Except form being a coach at the Picnic08 Mediamatic social RFID hackerscamp, I and a couple of others made the vBird.

vBird is a social bird which likes to fly, but cannot; it needs people to help it fly. The vBird project wished to build upon the successful by poly-xelor. The vBird’s heart has two parts: a camera with a wireless transmitter and a bluetooth Arduino with a serial RFID reader, a Lilypad accelerometer, and some leds. The former streams the flight to the vBird’s nest, the latter is used to identify the thrower and receiver of the vBird (by the RFID reader and the tags of the throwers). The accelerometer detects if the vBird is being thrown, flying, or being catched; an appropriate sound is then send out through the speakers in the nest (’nice to meet you’, ‘wheeeeee’). The leds are used as the eyes.

Because we knew who threw the bird (because of the embedded RFID reader), we could upload the video fragments captured by the vBird to the appropirate profiles in the picnic network. The idea was powerful and the technique worked as a prototype. However, throwing hardware needs solid casing and a lot of stuff broke during the proces. It would have been better also to use a hi-speed camera as our current camera did not have a high enough sample rate to provide really cool videos. A couple of shots were quite nice though, of which you can find some here: with the flash interface or as a playlist of movies.

All in all it was a fun project, and we had a good team. As a prototype it worked quite well, to be fool proof it would need some tweaks. If you want to know more about the vBird, check out our page at Mediamatic. All the code for the vBird can be found here. And of course, the other teams made really nice projects too, like a physical mario cart, a google elevator contest, the ik-Run, breeders, a mobile massage couch, and more

BTW, last year @ mediamatic’s hackerscamp I made iTea, an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table. In the coffee cup on top of the table, you can place your rfid tag - which is given to you at the entrance of the conference and linked to a social network - and the table will start to display information about you - like an oracle.

I just got a tikitag RFID reader. Tikitag will sell their betas starting from October the 1st. What they try to do is quite simple: provide everyone with an RFID reader and some tags, have the user install some software, and let him/her couple the unique RFID number to a service (e.g. open a browser with a specific url) through their site. As the tikitag reader software always connects to the tikitag website, I assume they hope to become the central point on the web linking RFID to information or ‘actions’.

Of course I don’t like third party platforms storing and tracking my information so I started scripting. I made a simple cube with an RFID tag on each side linked to the opening of a web browser with the sites I check in the morning - thus skipping the need to connect to tikitag.com to do local stuff.

If you want to try it out get your hands on a RFID reader (tikitag or not) and follow the instructions on Mediamatic’s page for interfacing with RFID. After that it is really simple to write a script to parse out the tag id and link it to an action yourself.

With the help of some class mates I wrote an extensive post about Recalling RFID at the Masters of Media weblog. It is well worth the read for anybody interested in RFID, ubiquitous computing, and privacy.

Recalling RFID was held on Friday the 19th and Saturday the 20th of October at de Balie. This unique event included presentations on RFID, debates and digital connectivity scenarios by industry representatives, academics, artists, privacy advocates, programmers and consultants. Recalling the current state of affairs and looking to the future, it turned out to be a very interesting, high quality conference.

Speakers included Katherine Albrecht (CASPIAN – Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion And Numbering, USA), Bart Schermer (privacy lawyer and coordinator of RFID Platform Netherlands), Rafi Haladjian (founder of Violet company - known from the Nabaztag Rabbit, tech entrepreneur), Melanie Rieback (Ubisec researcher who invented the first RFID virus, VU University Amsterdam), Stephan Engberg (Priway/Copenhagen Business School), Christian van ‘t Hof (researcher, Rathenau Instituut), Willem Velthoven (designer and director of Mediamatic), interaction designer Timo Arnall, and many others.

On September 25th - 29th, the cross media week picnic07 took place in Amsterdam. I was invited by Mediamatic to participate in a RFID hacking workshop. The goal was clear: put a bunch of hackers, t(h)inkerers and interaction designers together; let them play with rfid chips and readers and make an installation for the picnic event.

It turned out to be a lot of fun. Together with David Kousemaker (Blendid.nl), Don Blaauw, Dirk Oosterbosch, Vlad Trifa, and Esther Weltevrede we tought up and made iTea. iTea is an interactive installation in the form of a coffee table. (more…)

two-day public program on RFID and things to come.
19 & 20 OCTOBER 2007
DE BALIE AMSTERDAM
http://www.debalie.nl/recallingrfidd

It’s in travel documents, building passes, pet animals, clothing stores, libraries, public pools, theme parks and prisons… and yet only a few of us know what RFID is. RFID (radio frequency identification) uses radio waves to identify people, animals or objects carrying encoded microchips. For government and industry, RFID signifies economic innovation, while for the futurist it marks the next stage in digital connectivity. RFID’s pervasiveness will only increase in the years to come, forcing shifts in perceptions of the public sphere and private domain.
(more…)

From September the 22nd till the 29th, Amsterdam will host PicNic 2007. Picnic is a conference, festival, diy thingie, and much more. Although a lot of hot shots (euhm, interesting speakers) are coming and the program is quite nice, it is quite expensive (come on, +-500 Euros a day??). Fortunately there are good and sometimes free, or cheap, evening and side shows.

