RFID Tags Is it time to Invest?

[Thetaloops]

2 Months from Today, Wal-Mart and other big Companies will Learn the “Protocol” for a new $600 Billion Technology


Here’s How to Invest Before They Do

www.agora-inc.com/reports/PSI/WPSIEC21/


Doesn't feel right to invest in our own surveillance. I do agree that this is going to save the businesses money, but it is going to put many people our of work. It will make the individual investors alot of money, but, my conscience and logic wouldn't let me invest in this one. Next will be the chips in our necks.

[AtomHeartMother]

Your absolutely right Theta! I don't even feel right shopping at Wal-Mart knowing that many of their "every-day Low prices" are possible from methods that use the misfortune of others - which inturn will create profits for Wal-Mart.
Still that's not enough for the scalawags, so they create misfortune for others under the guise of improving lifestyle and community just about every time a new "Wal-Mart SuperCenter" opens it's doors - which inturn will create profits for Wal-Mart.
Wow, what a cycle. They supply their own need of misfortunate people by creating them.

[Thetaloops]

the Wal Mart family has 5 of the richest people in America, built on the backs of the poor and less fortunate. You are right, we don't shop there either. We just cut out 'Home Depot' also. 100% of there donations for the elections went to Bush.

Swamp did some research on it and 'Lowes' are more honorable, no politics only Tsunami victims and the Local Scouts, etc. We are boycotting the businesses that are destroying this country from the inside out.

It is something the we can do to effect the way things are!!!

[AtomHeartMother]

I had to do a double take when I saw this on the front page of the local paper,
at first glance I thought it read "A NEW WORLD ORDER".

[AtomHeartMother]

Suppliers Resist RFID Push[/COLOR][/B]
By Willie D. Jones
Wal-Mart wants them to take shipments with radio tags, but few are willing to pay

28 April 2005—Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, sells everything from diapers to tires at prices that draw in customers and run off rivals. It has been able to wring out healthy profits by economizing on labor and inventory—which is somewhat contradictory because it takes a lot of manpower to track thousands of goods from suppliers to customers.

To further reduce those costs, the company last year set a January 2005 deadline for its 100 largest suppliers to begin phasing in an inventory-management system based on radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags [see box, "What Is RFID?"]. The tags were to be placed on the pallets and cases shipped to three of the discount chain's distribution centers in Texas. Yet although Wal-Mart is the 800-pound gorilla of retailing, with 3500 stores, 1.2 million employees, and sales making up about 2.5 percent of the United States' gross national product, it has had difficulty getting most of its suppliers to adequately fund the transformation.

The rollout of the RFID system is running late. Wal-Mart has insisted that things are going well, but analysts say it has deliberately built enough ambiguity into its plans to explain the missed deadlines. (Wal-Mart declined to respond to repeated calls for comment.)

Wal-Mart is not the only company trying to make use of RFID. Other retailers, notably Target in the United States, Metro in Germany, and Tesco in the United Kingdom, are pursuing the technology. So are nonretail organizations. The U.S. Department of Defense requires any single shipment valued at more than US $5000 to carry an RFID tag, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and several of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies are planning to use RFID to fight the spread of counterfeit prescription drugs.

It's easy to see what RFID can do for Wal-Mart. The tags can be read en masse and from a distance, so that one person can do the work of many. Faster tracking should enable the company to cut back on inventory, close some of its distribution centers, and lay off the employees who man them, as well as some of the workers who track inventory inside stores. By keeping track of every last item, RFID should also be able to cut shrinkage—losses due to shoplifting and employee theft—which costs the retailer up to 2 percent of sales, or as much as $2 billion per year.

But what can RFID do for Wal-Mart's suppliers? In three to five years, when tag prices are lower and the suppliers presumably know much more about how to implement the technology, it may begin to help many of them save money, says Kara Romanow, an analyst at AMR Research, a business-technology consulting firm in Boston. Closer tracking of goods would let them cut back the goods in their own supply chains, freeing up capital for other purposes.

