29 Sep 2005
I encountered my first piece of RFID tagged clothing yesterday, at Kathmandu. They’re having a sale and I picked up an awesome polar fleece warm thing for $30 (and this is a clearance center having a sale, so that was down from like… $180. Good stuff.).
I got home and did the usual tag-snipping-off thing, then at some point went to look under the tag for wash instructions, etc., and felt a lump inside it. I kinda squeezed it/twisted it for a bit, and was pretty sure it was one of those rectangular stickers you find on various products in stores these days.
So, it didn’t take much to get it out. The stitching on the side of the clothing tag looked pretty weak (understandable, as these things aren’t normally even sealed on the sides), and I squeezed it until it popped and there was an incision just big enough to extract the RFID bit.
Less than a minute later I had the tag out.
I’m not against RFID per se… so long as it stays in the store. If you’re going to use techniques like this, etiquette should dictate you tell your customers about it after they’ve bought the product. I’m not too worried about Kathmandu (except on principle), because they’re a privately-owned company that doesn’t have various other stores under its control. I do, however, have concerns with larger companies using these technologies (such as Coles Myer), because they can potentially track how often people are wearing clothing bought in their stores, and match the RFID code to the style of apparel, and match the item to a transaction number to an EFTPOS record to an individual. No thanks.
Admittedly, this is only in their stores. However, when you consider the scope of some retail groups’ ownership, cause for concern arises. The same companies that own clothing outlets and department stores also own grocery and supermarket chains. These are the kind of retail properties that people visit every day, or every few days. The potential for abuse here is astounding.
Retailers should at the least warn (or, for those who prefer euphemism, “inform”) purchasers at time of sale that their clothing contains an RFID tag, and provide instructions for removing this. The difficulty of removal isn’t particularly great either pre- or post-purchase, so perhaps that’s one reason they haven’t informed people of this until now. Well, consider that the polar fleece was marked down from $179 to $30… this suggests retailers have room to move. They have theft margins built into their pricing structures (heh, so if we don’t steal from them, they’re making more money than they should be!), but surely these margins should extend to conventional anti-theft technologies that infringe consumers’ rights less? What about those chunky round things that used to be stuck on clothes and removed at point of sale? (I don’t know what they’re called, but they were blindingly obvious, difficult to remove without a tool, and didn’t leave the store)
RFID is fine for all the supply chain stuff in the world… it just shouldn’t ever leave the store.
29 Sep 2005
Aside from Audacity, does anyone know of a good (free) audio recording program for Windows (XPish… Media Center Edition, actually)? Only needs to do a single track, but I’m just not a huge fan of Audacity’s interface, and was mostly just curious to see what else was out there.
And no, I haven’t abandoned my Ubuntu behemoth, it’s just that we’ve got a baby Shuttle computer downstairs that has much better quality audio stuff going for it. The mic itself is slightly-but-not-much-better-than-the-average-PC-mic (it’s a now-discontinued Andrea product), which means you actually can hear the difference in line noise. Just. Well, okay, more than just, it’s probably the best cheap/free headset mic I’ve ever used, but that still probably isn’t saying huge amounts. Bah, whatever… the point is, whatever the soundcard I’ve got in my day-to-day computer (some C-Media thing) is crap and ridiculously noisy, and the Shuttle’s AC’97 is loads better (because it’s probably about five years more recent than the sound card in here, and also because its output is digital going to some Sony receiver that does things nicely enough. At least part of the problem with this PC is that its output is lousy.)
So yeah. I’m using XP Media Center Edition (I was planning on posting photos of the few-month-old box sometime, I promise! It just slipped past me/I couldn’t be bothered/It was downstairs and I live at the other end of the house/You’ve all probably seen these things before and it’s not really that exciting/It’s Dad’s toy not mine and I’m still vaguely convinced he shouldn’t have got it/Insert myriad other reasons for not blogging here.), and want to know what people who haven’t got money to spend on software they rarely use are using for occasional audio recording.
Slightly-crazy idea: Is Windows Movie Maker any good for recording audio? I recall you can use a commentary track on that… I’m thinking it’d be possible just to throw in a blank screen and extend it for however long I needed to record for. I’m a fan of not having to install more software, especially on something retarded and intended purely for… watching TV (hah!) and doing other such crap. So yeah. Comments? Please? For once?
Yeah, I know whenever I ask for comments I seem to get less than usual on posts… meh :P Failing feedback, I’ll give Movie Maker a go and if it’s too horrible then Audacity it is.
28 Sep 2005
28 Sep 2005
Mmm, gotta love that smooth placement variety from Tribe Media.
28 Sep 2005
SanDisk puts DRM on memory cards (CNet News.com)
And I give it two weeks after going to market until it’s cracked. Plus it’s hardly as though it takes particulary advanced technology to manually circumvent copy controls: whilst we’ve still got analogue I/O for our digital devices, it’s perfectly possible to circumvent pretty much any DRM technology out there, cracking efforts aside. Got a line-in on your soundcard? Got a TV tuner with S-Video or Composite input? There’s your home piracy studio.
And if we can do it, the only people you’re fooling when you say it’s not possible are your investors: the professional pirates are yards ahead of you.
(Gosh this post makes me sound like a raving Marxist, doesn’t it?)
Anyway, the point is DRM is only ever going to succeed in a limited capacity. Then, the masses will revolt and overthrow the bourgeoisie oppressors and their control of a false commodity! Socialist order will rule!! erm. Then, circumvention will become the norm, rather than a temporary force. Innovation will be out-innovated. Until DRM is at the point where hardware is in some kind of stasis, and software can be updated at the whim of content purveyors. I don’t say creators, because content’s creators aren’t generally the ones heavily pushing the agenda we’re seeing from various recording lobbies — and also because I do find myself agreeing that the ownership of ideas is a fundamentally flawed concept.
Aside: I think this fits without difficulty into my political views — Liberalism follows the principle of government/legislative intervention only where this is seen to be of greater benefit (e.g. where there is no privately operated/owned alternative to state-owned/operated infrastructure/services)… and the notion that individuals rather than the state be creators of wealth is fairly irrelevant here, because there’s no defined need in liberalism for the creation of wealth in all spheres, plus the present intellectual property climate that we see exists because of legislative (read: government) intervention in matters best left to free market forces. I’ll stop myself from launching into a full-scale rant here… hopefully some other time.
So, I think SanDisk are digging themselves a hole. Rant over.
