The iPod turned five in October. Amazing how, from 1996 to 2001, Apple went from nearly closing its doors to being a dominant player (pun vehemently intended) in the technology business. It is testament to how Steve Jobs, megalomania notwithstandng, truly does understand how to surround himself with smart people and guide smart decision-making (Lisa and Newton notwithstanding), Now Apple understands what it is like to be Microsoft, monopolizing a market. How the tables have turned.
Meanwhile, an interesting article re-frames recent headlines that iTunes is not as successful as it first was, as related to iPod sales. I tend to agree with this opinion. The nuts and bolts of it are that the media reporting this are not being very thoughtful in their analyses…
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=188
Filed under: Gadgets, Science, Tech
RFID technology has been around for a while, already embedded in a lot of things, like those “EZPass” electronic toll booth time-savers. RFID “tags” are also showing up in “PayPass” credit cards and have been at “SpeedPass” gas stations for sometime. (“Pass” is jargonspeke for easy! Which means “EZPass” actually means “EZ easy”! Yay!)Long story short, RFID is a technology that allows things to communicate wirelessly with extremely low power.
Here’s a poor explanation of how typical RFID works:
1) A base station – like the tool booth – transmits signal (constantly).
2) An RFID device – like an EZPass in a car – has an RFID chip inside it, and picks up a signal on a specific frequency and reflects it back. BUT the reflection is changed, intentionally, to contain data. Here’s how:
- The power of the frequency from the base station actually transmits enough power to the RFID tag for the tag to send the signal through a chip which then sends a digital coded message in the reflection. This all happens more or less instantly (like echo-location). The distortion in the reflection is deliberate and readable by the base station, which can confirm if a signal is authentic.
People can be very specific with how they change the signal and how much data the reflection actually sends back. Recently, the US, along with several countries of the world, has been issuing “biometric” passports with RFID chips in them. These typically include biometric data on you in the coded message so officials can confirm a passport-holder’s identity. RFID signals have been proven to be insecure – someone with the right kind of technology can steal the data. It can and has been done (even with passports).
Filed under: Politics, Science, Tech
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