Right now, though, RFID will only cost them, and they know it. In a December report, Romanow wrote that Wal-Mart's designated suppliers, together with 37 others who complied voluntarily, had spent just $250 million on implementing the technology. That sum was less than a quarter of what AMR estimates was needed to provide a working system that meets Wal-Mart's goals. The implementation on the cheap leaves problems for Wal-Mart, such as getting the electronic scanners to read enough of the tags. Some tags are being scanned twice, by two readers in close proximity, or left unscanned because the RF signal has been reflected by, say, the metal of aluminum cans.

Nevertheless, some suppliers, focusing on the future, have complied with the spirit and not just the letter of the edict. Procter and Gamble Co. (P&G), maker of soaps, snacks, and more, is itself one of the world's largest companies, especially following its recent $57 billion acquisition of Gillette. The conglomerate, based in Cincinnati, hopes to use RFID to solve its own inventory problems. One sort of problem is having to maintaining excessive inventories, which cost money to finance. The converse problem, a stockout, happens when a customer wants something that is not available at the time.

Larry Kellam, P&G's director of business-to-business supply innovation, estimates that stockouts cost the company about $2 billion in lost sales annually. According to Kellam, the company's attitude is that electronic product coding using technologies such as RFID "is going to happen. We don't think it is a question of if, but a question of when."

But if P&G and a few other big Wal-Mart suppliers are enthusiastic about RFID and have invested accordingly, there were many more who did not, to bring down the average.

For them, any money they did spend will have largely been for naught if they did not adapt their internal procedures to take advantage of RFID, says Bill Hardgrave, an information systems professor at the University of Arkansas Sam M. Walton School of Business in Fayetteville. Hardgrave says he suspects that many companies are using the tags merely as a high-priced substitute for bar codes. "Just slapping a tag on the side of a product without changing anything else about how the supply chain is managed will obviously limit its value," he says.

Andrew White, an analyst at Gartner, says much of the advantage attributed to RFID really should be credited to the thinking that managers are forced to do in order to adopt the technology. "There's lots of technology around that we have not used properly," White says. "If we did use it properly, we'd actually get many of the benefits we want to get with RFID."

The point at which RFID becomes attractive to retailers hinges more on how well a system is implemented it than on how much the tags cost. Today the cheapest tags cost roughly 20 cents apiece, and the prices will drop only slowly, White says. He advises vendors not to make overly hopeful cost projections. "You take whatever price you've got, plug that number into your business plan, and see if you can make money out of it," he says.

Sometimes there's no doubt that RFID makes sense. It's critical for airlines to track luggage and for hospitals to track patients, and that's why the health-care and airline industries like the technology. They're adopting RFID of their own free will, not because an 800-pound gorilla told them to do it.

www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/wonews/apr05/0405nrfid.html

[Thetaloops]

If sure figures a big monster company like Wal-Mart would be pushing for this technology. Less employees needed for inventory control and thus more money for them.

[Thetaloops]

National ID Card - Big Brother - Here we Go!

Congress set to impose ID card rules
States would need to verify papers

www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/05/05/congress_set_to_impose_id_card_rules/?rss_id=Boston+Globe+--+National+News

[AtomHeartMother]

More on Wal Mart[/b][/color]

Fat? Over 40? Don't bother applying for a Wal-Mart job[/b]
By Katherine Griffiths in New York - Published: 27 October 2005

If you are on the wrong side of 40 and not as fit as you'd like to be, don't bother applying for a job at Wal-Mart. That is the message for workers in America - revealed in a secret memo, laying out a plan by Wal-Mart to make it harder for older, less healthy people to get a job at one of its legions of stores in the US.

The memo, written by Wal-Mart's vice-president in charge of benefits, says undesirable applicants could be discouraged by making physical activity part of the job, such as asking cashiers to demonstrate they are also able to collect trolleys. The tactics appear to be designed to drive down the bill for health care and other employee benefits at the company, which made $10bn (£5bn) in profits last year.

