[commentary] Consumerist writes [via LifeHacker] about a bank who threw out a customer for refusing to supply a fingerprint. WTF?! Seems Bank of America’s rules state that thumbprints must be given if a consumer wants to cash a cheque and they are not a BoA customer. Even if the cheque is issued from a BoA […]
Malaysia has decided to turn to RFID to combat car-theft. Thirty luxury cars are stolen daily in Malaysia. Car license plates will now be embedded with microchips that will contain information about the vehicle and its owner.
The government hopes that this will bring down the number of car thefts in the country and tracing stolen […]
Contactless News has an embedded video from Avisian (publisher of RFID-related websites) and Identity Stronghold showing how the latter’s anti-RF (radio frequency) sleeves work. These are small specially designed envelopes that block out RFID readers. The basic principle applied is a Faraday Cage, which is named after physicist Michael Faraday and his experiments in 1836. […]
Finextra reports that a group called the Smart Card Alliance (SCA) is refuting the findings of two researchers studying RFID-enabled contactless credit cards recently. [Note: The Finextra article does not have a link, and they refer to the Smart Card Assocation, which I believe is an error. Here is a link to what appears to […]
A New York Times piece earlier this week suggests that identity thieves might be found more easily by looking to the victim’s family members, that they in fact might be the thief. The culprits might be spurned relatives, ex-spouses, or anyone in the immediate family with motivation and access. In the case of Eric Wagenhauser, […]
Certicom and Texas Instruments are working on a means of storing encrypted authentication information on RFID chips. The chips are only 160 bits and use an ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography) scheme which is as secure as a 1024-bit RSA (Rivest Shamir Adleman) public encryption key. The reduction in bit space is necessary, as most RFID […]
With so many countries adopting more secure identification documentation for citizens, technology is playing a very important role in id cards. So is biometrics. In a nutshell, biometrics is the study of uniquely identifying humans by measurable characteristics. This includes the measurement (metrics) of any of the following:
thumb or fingerprint
palm vein patterns
voice
iris/ retina
facial recognition
dna
For […]
More RFID Use In US Defense
The US DoD (Dept of Defense) recently completed rolling out RFID in 19 DDCs (Defense Distribution Centers), some of which are receiving tagged shipments. The system, installed by ODIN Technologies, went through rigorous testing to prove tag read rates of 100% for both Gen 1 and Gen 2 tags. [source: […]
Many people have already debated whether or not RFID (radio frequency identification) can be used to track people. Generally speaking, the answer is no - at least not in real-time. RFID can tell where you have been, if you are carrying something with an RF tag, say an employee card, and have passed through a […]