the system, called ZPass, will allow school administrators to keep better track of those students who ride the bus each day. Kyle Koski, transportation director of the district, said about 5,000 students ride the bus.

“It is an immediate way that we can have feedback if a child does not get off (the bus) where he’s supposed to,” Ward said.

The district and police went on alert twice in August when, on the first and second days of school, two elementary students briefly went missing after taking the wrong buses.

This system is being implemented because two small children got on the wrong bus on the first and second days of school. This sort of thing happens every year when students try to learn the new bus system. A student may have ridden bus #7 last year, but this year bus #12 runs the route that takes him/her home. The same applies to new students who don’t know the bus system, students who have never ridden the bus before and kindergarteners who simply don’t understand how things work.

Each student in the pilot program will be assigned a personalized radio frequency identification (RFID) card, which they will swipe in front of a card reader installed on the bus’ dashboard. Students will swipe their cards each time they get on the bus and whenever they exit.

Using RFID technology and GPS, the card reader records the location of the bus at the time of the swipe and immediately loads that information onto the district’s computer network. At any time, administrators can pull up the data — including a map — and see exactly where a student both entered and exited a bus.

Though the new system is designed to track students, it has a major flaw. The system appears to only match a head count with the count on the RFID reader. There’s nothing to say the person holding little Johnny’s card is really Johnny. This is not a new flaw, yet every district that attempts to use RFID for tracking students seems to ignore it.

Some major flaws in this video is that a lot of things have to happen for a supposed terrorist attack to happen. What happens when the person dispersing the biological agent is actually authorized to be in that area? Nothing will happen until the person actually releases the gas or powder into the system.

Does TASS even begin to understand how many thousands of vehicles are illegally parked every single day at an airport? Trying to figure out which ones are just regular people and which one is there to pick up a terrorist or set off a car bomb is impossible to do.

Facial recognition is not perfect and there are too many false positives currently in the systems for it to be accurately relied upon. Many terrorists or suspected terrorists aren’t going to go to the airport. They are going to pick someone with no record so they won’t be detected. Also, how is an RFID detector going to keep track of the person? Presumably, they have an RFID chip in the passport, boarding pass, or both. What happens when that person puts their passport and boarding pass in an RFID safe wallet or sleeve? It won’t be detected and the police won’t be able to track them so easily.

While the truck in the cargo area could be a legitimate threat, not all trucks have electronic seals and there would be no way to know if the cargo was actually opened. Even then, TASS only sets up monitoring on the truck, based on a presumed GPS device within the truck. If this were some sort of plot or something dangerous, simply monitoring it isn’t going to stop any kind of explosion.

TASS then assumes that because all of these things are happening at the same time, there must be a multi-targeted attack about to happen. The fact that any or all of these things are easily explained away points to overreaction and paranoia instead of some type of attack. Given the fact that no one has attempted to do any of these things individually, yet alone combined, suggests that TASS is not only not necessary, but a huge waste of money.

The store, in the Sydney Qantas Club (Terminal 3), will remain in Sydney in July and August, move to Melbourne for September and October and then to Brisbane in November and December.

Qantas Club members and their guests can take advantage of a special deal with a “buy one get one free” offer until December. The tags normally retail at $49.95 each.

The Q Bag Tag has been designed to streamline the bag drop functionality of Qantas’ new faster, smarter check-in system. It replaces the need for paper tags and improves the speed and ease by which a customer moves through the airport. The tag contains world first RFID technology, allowing the tag to be electronically imprinted with the information of the passenger and their flight details.

You can also purchase them online, but they only work on Qantas’ domestic network for now. If things go as smoothly as Qantas hopes, it will roll out to the entire Qantas network. When that happens, look for other airlines to introduce similar measures.

NutriSmart from HannesRemote on Vimeo.

Hannes Harms – “embedding data in food” 2011
Royal College of Art,
Innovation Design Engineering

Tracking certain items for medical reasons is also a plausible use because it helps to keep track of exactly what is happening to a patient and can better help a medical professional to care for the patient. What will happen when a tag malfunctions and says that there are no allergens in a food and you eat it? Can your family sue because you relied on a tag to determine whether or not you should eat it?

Food, on the other hand, is not a practical use of RFID. There is no reason why the food couldn’t come with a small tag that tells you this information instead of a tag that is placed into your food that you must then consume.

