Police remote-scanning the NFC tags in your library book and cross-referencing them with your plate from the ANPR was not on my dystopia checklist. Time to go back to barcodes.
@dymaxion I know, but it fixes the issue with cars and if anyone has been in league with over reaching law enforcement, it's the auto-industry who made crossing the street illegal and campaigned to call it "jay walking".
@mikemccaffrey@dymaxion My Nexus card comes with its own faraday envelope. Ditto, your US passport has wires in the cover. For others, possible to get a little envelope that blocks RFID, which requires very close connections.
I don't believe the company's RFID claim, though. It seemingly defies the inverse-square law.
there’s considerable hype in that company’s claims. It’s possible to scan for Bluetooth, WiFi, and Cell from the side of the road. NFC only is good for a few cm at most (by design). RFID passive tags like in clothes at stores are only readable for 10 ft or so at most, seems highly unlikely from the roadside too.
@wa7iut@glennf@mikemccaffrey@dymaxion
Animal RFID chips can only be read at a few cms at most. Anything further away is physically impossible given the tiny power output of the device.
@Naich
If you shove a hundred watts of amp on both your transmitter and receiver and use a pair of large, tightly-tuned high hain antennas, you'd be shocked at what's doable. Are they doing that? No clue. But I'm not going to rule it out. @wa7iut@glennf@mikemccaffrey
@dymaxion@wa7iut@glennf@mikemccaffrey
The inverse square law applied to an output power measured in microwatts puts paid to any notion of doing that. The RFID tags use scavenged power to transmit and it has to go through the skin on the way out. The signal will be below the noise floor if you are more than 6 inches away.
@dymaxion@Naich@wa7iut@mikemccaffrey Library books in a moving vehicle is what seemed implausible. The fingerprinting also complicated but not impossible. I shouldn’t lose sight that the overall product brief is terrifying even if it’s not a reputable product. It will be sold and misused.
@glennf
Idk? Iirc, those are all just going to be dumb "energize it and it sends a response" tags, and read times are fast. Commercial reads can read a tag going by as fast as 180kmph. Because this is intended to be used in a vehicle on the road scanning opportunistically, read distances don't need to be much more than 10m, and may be as little as 2m. It doesn't seem that impossible. @Naich@wa7iut@mikemccaffrey
@wa7iut
It's doable — we did 134khz card reads at 40m in the lab about twenty years ago with cheap kit. Huge antennas, though, and a lot of power. Can they scale it down, given 20 years of time? Idk, but I'm not gonna say it's impossible. @glennf@mikemccaffrey
@dymaxion
Enough power to EMP kill every other kind of electronic device with a built in antenna? Can you send enough power to activate RFID over a relevant distance while at the same time listening for ISM band beacons? It's cool tech, but the physical limits are harsh as well. @wa7iut@glennf@mikemccaffrey
@dymaxion in about 2008 or so I wrote a scenario where a specially equipped police cruiser slowly works its way through a neighborhood firing UV laser scanners into every open window on everyone's house, looking for optical codes, as powerful transceivers looked for RFIDs.
It was really hard to write plots in that world. Most of the character breathing space was via bureaucratic incompetence - but once someone in the bureaucracy wanted you, they could find a way to get you.