Further to my column a few weeks back about
RFID, the little tags on merchandise that can tell retailers and others an awful lot of information about you,
here’s a story from WIRED about how food companies are trying to get the technology declared ‘antiterrorist’.
“Facing increasing resistance and concerns about privacy,” WIRED’s Mark Baard writes, “the United States’ largest food companies and retailers will try to win consumer approval for radio identification devices by portraying the technology as an essential tool for keeping the nation’s food supply safe from terrorists.” The basic idea is that the technology can help keep precise track of all goods and help in recall efforts should their products be contaminated or laced with poison during a terrorist attack.
For sure that could be useful. But it sounds to me like a back door to get the technology on every shelf, which smacks of dishonesty to me. Are terrorists going to start contaminating razor blades and wooly jumpers too?
Just when you thought hard drives couldn’t get any bigger…. they don’t. Interesting piece called Midlife crisis for the hard drive by CNET’s Ed Frauenheim says growth in hard drive capacity, after doubling annually during some periods, is beginning to slow “as engineers run into technological obstacles and many PC buyers feel they have more than enough space”.
Further to my column about RFID, and the privacy issues of having tags attached to products that may contain more info about you than you’d like to know, a group called CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) is calling for a worldwide boycott of Gillette products since the company failed to renounce what they call “a Gillette Mach3 “smart shelf” spy system”.
HP have gone crazy, announcing “a strategy to radically simplify technology to help people “enjoy more” – a move that extends HP’s leadership in imaging, printing and home computing into the fast-growing digital photography and entertainment markets.”
A cautionary tale with happy ending from South Africa, courtesy of The Daily News. An American professor gets robbed of his laptop at gunpoint, having inexplicably failed to back up years of work on AIDS from his hard drive. He then tearfully relates his story to a journalist in the tiny hope that publicity may awake compassion in his muggers’ hearts.