandoning an M.Sc
 
Relaxing Patent Licenses for Open Documents
 
Windows Media Center's Been Good To Me ...
 
Responding to Hurricane Katrina
 
Consigning Software Patents to the Turing Tar Pit
 
Merchants of Attention
 
Symbols of Trust
 
The Passing of Salvatore Lombino: Farewell, 87th Precinct

Microsoft Scores for Respecting Its Customers

Microsoft Scores for Respecting Its Customers

Computerworld: Microsoft scores highest in customer-respect study.  Linda Rosencrance's 2004-06-25 article describes a study by The Customer Respect Group.  The study examines web sites for how they support successful customer experiences.  Microsoft was found to lead the top 100 from that perspective.

Although I have had unsuccessful experiences with the sites, especially when dealing with a security-related concern, I must confess that the experience is still better than any I have found on other sites.

Today, there is announcement of a major transparency move (for Microsoft), putting its bug reports and feedback on line, so that there is visibility on the incidents that have been reported, the actions being taken, and any resolution.  I would say that will raise the score considerably, at least in the developer community.  You can't imagine (or maybe you can) all of the conversations that go on inside of a business about the importance of not doing that.  It always feels risky, and I suspect that the lawyers are the most nervous about it.  So that is a very good move in terms of willing to deal with any feeling of vulnerability out of respect for the customer and also out of recognition of what value that is to ones own business operations and customer relationships.

Watching and Listening:

Yoga Zone.  Total Body Conditioning for Beginners.  DVD edition, first 20-minute session.  Yesterday I got back on the rowing machine, today is back to yoga.  I maxed my lifetime weight and some serious intervention is called for.  I am starting with light routines and building back up to the level I was at when I stopped this in April.  You can see my gut in the photos from Kaua'i.
MSN Radio Plus. Yoga, Yoga, Yoga (theme station).  Good cool-down music and relaxation while I am feeling a bit jangled this morning.

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posted by orcmid at 6/29/2004 10:06:36 AM

Difficulties of Wireless Mesh

Difficulties of Wireless Mesh

ACM News Service: The Realities of Dealing with Wireless Mesh Networks..  The idea of wireless mesh networks appeals to me because of the possible utility for peer-to-peer bootstrapping and discovery.  I am not so interested in the problems of wireless access that the techniques are designed to overcome, since I am happy to apply the same ideas to wired edge nodes, even wireless access points, that can form a mesh without heavy centralized support.

This is a 3-by-5 card placeholder for me to return and dig deeper, supplementing what I discovered earlier about this case.

The concern that this blurb raises for me is the item on the end that says coming out of sleep mode (that is, being detached or shut down for some period) "in a mesh network requires nodes to resynchronize with the network upon reactivation, a power- and time-consumptive process that involves considerable over-the-air network traffic."

I don't like the sound of that and I need to check out the full article, in the June 2004 issue of Sensor online.

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posted by orcmid at 6/27/2004 06:33:14 PM

What Is RFID Technology?

What Is RFID Technology?

Now that I have stuck my neck out on how passive RFIDs are, and how the work of correlating the presence information is done elsewhere, I thought I should get something closer to the real facts.

The site RFID Talk: Discussion of RFID technology  provides a discussion portal for matters RFIDian.  There is an RFID Technology forum on the site.  Many of the topics are about specific products.  It is interesting that RFIDs are described as transponders.  I am looking into some of the specific discussions.

It appears that the typical RFID returns something like an EPC, an Electronic Product Code prefered by Walmart and the US DoD.  The passive tags are cheaper, can be polled indefinitely, and are the ones likely to be ubiquitous in the near future.  These, like the Hitachi u-chip, have small (e.g., 128 bit) ROMs and are not alterable after manufacture.  They are physically miniscule and the power for their response is derived from the scanner's UHF signal.

There are also active tags.  The ones being used to monitor truck tires, with 8-kilobit memories and environmental sensors, can report temperature and pressure histories for the tires they are affixed to.

