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With the births of Amy and Irie Claire hasn’t been up to much RFID stuff for the last few years. It’s moved on a bit….

HP today announced an innovation that may someday give RFID a run for its money. The company is touting its “Memory Spot” as a new wireless chip capable of “linking the digital and physical worlds.” The devices, which measure 2 mm to 4 mm square, complete with an antenna, offer transfer rates of 10 megabits per second - faster than Bluetooth. Like passive RFID, the chips are powered by radio signals emitted from a reader.

When it’s in a UK ID card, apparently. This does not make pleasant reading.

All US Passports to be RFID chipped

Sweeping new State Department regulations issued on Tuesday say passports issued after that [October 2006] will have tiny RFID chips that can transmit personal information including the name, nationality, sex, date of birth, place of birth and digitised photograph of the passport holder. Eventually, the government contemplates adding additional digitised data such as “fingerprints or iris scans”.

Apparently it’s all the fault of the UK, as well…

The question is, was the pain that Walmart went through getting RFID off the ground actually worth the benefits?

Intel has published a white paper (precis, summary, full PDF) discussing a tool kit for mobile devices to use mapped local radio sources (such as known 802.11 hot spots and GSM transmitters) to triangulate their positions; there is so much known local radio traffic why put in new networks for such a simple task? Read more at the Place Lab web site
Found at Raw Feed

This is amazing… Non-Canadians crossing from Canada into the US at 3 different crossing points will be required to carry an RFID card containing, amongst other things, biometric information at all times during their visit to the US. The card can be read from 12 metres by the relevant device.
Found at Raw Feed

DartMail. That’s a serious data transfer protocol.
Found at Raw Feed

Drawing from its own lessons learned, HP plans to help customers deal with “real world” factors - ranging from liquids to forklifts and conveyor belts - that can impact deployment in various ways.

Much needed. Claire and colleagues’ experience of a paint factory was not pretty.

Subdermal RFID chips have been touted for a while as a way of getting access to medical records (see VeriChip, for example). Simpler, less invasive and less scary is Redi-Records - your medical records on a CD business card.

Some time last year there were reports about a Danish company building a sniper rifle that injected RFID tags into its targets… I finally found the site… Luckily it’s a spoof…