RFID Update

At the hacker conference in Las Vegas, there were demonstrations of a RFID jamming device, a RFID sniffing device, and RFID spoofing.
"...Paul Simmonds, chief information security officer at chemical and paints manufacturer ICI in the U.K., said corporations in retailing and the grocery industry use RFID tags to speed delivery of goods so they don't have to unpack them to identify them.
But as a maker of a premium line of house paints, ICI would be concerned if its goods were fraudulently marked down in a two-for-one sale through some form of RFID spoofing. "People can get away with theft with this," Simmonds said."
Reading tags from far away and creating illegal copies has a whole new world of meaning now that governments are starting to use RFID as part of their passport systems.
The open source community, which is devoted to providing free software for everyone to use, is now getting into the act, with some middleware libraries for RFID users. It's a VERY long way from having a complete, free source RFID system to plug into your office, but every bit of free software might help a business that decides to integrate their own solution -- and right now it looks like everybody is going to have to integrate their own system to some degree.
From the "applied RFID" department, officials in Delhi, India are using RFID to track sacred cows. They've got up to 40,000 of the bovines wandering through the city at any moment, and it becomes very important to figure out where the moo-cows are and what they are doing.
The New York Times is reporting about a new doll that can recognize voices, identify objects and show emotion.
"...Judy Shackelford, who has been in the toy industry for more than 40 years, has seen a lot of dolls. But none, she says, like her latest creation, a marvel of digital technologies, including speech-recognition and memory chips, radio frequency tags and scanners, and facial robotics. She and her team have christened it Amazing Amanda..."
It should cost around a hundred bucks.
Making RFID work better is the job of a new University of Wisconsin program that is being funded by several dozen vendors, like 3M, or Kraft foods. This should be a project to pay attention to. Hopefully it will address a lot of the problems the RFID industry is having.
If you ask me, the industry is still in a state of flux. German chip maker Infineon has announced they are moving all of their RFID efforts to a new company, an indication that the chip market for RFID is going to be substantially different than their usual market.
Ephraim Schwarz over at InfoWorld, on the other hand, is saying that where there's smoke, there's fire -- RFID is beginning to pay off for a lot of companies.
It's still a mixed bag, but RFID is definitely going somewhere. It will be fun to tag along for the ride.