Best of all though, is that there will be some 1200 people carrying a RFID badge, linked to a social network. And I can play with it I was invited to join a very interesting group of people at the RFID Hackers Camp. The idea is to think up and realize 6 to 8 projects with the available hardware and data. Mjummy.

from http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/crypto/passport/index.html

A research team in cryptography from the Catholic University of Louvain (Louvain-la-Neuve) disclosed serious weaknesses in the Belgian biometric passport, the only type of passport distributed in Belgium since the end of 2004. The work carried out in Louvain-la-Neuve during the course of May 2007 show that Belgian passports issued between end 2004 and July 2006 do not include any security mechanism to protect the personal data embedded in the passport’s microchip. Passports issued after July 2006 do benefit from security mechanisms but these ones are flawed. This means that anyone possessing a little electronic reading device, which is easy and cheap to acquire, can steal the passport content while it is still in the pocket of the victim owners and thus without their knowing. Face and signature are among the data at risk. This news is all the more surprising because Karel De Gucht, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, declared in the Parliament on 9th January 2007 that the Belgian passport benefited from the security mechanisms advocated by the International Civil Aviation Organization.

from http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/10/belgian_epassport_flaws/

Gildas Avoine, Kassem Kalach, and Jean-Jacques Quisquater (leader of the crypto group at UCL) found that first-generation Belgian passports fail to include any security mechanism that would ensure the protection of personal data. The researchers carried out a demo that showed it was possible to read first generation passport from a short distance, potentially while it is still in the pocket of a prospective victim.

video: http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/crypto/passport/passports-UCL-AKQ-2007.mpg

To be better protected you’ll need to create or buy an RFID blocking wallet. This way at least your data can’t be snooped without you consciously handing over (or unconsciously losing) your pasport and other rfid enabled stuff.

Wired News: American Passports to Get Chipped
New U.S. passports will soon be read remotely at borders around the world, thanks to embedded chips that will broadcast on command an individual’s name, address and digital photo to a computerized reader.

>> This was on Slashdot’s political feed. Here’s the jaw-dropper:
>>
>> McCain envisions erecting physical checkpoints, dubbed
>> “screening points,” near subways, airports, bus stations,
>> train stations, federal buildings, telephone companies,
>> Internet hubs and any other “critical infrastructure”
>> facility deemed vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Secretary
>> Tom Ridge would appear to be authorized to issue new
>> federal IDs–with biometric identifiers–that Americans
>> could be required to show at checkpoints.

on this, it’s worth noting that the current plans for biometric passports,
as will be standard in the US from 2005, include an RFID chip broadcasting
your ID information, in the clear, to any scanners in range.
( http://hasbrouck.org/blog/archives/000434.html )

Range of RFID is currently on the order of less than 1 foot reportedly –
although the readers used to read the chips in farmed salmon get a range
of 10-12 feet, and I’ve talked to wifi-haxx0rs who are pretty certain a
high-powered directional antenna could *massively* increase this.

Massively widespread identity theft of US citizens on vacation, anyone?

Schneier says: ‘Unfortunately, there is only one possible reason: The
administration wants surreptitious access themselves. It wants to be able
to identify people in crowds. It wants to surreptitiously pick out the
Americans, and pick out the foreigners. It wants to do the very thing that
it insists, despite demonstrations to the contrary, can’t be done.’
( http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2004/10/rfid_passports.html )

Never mind tinfoil hats — it’s time for tinfoil wallets.

Photographs taken by privacy activist and writer Katherine Albrecht at the Frontline Expo 2004 conference are “unauthorized” according to Advanstar. The event management/PR firm has threatened to ban Albrecht, founder and director of CASPIAN (Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering) from future events it organizes unless she “refrain[s] from making the photos available.”

The photographs in dispute show Checkpoint RFID-enabled prototypes of Abercrombie & Fitch, Calvin Klein, Champion and other name brand clothing labels.

“The notion that I somehow ’surreptitiously’ photographed the displays at your event is baffling,” Albrecht said in a written response to Advanstar. She characterized Advanstar’s threat as “an attempt to censor images that fairly and accurately depict the activities that took place at their conference.”

Advanstar’s censorship “request,” and Albrecht’s response are posted at:

http://www.spychips.com/frontline-letter.html

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