Developed by Hannes Harms, a design engineering student at the Royal College of Art in London, these little markers would allow consumers to trace the entire supply chain behind every item in their cupboard, while feeding valuable nutritional information to dieters or people with particularly dangerous food allergies. Kodak, as you may recall, came up with a similar idea a few years ago, though Harms’ prototype extends beyond the realm of medical monitoring. Properly equipped refrigerators, for example, would be able to alert users whenever their stock’s about to expire, simply by scanning the tags. The NutriSmart concept also calls for a smart plate, which Harms describes as an “invisible diet management system.” Just put your meal on the plate and an embedded reader will analyze your grub, tell you how many miles it traveled before arriving at your kitchen and transmit all of its history and caloric data to your phone, via Bluetooth. No word yet on what would happen to these tags post-digestion, though our inner 13-year-olds are giggling at the possibilities.

If the food can keep track of what you’re eating and how much, it won’t take long for insurance companies to want the information. Next will be the advertising companies and the spammers, who will all want a little bit of your money. No government or company should be in the business of tracking what you eat.

There’s little bits and pieces of technology—like an RFID chip—in the new permanent bag tags, and once you’re at the airport you can use one of the updated airport kiosks to check-in. Your luggage information will automatically be linked up with your boarding documents, and you’ll be on your way to security.

Right now the bag tags can only be utilized around Australia, in cities like Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, and Perth as well as plenty of smaller airports and cities. Of course they’re planning to take over the world with these new little bag tags, so stay tuned.

Frequent flyers get these neat little slices of travel tech along with their fancy flyer credentials, but for the rest of us there’s still hope. Qantas is selling these directly for right around $50, but be sure to affix it securely to your bag. Unfortunately, Qantas isn’t giving out any freebies for lost or damaged tags.

At the moment, the only real drawback appears to be, if something goes wrong between the tag and check-in transfer of information, no one will know where your bag is supposed to go. Otherwise, a passenger’s luggage is tracked nearly constantly. Combined with Qantas’ RFID enabled membership cards and check-in should only take a few minutes, streamlining the entire process.

Read my entire post over at The Daily Censored.

Dynamics introduced two different cards at the DEMO conference.

The “MultiAccount” card has two buttons on its face, each with an indicator light that can be pressed to record data to its magnetic strip. “One might switch the card to be your debit card, and the other your credit card,” says Dynamics CEO Jeff Mullen. “These cards are exactly the same size and thickness of a conventional card, and the lithium-polymer battery inside can last four years under high usage. They’re also fully waterproof, so you can put them through the washing machine.”

The “Hidden” card features a keypad and black-and-white display for six of the digits in the card’s unique number. Once the correct PIN is entered on the card’s four buttons, the missing digits are filled in and the card’s magnetic strip is populated with data. Both the digits and the strip become blank again after a short time. “If this card is lost, it’s just dead plastic to anyone who finds it,” says Mullen, who thinks it could help banks attract security-conscious consumers.

While it seems like a good idea to have a card that can be set to erase itself, most of the credit card information that is stolen, is taken from databases that have been hacked in to or stolen.

“Cards with this technology have been used in large numbers in stealth trials in the U.S. since earlier this year,” says Mullen, who adds that banking partners will begin talking about their plans for the technology in coming months.

This statement should be of particular concern to anyone who values privacy. Why have there been stealth trials? Do the people who are trialing the cards know that they are using them or is it a case of people are using them and not telling retailers?

This new card is only a fraction more secure than current cards. It’s biggest selling point is the ability to consolidate cards, which has its own security problems. One should remember that when considering whether or not these cards would be worthwhile.

From cnet:

In a bid to set parents’ nerves at ease, a southwest suburban school district has become one of the first in the state to begin tracking students riding buses to and from school each day with Global Positioning System and Radio Frequenty Identification technology.

Palos Heights School District 128 had previously been using ZPass, a GPS technology provided by Seattle-based Zonar Systems, to track the buses.  But now the district is outfitting students’ backpacks with a luggage tag-sized unit that logs when the student steps on and off the bus.

And this will surely work because kids never forget their backpacks and always take them home from school. Children will just get a friend to hold their bags, thus circumventing the system. Once the kid gets off the bus, they aren’t tracked anymore. Good luck finding your child then.

For all you parents that worry far too much, stop worrying. Your kids aren’t in any more danger now than they were 40 years ago. Allowing this intrusive crap into your lives only coddles your children into accepting being tracked as normal for the rest of their lives. You’re not helping.