For the world's largest retailer, which owns Asda in the UK, the leaking of the memo could hardly have come at a worse time because it is has embarked on a campaign to improve its public image.

For Wal-Mart's mounting critics, the document is proof that it is the world's most controversial company, which locks its workers in overnight while they stock shelves and aggressively resists the formation of unions among its employees.

The normally private company, which has preferred to maintain a bunker mentality from its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, has launched a number of initiatives to fight back against its critics.

Only this week, Wal-Mart announced a number of initiatives to make it seem like a more caring place to work. On Monday, the company published a speech by its chief executive, Lee Scott, urging Congress to raise the national minimum wage from $5.15 an hour. Mr Scott said Wal-Mart's millions of customers were "struggling to get by" on their current earnings.

The company, which has more than 3,300 stores in the US alone, also said it would improve its environmental record, increasing the fuel efficiency of its fleet of trucks and investing $500m a year to cut greenhouse emissions and conserve energy.

In a third offensive, Wal-Mart said it would make improvements in an area where criticism of the company has been particularly heated: health care. To counter criticism that Wal-Mart's benefits have been so poor that many of the workers - or "associates" as the company calls them - have resorted to Medicaid to pay hospital bills, it launched a new, cheaper plan. The initiative allows its 1.3 million US employees to buy into a health insurance programme for as little as $11 a month.

Yet the reality of Wal-Mart's attitude seems at odds with the positive impression the company had worked so hard to create. Susan Chambers, the Wal-Mart executive who prepared the memo with the consultants McKinsey, notes that Wal-Mart's workers "are getting sicker than the national population, particularly in obesity-related diseases".

To deal with this problem, Ms Chambers suggests various ways to woo younger workers and discourage older ones. "It will be far easier to retain a healthier work force than it will be to change the behaviour in an existing one ... These plans would also dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart", she writes in the document which was sent to the company's board to consider.

In an interview with the New York Times, Ms Chambers defended her ideas, saying her focus was not on slashing costs but on finding new more flexible ways to manage benefits. Ms Chambers also pointed to positive perks which would be offered to motivated associates, such as education programmes.

However, Wal-Mart's critics believe the company was revealing its true colours.

Andrew Grossman, director of Wal-Mart Watch, the advocacy group that received the document anonymously, said: "This company has been selling a false image of itself to the general public.

"Anyone who truly wishes to understand Wal-Mart need look no further than this document. We thank the good person or persons inside the Wal-Mart company who bravely shared this with us."

A spokesman for Asda, which Wal-Mart bought in July 1999, said the hiring tactics would not be used in the UK. "Our human resources policies are unique to Asda," he said.

news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article322562.ece

[AtomHeartMother]

thetaloops said:

If sure figures a big monster company like Wal-Mart would be pushing for this technology. Less employees needed for inventory control and thus more money for them.

Yep they're always striving to improve efficiency. Always. Wow, this could be just a stepping stone to a bigger more efficient objective...an inventory of identities. But that would be more of a banker's tool, wouldn't it?[/color]

Wal-Mart's bid to open bank draws opposition[/b]
By Lorrie Grant, USA TODAY

The world's largest retailer wants to open a bank, and its critics are showering federal regulators with pleas to say no.

Wal-Mart Stores' (WMT) application to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to charter a bank has drawn 1,550 mostly negative comments, the most ever. With bank-charter applications, a half-dozen comments is considered a lot, the FDIC says.

Wal-Mart wants to start an industrial loan corporation (ILC), a type of bank that regulators let commercial businesses operate for specific purposes, such as processing payments. Most negative comments stressed the dangers of an unregulated commercial company owning a federally insured bank.

Among the concerns: "Is the parent company sufficiently regulated? Will credit decisions be objective? Will economic power become too concentrated?" says Edward Yingling, CEO of the American Bankers Association, a trade group of independent banks that opposes Wal-Mart's application.

Wal-Mart currently allows about 300 local and community banks to operate branches in more than 1,000 stores on long-term deals.

Opponents, ranging from banks to unions, fear that Wal-Mart might someday move to put its own banks in its stores, in turn devastating community banks.

