The White House’s use of secrecy and obfuscation is notorious. Now, instead of outright eliminating the FOIA Act, they are simply slowing the process down, ignoring requests, and moving it to the Justice Department where it would simply be neglected to the point of nonuse.
At MIT, the Human Dynamics lab has developed high tech badges that can track a person’s social interactions.
The high-tech badges recognise each other using infrared, then record your speech, note your distance from other people, and track your movement.
Ben Waber, one of the researchers has blogged about the results of handing the badges out to delegates who met with corporate sponsors.
Instead of running away from such technology, people started to actually compete against one another to see who could get the most contacts.
Several articles last year stated that Wal-Mart’s plans with RFID was receiving a lukewarm reception from its suppliers. They were not required to use the tags, but it was highly suggested. After more than a year of suppliers balking at using the RFID tags, Wal-Mart has decided to force the issue.
Beginning January 30, 2008, Wal-Mart will charge its suppliers $2 per tag, for each tag they place on pallets entering their Sam’s Club distribution center in Texas. While many will shrug their shoulders and think it no big deal because it is one distribution center, this will affect hundreds of stores. A distribution center is a single drop off point for suppliers. Millions of shipments arrive here yearly before they are broken down into smaller shipments and sent to other distribution centers or directly to stores.
Worse yet, Wal-Mart will be requiring all distributors to mark their merchandise with RFID tags at the item level by 2010. So, while they aren’t quite the big bully on the block just yet, they will be in two years. Because Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the United States, many companies that are forced to comply with their policies will simply make all their products RFID compliant to all the other retailers.
All this has execs at companies that conformed early to Wal-Mart’s RFID mandate, including Daisy Brand, smiling smugly. The manufacturer of sour cream and cottage cheese started shipping RFID-tagged cases and pallets to Wal-Mart in the fall of 2004. Daisy says its investment in RFID has been a boon, helping it better manage the flow of its perishable products through Wal-Mart stores and ensure marketing promotions proceed as planned.
Daisy’s information systems manager, Kevin Brown, says he can track, by lot number, how quickly pallets of products make it to stores and when they’re unpacked using Wal-Mart’s Retail Link Web site for suppliers, since Wal-Mart has readers at its dock entrances and on its cardboard-case compactors. If a Wal-Mart store is scheduled to run a sales promotion on sour cream, certain information will signal that the promotion is taking place as planned, such as the destruction of a large number of cases in order to fill up the waist-high coolers typically used for refrigerated-product promotions. In fact, some in the industry speculate Wal-Mart soon will require any retailer running a promotion in its stores to use RFID.
While this is a great tool for businesses because they can track their perishables, there is no reason to tag things at the item level. Once this happens, the cost of each individual tag will be passed on to the consumer.
This type of RFID tagging, however, is what we should be supporting. It isn’t implanted into anyone. It isn’t keeping track of an individual’s data. It is only providing a better way to track pallets of merchandise. While I despise Wal-Mart, and they are strong-arming their suppliers, it does appear that they are pushing their suppliers to create a more efficient mode of transporting and tracking their merchandise.
Tagging the pallet still brings concerns of not really knowing what merchandise is on the pallet, but it can keep track of the pallet and where it is, making it easier to locate what specific item is supposed to be on the pallet. It won’t prevent thefts, but it may be able to track them quicker to pinpoint where the thefts occurred.
Even with these changes, Wal-Mart will still be seen as a monopsony. They bought the merchandise. They should be doing the tagging, not the suppliers.
Over on Reddit, there’s a post from a user who has discovered that Amazon’s British branch has a clause in their shipping policies that limits the number of copies a person may purchase.
Amazon.co.uk: most countries in the world. Please note that customers in the US and Canada may be restricted to one copy of certain book titles because multiple copies may infringe US copyright laws.
According to their policy, purchasing too many copies of a single book can be construed as copyright infringement.
At issue is whether or not publishing rights = purchasing rights.
The law presumably exists (I am not a lawyer) to prevent people who live in countries without copyright laws from printing copies of books, however, if you do not have copyright laws in your country, why would you care about them in the first place? If importing is a problem, I am sure they purchase directly from the publisher and not Amazon.com.
In 2007, credit card data and social security number theft reached record levels in 2007, with experts predicting it will only get worse in 2008. Estimates of 79 million records in the USA and 162 million worldwide were compromised last year.
Major breaches last year included TJX Co., which accounted for more than half the breaches, and the breach the United Kingdom suffered of its citizens health records. However, a large majority of the information that was lost was due to employees losing the information as opposed to hackers gaining access to a company’s database.
while companies, government agencies, schools and other institutions are spending more to protect ever-increasing volumes of data with more sophisticated firewalls and encryption, the investment often is too little too late. “More of them are experiencing data breaches, and they’re responding to them in a reactive way, rather than proactively looking at the company’s security and seeing where the holes might be,” said Linda Foley, who founded the San Diego-based Identity Theft Resource Center after becoming an identity theft victim herself.
Users need more education so that this type of problem doesn’t happen. Your phone number and full address aren’t needed on 90% of the sites you visit, so why give it up so freely? Unfortunately, the only people who seem to take this problem seriously are those that have been victims of identity theft or paranoid people, like myself, who keep informed about just what is happening with their information.