Zebra Technologies offers RFID Printing Solutions.  An RFID embedded in a product label is programmed with its identifier, such as an EPC, simultaneous with the printing of visible identification (even bar codes) on the label itself.  The distinction between the soon-to-be-ubiquitous passive tags and active tags is explained in another Zebra Fact Page:

"Information is sent to and read from RFID tags by a reader using radio waves. In passive systems, which are the most common, a Radio Frequency Identification reader transmits an energy field that 'wakes up' the tag and provides the power for the tag to operate. In active systems, a battery in the tag is used to boost the effective operating range of the tag and to offer additional features over passive tags, such as temperature sensing."

In all near-term cases, the information carried by the tag is limited, whether or not alterable.  Some connection to a datasystem is required to correlate the current scanning, and collateral information (e.g., a cash-register feed for purchases) to any kind of global record.  The requirements for the data-communication and database end are considered to be immense.

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posted by orcmid at 6/27/2004 05:31:25 PM

Hark, Is That an Arphid That I Smell?

Hark, Is That an Arphid That I Smell?

RG News: The Smell Of RFID Tags.  I notice that there is an assumption, in the scarier accounts, that RFID tags can be updated to carry complex information.  For example, it is speculated that purchasing history can be carried by an RFID built into a credit card.  My sense of the current technology is that the association is done behind the scenes and accomplished in massive data aggregation activities, not on the RFID (or the credit card).  The impact might be the same, but the methodology is quite different.  What I see here is a seriously overblown assumption about what the technology is capable of, in any reasonably-near future, and this over-generalization discredits accounts such as this summary on Robin Good's Latest News.  It is likely to be regarded by legislators and decision makers as idiot radicalism.

I think the problem around this technology being intrusive is that it is near-invisible.  While this article emphasizes this action:

Consumers must insist that RFID tags be easily visible, removable and turned off at checkout.

this injunction becomes meaningless if consumers are not equipped to verify it.

I do have a few modest suggestions that might be more effective as social action.

Whittier Daily News - Opinion.  Robin Good's source is Lenore Skenazy's 2004-06-25 Whittier Daily News.com opinion piece.  The article addresses RFID as a universal surveillance system.  Here the description of an RFID as a "bar code on steroids" is more apt, although the leap into outrageous extrapolations almost qualifies this article as an urban e-mail hoax.

Again, the example of what the RFID reports is exaggerated.  The RFID just reports what it always reports, it doesn't carry the history of its voyage from manufacturer to a garmet you are wearing.  It is in the uniqueness of that identification, and its availability, that provides the basis of surveillance.  That is all it needs.  In the cinema, when someone places a tracking beacon on a vehicle, the beacon doesn't do the work, the trackers do.  This might be a better way to view the situation.

Now, that does not alter the fact that a fine basis for surveillance is available, and that this is commercially valuable and potentially just as important to everyone's Department of Homeland Security and everyone who might be spying on them.

So the scary scenarios don't work as described.  The RFID needs to be scanned repeatedly at different places, and the scanning point needs to send its information somewhere that it can be aggregated with other information from other scannings of that same RFID.  This is not a trivial act, and yes, people are working on it.

It is more like my supermarket membership card.  All it has to do is identify itself.  The rest is handled by passing that identification, and my coincident purchasing information to a database system.  The easy part for the supermarket is they issued the card. They are not just trying to scan anybody's any-kind-of-card, and connecting it to a data-collection and reporting system somewhere.  With RFIDs, the problem is more complicated.

What is more important is that the RFID is a kind of passive technology.  It responds to scans from any suitable scanner.  So, instead of worrying about who is scanning RFIDs in your possession, why not look at the opportunity we have in being able to scan the RFIDs in our environment?

Questions to self: Is there any selectivity in the scanning and response? (Obviously, for intentional surveillance, different kinds of RFIDs and readers might be developed and used; but what about the current case). When the vet scans our cats and notices that they have been "chipped," what other objects respond to those same scanners?  What other scanners would notice our cats, perhaps from a greater distance.  How many flavors of this technology are there?  If these are really equivalent to a homogenous system of very-long bar codes, I here point out that bar code scanners are now affordable enough to be consumer devices.  For the kind of tracking that people speculate about, that means scanners will be at least that affordable.  Probably more affordable than the video-recorder at the Rodney King beating.  Heh.

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posted by orcmid at 6/27/2004 03:21:34 PM

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