Australia's Geekiest Man

An anonymous reader writes "Why have a key to open your front door when you can have an RFID tag implanted in your arm that will do the trick? Computerworld has a story up about the outgoing Linux Australia group president's hacked home, in which just about anything from watering the lawn, to opening his blinds, or checking the mail can be controlled through a software environment. Jonathan Oxer is an electronics and coding whiz who apparently has an RIFD tag implanted in his arm that opens his front door, and his front gate is hooked up with gigabit Ethernet — able to tell him when someone enters the property or send him a virtual email or sms to say he has real mail. Apparently the iPod Touch has just inspired him to begin linking all his little hardware hacks together into the one single, software controlled handheld touch device. I wonder if Steve Jobs ever thought the Touch would end up being used this way?"

Pretty damn cool

[Corpuscavernosa]

But I can imagine that you might not always want to have your front door unlocked whenever you're near and I imagine it might be a pain in the ass to get out the Touch and disable it if there were some sort of emergency that required your door being locked.

Excessive?

[multipass666]

I was always curious why futurists and cyborg fanboys get RFID chips implanted underneath their skin. What's wrong with just wearing one on a ring or perhaps a chain around your neck? Maybe both for multiple redundancy. Does it really happen THAT often you go to the pub for a few pints and comeback so drunk you've lost all your possessions? Does that slim probability warrant tagging yourself like cattle?

Re:Cancerous Police state much?

[flyingsquid]

The other issue I would like to point out is that putting RFID chips into people and treating them as cattle has for some time been a dream of the uber wealthy elite classes.

Why? By definition, people who are obscenely rich have lots and lots of money, which is a far more effective way to manipulate people than RFID tags. Come on, really, do you picture the super-rich saying, "man, what I'd really like is to be able to implant electronics into the working class so I can watch their every move"? They're rich. They have yachts, and private aircraft, and small islands, and can do anything they want with their lives... do you really think they give a shit about what time Joe Sixpack staggers home with some drunken bar skank?

Re:Cancerous Police state much?

[Dutch Gun]

The notion of people-tracking with RFID is a bit far-fetched, isn't it? These things have a pretty short range, maybe a few meters at most if I recall correctly. Tracking a person isn't going to do much good unless there were sensors everywhere.

That being said, I'm also in no hurry to have any tracking devices implanted in me either.

Re:Then again

[Tolkien]

More disturbing is that it's not *your* proximity. It's *your arm's* proximity. This technology could bring about a whole new and horribly gruesome form of breaking and entering. :|

Favor me with a short answer

[bitspotter]

My understanding of "RFID" tags is that since they are powered by the energy broadcast by the reader, the tags themselves can't do very much in terms of computation. As a result, they are limited to parroting back a static serial number (though a long one, or part of it) that's determined when the tag is manufactured.

This means that the tags themselves cannot do any encryption at all.

If this is the case, why the hell would anybody want to use it to gain secure access to anything when anybody nearby the tag with an RFID reader can read the serial number and spoof the tag?

This would be like writing your credit card number on the front of your shirt - //in infrared ink//. Sure, you'd need fancy infrared optics to read it - but why the hell would you take that chance?

Is my understanding flawed, here? Are there newer RFID tags that actually can do crypto (and are people like those in TFA using them)? I may be wrong in any number of ways, so I'm looking for some more solid info.

Oh - good, only 1-2 of every 100 people get cancer

[agentofchange]

You say only 1 or 2 mice out of 100 got cancer like it's a small amount.

I'm not taking those odds. There's roughly 300 million people in the US. If we gave them all implants and the same percentage of people got cancer that's 30 to 60 MILLION people!

No Science, Silly Math

[andersh]

If we gave them all implants and the same percentage of people got cancer that's 30 to 60 MILLION people!

No, I said the OP claimed a HUGE percentage got cancer when in fact they don't. Secondly there was no research done on humans, and mice are not humans.

The fact that 1-2% could even possibly get cancer does not mean 30-60 million people will get it. Science is a bit more advanced than that. I'm not giving you any credit for your math skills. In fact it's probably unlikely they will get cancer at all from this "potential" threat. You are just making outrageous claims from no evidence what so ever.

I would take those odds, they're really quite good, but I don't want to be tagged none the less.

Re:Virtual email?

[lukas84]

No, real hippies would never condescend to use .doc or .ppt. Real geeks would use whatever tool is suited best for a given task, which may or may not Microsoft products.

Re:Then again

[peragrin]

That's just a bad implementation. I have it as well and love it. the trick is that to unlock the doors you have to press a button which triggers the RFID tag. to start the car once inside it looks for the tag and then allows you to start it up.

The button is on the door handle and works both ways. press once to unlock twice to unlock them all, if unlocked one press will lock them alll.

For all RFID systems it shouldn't be all automatic there should still be a physical aspect to work with to unlock the item, even as simple as a button press increases security.

Oh and my car is nothing fancy just a Nissan Sentra.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Then again

[Malekin]

Speaking as an Australian, I'm quite glad this isn't really an option here.

If handguns are to work at all to deter assault or robbery, a reasonably high percentage of the general population has to be packing. Unfortunately when there are that many guns floating around it's likely the assailant / robber has one too and all you've done is increased the chances of somebody getting killed rather than just mugged or robbed.

In the end I'm not sure I buy the idea that handguns deter crime significantly anyway. Even if they did, given the rate at which they're used to inflict grievous harm by angry spouses, stupid children playing with them, and homeowners spooked by noises shooting themselves in the foot at night, I don't think having handguns distributed into society actually works to reduce overall human suffering.

Re:Then again

[bkr1_2k]

I totally know how to jack with my OCD friend, now. I've been trying to think of a prank for a long time, and now you've come up with it for me. Excellent.

Re:Not to rain on anyone's parade

[Forseti]

If you need to carry a key with you everywhere as a backup, the purpose of the RFID implant is a bit defeated, don't you think?

Re:Virtual email?

[geminidomino]

And when the hell would a .doc or .ppt be the best tool for sending an email?!

Re:RFID?

[tumbleweedsi]

This is kinda how we got in the current mess with security in the first place. Some geek hacks together something cool (like SMTP) and never imagines that anyone would want to use his experiment maliciously (like spoofing the sender address) or thinks that by the time it is generally used it will have been developed further. 30 years later people are using broadly the same kit but in nastier world and the things that didn't seem to matter when it was an experiment on a small scale now matter a lot.

his ideal situation...

[pomakis]

FTA:

"My ideal situation would be, for example, to be able to take a video feed from a camera near the front door and have that fed through to the home automation controller, which is a machine running Linux and a whole bunch of these scripts...and if someone rings the doorbell you could pull up a full motion video stream to see who it is and then use the controllers to unlock the door and let them in."

So... his ideal situation (which he hasn't actually manage to achieve yet) is to do something that the security systems in most apartment buildings have been doing for decades.