Get creative with Lotusphere RFID tags
by Volker Weber
Some of you are probably aware of the fact, that IBM has decided to track conference attendees with RFID tags. They are not embedded inside your badges, but simply glued to the back. The sticker comes off easily, so you can get creative with it. I attached mine to a business card to send it off. It may also be interesting to have somebody carry as many RFID tags he can carry. How, 2000 attendees in this room? ;-)
Comments
Are that really RFID-tags for tracking purpose?
Is there any other purpose for RFID?
I guess they usually had barcodes on the badges and helpers would have to scan each person attending a session. rfid speeds up that process quite alot.
Timo, there are many other purposes for RFID.
It's not a "bad" technology per se. It's like a knife - you can use it for good and for bad.
@Martin
But a knife is always used for cutting, just like an RFID tag is always used for tracking. The discussion is about whether cutting/tracking is bad or not.
At the 24C3 the CCC (again) ran their Sputnik project, which did the same thing. Attendees could buy a RFID badge if they wanted to. The readings, i.e. which badge was seen where at what time, were supposed to be published later on for whatever analysis you wanted to run on it. I don't know if they published it yet.
Thomas, I don't think so.
You can do various things with a knife like stabbing, leveraging, schmearing sth on sth, carving, ...
Some uses of RFID are listet at Wikipedia.
RFID is becoming very useful in a conference environment. The attendee's information is secure, mainly due to the limited amount of characters that can be put on the RF chip. Also, my company embeds the chip into the badge holder – reducing the temptation of tampering ;-) - Attendee Tracking
I stuck mine to the bottom of a cleaning trolley. Hopefully some good cleaning performance data will be returned.
Strangely enough not everybody seems to have one. I double checked that I don't. So unfair, I wasn't allowed to get creative ... :-)
Rumor has it that one was stuck under the 'jacket' of the seeing eye dog trainee that was wandering about all week.
