[wordup] Digital dog tags ...

[Adam Shand]

So with this announcement Scott McNealy confirms that he's the real
world corporate equivalent of a Slashdot Karma whore.  See also Larry
Elison's plans for a central ID database and some whacko's idea of video
survelience of "bad people".

My personal preference would be if we shipped all these "original
thinkers" off to a small island somewhere they could spend the rest of
their lives carefully monitoring each other to make sure nothing bad
happens.

Adam.

Via: http://csof.net/node.php?id=49&drupal_csof=2be72d14fa74e20097aee31da9c4cb5b
From: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/cn/20020209/tc_cn/digital_dog_tags__would_you_wear_one_&cid=70

Digital dog tags: Would you wear one?
Fri Feb 8, 9:42 PM ET

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems has joined a program called Auto-ID to
build wireless digital identification tags into everything from razor
blades to soup cans, Chief Executive Scott McNealy said Thursday.
  
The technology promises efficiency for manufacturers and convenience for
shoppers--but potentially also headaches for those concerned about
privacy.

McNealy and his colleagues at Sun have eagerly anticipated the day when
everything with a "digital heartbeat"--cell phones, cars, microwave
ovens--is attached to the Internet. Sun hopes to supply the mammoth
servers that will process all the information produced by these devices.

"I used to talk about everything with a digital or electric heartbeat"
being connected to the Internet, McNealy told financial analysts in a
speech here Thursday. "Now I'm talking about tomato cans, and I'm not
making it up anymore," he quipped.

Sun has joined the Auto-ID program at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, funded by Procter & Gamble, Gillette, Wal-Mart, Unilever,
Tesco, Target and other corporations.

"You put stuff in a grocery basket and just drive by (a detector),"
McNealy said, describing the idea. The detector reads what's in the
basket, charges a person's credit card and "tells the factory to restock
the shelves," McNealy said.

The goal of the Auto-ID program is to keep store shelves full, said
Gillette spokesman Steve Brayton. On any given afternoon, 8 percent of
the items that U.S. shoppers are looking for are out of stock, he said.
On Sunday, it goes up to 11 percent.

In addition, the technology could help curb theft, Brayton said.

Wal-Mart is trying out the technology in a pilot project in Tulsa, Okla.

"We think within two to three years you'll find some early adopters
among retail and manufacturing businesses," Brayton said. "We're looking
at five to 10 years to widespread use."

Privacy problems?
But building transponders into every sort of product could spark privacy
concerns, said David Holtzman, an Internet security researcher and
former Network Solutions chief technology officer.

People might not be comfortable walking around with items that identify
themselves as medication, condoms or pornography. They also might not be
comfortable with manufacturers tracking where products go after being
purchased.

And "if legislators mandate mandatory tagging of things like firearms or
ammunition, we could get both the left and right wing pissed off,"
Holtzman said.

Keeping store shelves stocked or easing checkout isn't a big deal,
Holtzman said. But combining that product information with data about
the individuals buying those products could raise hackles.

"Any one piece of information"--cell phone records, purchasing records,
car location--"is not that damning or intrusive. But if you put them
together, you've got my life," Holtzman said. "It's very hard to hide
things when you have that level of analysis."

Even if these uses aren't what retailers and manufacturers have in mind,
technology has a way of creeping into other domains, Holtzman added.
Transponders for driving through electronic tollbooths started as a
convenience to drivers but now are used in combination with timing
analysis to send out speeding tickets, for example.

How it's done
Auto-ID uses passive tags that respond to a specific radio signal. A
tiny capacitor on the chip stores enough energy from the incoming signal
to send out a response. The tags only respond when near a special reader
device.

The tags also have a miniature chip and enough memory to keep track of a
digital identity. The memory is 96 bits long, tiny by computer standards
but it provides a huge number of combinations of ones and zeros.

The technology is set up to identify more than 268 million manufacturers
with more than a million individual products each, an Auto-ID
representative said.

The memory stores an electronic product code, or EPC, which is linked
with an Internet service called the Object Naming Service (ONS) that
keeps track of data for every EPC-labeled object. Researchers also are
working on a pared-down 64-bit version of EPC.

But the system is limited by the cost of making the tags, not to mention
installing the infrastructure to monitor the tags and process the
information.

With existing technology, tags cost about 50 cents. That's not much
additional expense for a $1,000 computer, but it is for a $3.50 bottle
of shampoo.

Gillette expects the investment to pay off in the long run, though, and
Auto-ID researchers are examining ways to bring the cost of tags down to
a nickel apiece.

"The researchers of the Auto-ID Center believe the goal of the 5 cent
tag is difficult but achievable," research director Sanjay Sarma wrote
in a February paper that describes a plan to build a low-cost prototype
in a year.