"I believe you would see a lot of banks close down," Terri Thompson, an executive at American Exchange Bank in Henryetta, Okla., wrote to the FDIC. "Please do not let this happen."

Wal-Mart says it has no plans to use the ILC to offer banking services to the public, though it does plan to offer certificates of deposit to non-profits. It says it wants to form an ILC only to save "millions" of dollars that it pays financial institutions for processing its debit, credit and electronic check transactions.

"Wal-Mart receives more than 140 million credit, debit and electronic check payments per month and pays a small fee to process each transaction," says Jane Thompson, president of the retailer's financial services division. She would become chairman of the Wal-Mart ILC if it is approved.

The proposed ILC would be chartered in Utah, home to 31 of 59 such institutions, including one owned by rival Target.

The FDIC doesn't expect to make a decision for at least 200 days.

This is Wal-Mart's fourth attempt to get into banking. In 1999, it tried to buy an Oklahoma thrift, but a change in federal law banned thrift ownership by commercial entities. In 2001, it tried to partner with Toronto-Dominion Bank to open branches in stores but failed to get the OK of the Office of Thrift Supervision. In 2002, it tried to buy an ILC in California, but a state law was passed prohibiting non-financial institutions from owning ILCs.

In an unrelated move, Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, has asked the Government Accountability Office to determine if ILCs are adequately regulated.

www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2005-11-08-wmt-bank-usat_x.htm

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Wal-Mart Ditty:
judicial-inc.biz/wal_mart_health_care.htm

[Swamp Gas]

news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060213/ap_on_hi_te/security_chips

2 Workers Have Chips Embedded Into Them

Mon Feb 13, 6:25 PM ET

CINCINNATI - Tiny silicon chips were embedded into two workers who volunteered to help test the tagging technology at a surveillance equipment company, an official said Monday.

The Mexico attorney general's office implanted the so-called RFIDs — for radio frequency identification chips — in some employees in 2004 to restrict access to secure areas. Implanting them in the workers at CityWatcher.com is believed to be the first use of the technology in living humans in the United States.

Sean Darks, chief executive of the company, also had one of the chips embedded.

"I have one," he said. "I'm not going to ask somebody to do something I wouldn't do myself. None of my employees are forced to get the chip to keep their job."

The chips are the size of a grain of rice and a doctor embedded them in the forearm just under the surface of the skin, Darks said.

They work "like an access card. There's a reader outside the door; you walk up to the reader, put your arm under it, and it opens the door," Darks said.

Darks said the implants don't enable CityWatcher.com to track employees' movements.

"It's a passive chip. It emits no signal whatsoever," Darks said. "It's the same thing as a keycard."

CityWatcher.com has contracts with six cities to provide cameras and Internet monitoring of high-crime areas, Darks said. The company is experimenting with the chips to identify workers with access to vaults where data and images are kept for police departments, he said.

The technology predates World War II, but has appeared in numerous modern adaptations, such as tracking pets, vehicles and commercial goods at warehouses.

After Hurricane Katrina, as body counts mounted and missing-person reports multiplied, some morgue workers in Mississippi used the tiny computer chips to keep track of unidentified remains.

[DannyRock]

RFID Implants Could Chip Away At Your Health, Identity
Microchips Not Approved By FDA

POSTED: 12:51 pm PST March 13, 2006
UPDATED: 1:21 pm PST March 13, 2006

There is no more hassling with house keys for Amal Graafstra because the key to opening his door is always at his fingertips, literally.

Graafstra has radio frequency identification microchips implanted in his hands. When used with RFID readers, they allow him to control devices around his house.

"There's a small 3-millimeter-by-13-millimeter glass RFID tag in both the right and left hands. I can get in my front door, in my car door, and log into my computer," Graafstra said.

Mikey Sklar is also chipped and now gets bombarded with questions from the curious on his Web site.

"I usually get questions about why I did this implant and where they can find out some more information," Sklar said.

Alex Pang with the Institute for the Future said techy-types are taking RFID to the next step.

