Tag Archive for RFID

| October 2, 2012
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Texas School ID Cards Track Students

Updated 07-27-13 According to Chron, Northside Independent School District Texas spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said the microchip-ID program turned out not to be worth the trouble.

Family claimed the RFID tag is “the mark of the beast”Updated 01-19-13 The student lost her lawsuit against the district. The student and her family had sued the district, claiming that her first amendment rights were being violated (she claims the RFID tag is “the mark of the Beast”), but the school removed the RFID chip from her ID and the court found that that was a reasonable accommodation.

Updated 12-02-12 A self-described teen-aged Anonymous hacker claims to have hacked the website of Texas’s Northside Independent School District in support of a student who refuses to wear an RFID ID badge according to the San Antonio Express-News. The district’s site was never compromised, Northside spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said.

In a statement posted on Twitter, the teenaged hacker wrote: “Now it is your school and your rules, but you seen what I did to your website, and have a simple deal for you, weather you accept it or not, is up to you,” the statement reads. “If you still want to do this tracking idea on the students, at least have a meeting with each and every students parents, so they know what is going on.”

Updated 11-21-12 It is not surprising to me that Wired is reporting that the school district is being sued over the program. According to Wired, the family claims that the student refuses to wear the badge because it signifies Satan.

Texas School ID Cards Track StudentsA Texas school district is putting tracking chips into new, mandatory student IDs to keep tabs on students’ whereabouts while on campus. According to Sophos’ Naked Security blog, Texas’s Northside Independent School District‘s John Jay High School and Anson Jones Middle School are performing a pilot test of the technology.

Sophos logoFOX 29 TV in Texas reports that students will be required to wear the cards on a lanyard around their necks and will be charged a fee for losing them. Their location will be beamed out to electronic readers throughout the campuses.

The one-year pilot program, which will cost the district $261,000, is also expected to increase attendance, and could bring an extra $2 million to the district in state funding as a result, District spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said. He stated that the program will be re-evaluated next summer.

RFID chipIn a letter to parents, school administrators stated that the ID cards will store no personal information and that they’ll work only on school grounds. “Think how important this will be in the case of an emergency,” the letter reads. “In addition, the ‘smart’ student ID card will be used in the breakfast and lunch lines in the cafeteria and to check out books from the library. Because all students will be required to wear their ‘smart’ ID, staff will be able to quickly identify Jay students inside the school.”

FoxNews reports that a coalition of privacy and civil liberties organizations and experts have called for a moratorium on the technology, including the American Civil Liberties Union.

RFID tags eveywhereThe Sophos blog reports that some parents are protesting, comparing the tags to RFID tags used to track cattle. Steven Hernandez, a father of a student who attends the school and the only local parent to attend a protest late last month, told KSN News that the new badges amount to “a spy chip”.

His daughter, Andrea, a sophomore, told KSN that she’s decided to wear her old photo ID even though students were told the new micro-chip ID is mandatory: “It makes me uncomfortable. It’s an invasion of my privacy.”

Northside ISD’s Gonzalez rejected that criticism, saying the pilot program and the “smart” ID cards have been used successfully in Houston’s Spring Independent School District for at least the past five years. “This is non-threatening technology,” he said. “This is not surveillance.”

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Chip readerThere is a great deal of bluster around this article on the blog. Look around people, your passports and driver’s licenses have RFID tags. What about proximity card readers? Have you checked the Visa in your wallet? Isn’t near field communications (NFC) the hot topic in the VC world?

I will bet a cookie that some of the same folks blustering about ID tags also favor gutting public education funding, yet the object to efforts to increase alternate sources of revenue for Texas schools by using chips in student ID cards.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| August 14, 2009
Comments Off on Nokia Tries Wireless Electricity

Nokia Tries Wireless Electricity

Nokia Tries Wireless ElectricityIf someday the researchers at Nokia (NOK), are right you will be able to use wireless electricity to charge your mobile. Putting your cell phone in standby mode may no longer cause the dreaded vampire power. Vampire power is often described as pointlessly wasting electricity with little benefit other than a small red light and instant start-up.

Nokia logoAccording to an article in the UK’s Guardian, Nokia is developing a mobile phone charging system that is able to power itself on nothing more than ambient radiowaves that constantly surround us. The Guardian article points out that radiowaves power the old crystal radio sets and modern radio frequency identification (RFID) tags.

Nokia claims that its system is able to scavenge enough ambient electromagnetic radiation emitted from Wi-Fi transmitters, cell-phone antennas, TV towers, and other sources miles away to run a cell phone. Individually the energy available in each of these signals is minute, but by harvesting radio waves across a range of frequencies it all adds up, said Markku Rouvala, one of the researchers who developed the device at the Nokia Research Center in Cambridge, UK.

Nokia’s device uses a wide-band antenna and two very simple passive circuits. The design of the antenna and the receiver circuit makes it possible to pick up frequencies from 500 megahertz to 10 gigahertz and convert the electromagnetic waves into an electrical current. The second circuit is designed to feed this current to the battery to recharge it.

“Even if you are only getting microwatts (mW), you can still harvest energy, provided your circuit is not using more power than it’s receiving,” Rouvala told Technology Review. So far the researchers have been able to harvest up to 5 mW. Their next goal is to get in excess of 20 mW, enough power to keep a phone in standby mode indefinitely. but not enough to actually use the phone to make or receive a call the researcher says.  Rouvala says that his group is working towards a prototype that could harvest up to 50 mW of power, enough to slowly recharge a switched-off phone.

Earlier this year, Joshua Smith at Intel and Alanson Sample at the University of Washington, in Seattle, developed a temperature-and-humidity sensor that draws its power from the signal emitted by a 1.0-megawatt TV antenna 4.1 kilometers away. This only involved generating 60 mW.  Smith says that 50 mW could need around 1,000 strong signals and that an antenna capable of picking up such a range of frequencies would cause efficiency losses along the way.

Harry Ostaffe, head of marketing for Pittsburgh-based company Powercast, which sells a system for recharging sensors from about 15 meters away with a dedicated radio signal told Technology Review, “To get 50 milliwatts seems like a lot.”

If Nokia’s claims stand up, then it could push energy harvesting into mainstream consumer devices and improve their environmental footprint. Steve Beeby, an engineer and physicist at the University of Southampton, U.K., who has researched harvesting vibrational energy, adds, “If they can get 50 milliwatts out of ambient RF, that would put me out of business.” He says that the potential could be huge because MP3 players typically use only about 100 milliwatts of power and spend most of their time in lower-power mode.

According to Technology Review. Nokia is being cagey with the details of the project, but Rouvala is confident about its future: “I would say it is possible to put this into a product within three to four years.” Ultimately, though, he says that Nokia plans to use the technology in conjunction with other energy-harvesting approaches, such as solar cells embedded into the outer casing of the handset.

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As I have chronicled in the past and here, wireless power is a good solution looking for a way to be implemented. Wireless power has now hit the Gartner “Hype-Cycle.” According to the July 2009 Gartner Hype-Cycle, Wireless Power has just entered the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” zone and is still 5-10 years from mainstream adoption. 

This technology holds many benefits to the environment (less wasted electricity) and user convenience (how many proprietary power adapters do you have?), it is yet to be seen if consumer demand can overcome the inertia of the status quo and the power of big money lobbying by the coal, nuclear and utilities. Right now my money is on the money.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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