Changes @ Rogue Sun

If you’re a regular visitor you may have noticed the new theme. If you have a link here and are wondering where it went, I will be rotating the links out roughly weekly. I need to keep the links on display down to about 10. If you’re a blog service that has to see your link I’ll be adding a section for that stuff tomorrow or the next day.

RFID Chips and the Tunnel Vision of Business

Business always seems overly eager to adopt new technologies without much apparent examination of what the wider implications are beyond their own compartment of use. Questions need to be asked that aren’t being asked by people in business and while they’re rushing to be the first to outfit their warehouses with this and by making purchases are enabling further development, they aren’t concerned with the larger ramifications of related items. A chip of limited capabilities might be useful to warehousing but a more advanced version from the same manufacturer, funded in part by purchases of the package tracking version might be used for something else.

Should such businesses be concerned? Yeah. While a book written in support of the technology for business might insist that the chips can’t be tracked by satellite, what if they could? But the satellite might not be necessary. What if something like a cell tower or an innocuous-looking signal transceiver pedestal was placed every few yards or blocks on roads? You might only need to be a few feet from the pedestal but the pedestal is wifi enabled and can communicate with a substation farther away, which gets to a central computer. There is a utility easement on all property. You don’t have control over that. One of those could be installed every other house and an entire neighborhood could be monitored with a dozen.

But of course the bar-coding is inefficient and technology has to advance.

Doesn’t it?