"They want to experiment with it and sometimes use themselves as the experimental subjects," Pang said.

But are these experiments safe? Graafstra and Sklar's chips are not approved by the Food and Drug Admistration. In fact, there is only one device approved for human implantation and it's for medical purposes.

Both got their tags from a tech Web site and persuaded surgeon friends to do the implants.

"I'm not worried about any kind of ill effects," Sklar said.

But the FDA warns of risks like rejection or infection with any RFID implants. And when it comes to the unapproved chips, the agency hopes "the physicians performing these procedures are doing so under proper clinical circumstances" and wants to make sure patients are told of the risks.


But health risks aren't the only concern.

"There is a potential for a security problem," privacy expert Liz McIntyre said.

McIntyre said there is proof hackers can clone RFID chips. And if people program tags with credit card, bank account or medical information, the risk of identity theft goes up.

And if you think replacing a credit card is a hassle -- "You can imagine if you have a tag in your body, getting that changed is a surgical procedure rather than a number of phone calls," Pang said.

Graafstra and Sklar said they don't feel at risk and love what's slipped under their skin.

"I don't see how people are going to take advantage of me. If someone really wants to get into my particular house, there's a lot easier ways to do it," Graafstra said.

The FDA said health concerns are not just about infection or rejection.

They said the tags could potentially migrate, travel in the body or even cause MRI incompatibility and electromagnetic interference.

The company selling Graafstra and Sklar's chips has a large disclaimer on its Web site stating the chips are not intended for human implantation or medical use.

www.10news.com/technology/7968362/detail.html

[BigBunny]

Viruses leap to smart radio tags
By Mark Ward
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website

Computer viruses could be about to take a giant leap and start spreading via smart barcodes, warn experts.

Security researchers have infected a Radio Frequency ID tag with a computer virus to show how the technology is vulnerable to malicious hackers.

The researchers warn that RFID tags could help mount many different types of attacks on computer systems.

Makers of radio tag systems were urged by the group to introduce safeguards to guard against RFID-borne bugs.

Cat attack

"This is intended as a wake-up call," said Andrew Tanenbaum, one of the researchers in the computer science department at Amsterdam's Free University that did the work revealing the weaknesses on smart tags.

"We ask the RFID industry to design systems that are secure," he said.

RFID tags are essentially smart barcodes that replace the familiar lines with a small amount of computer memory, a tiny processing unit and a radio. Information is downloaded into the tag and read off it via radio.

Many large companies are keen to use the RFID tags because they will help keep track of the goods they are shipping from warehouses out to stores or regional offices. Currently RFID tags are relatively expensive so most are used to log what is in boxes of goods rather than to label individual items.

However, many expect the smart tags to become ubiquitous as the price of making the devices falls.

In their research paper Mr Tanenbaum and his colleagues Melanie Rieback and Bruno Crispo detail how to use RFID tags to spread viruses and subvert corporate databases.

"Everyone working on RFID technology has tacitly assumed that the mere act of scanning an RFID tag cannot modify back-end software and certainly not in a malicious way. Unfortunately, they are wrong," wrote the trio in their research paper.

The researchers showed how to get round the limited computational abilities of the smart tags to use them as an attack vector and corrupt databases holding information about what a company has in storage. To test out the theory the group created a virus for a smart tag that used only 127 characters, uploaded it and watched it in action.

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at anti-virus firm F-Secure, said: "RFIDs with embedded computers are suspectible to basically all the same threats any other computers are. Unfortunately."

If viruses do appear in smart tags, said the researchers, they are likely to cause problems for companies that read data off the tags. They speculated that consumer activist groups could use smart tags viruses to cause havoc at stores they are targeting.

In some cases, said the researchers, viruses could be spread by household pets such as cats and dogs that are injected with the tags to help identify their owner.

The researchers urged companies working on RFID systems to start thinking seriously about security measures to protect against future threats.
Story from BBC NEWS:
news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/technology/4810576.stm

Published: 2006/03/15 18:02:32 GMT