Friday 17 October 2008

The Wallet Is The New Tinfoil Hat.

The new tinfoil hat is...

Your wallet!

Yep, where once we stuck our heads into clumsy inelegant home-made Faraday cages to prevent someone getting in and changing your identity, now this article shows you how to make a clumsy inelegant "tinfoil hat" for your RFID cards and prevent your identity getting out...

I love duct tape, don't get me wrong.  Duct and gaffa tape are the kings of clumsy inelegant solutions to many of life's little problems.  But that's just it - they are clumsy and inelegant.  They are meant to be temporary.  Also, I prefer to keep the solutions arrived at with duct tape, very very hidden...

In these days of conductive threads and circuits printed onto cloth, leather, and flexible plastics, there have to be a dozen solutions that look better.

Also - and call me radical for thinking this - I think privacy is a thing that was a brief fad between the Victorian Era and the Industrial Revolution, either side of that there wasn't much of it around, and no-one actually cared.  I'd much prefer my SmartRider card to be available without having to dig a duct-taped folder out of my wallet, try and separate the oozy melted adhesive-glazed sides, rip my SmartRider out, wave it at the card reader - and get it stuck to the screen.  All while fifteen other riders are lined up behind me, tut-tutting and sighing loudly and pushing me ever so politely past the reader...

I'll accept that people can probably make a copy of the RFID part of my passport and probably make a decent copy of it, too.  But they could do similar things to me before, too - skimming my letterbox at home for personal details, or in a public place, a bit of pickpocketing isn't exactly unknown, you know?

So I'll take my chances I think, keep identifying stuff at home in a lock box like we're supposed to, and if I absolutely have to carry some kind of secret agent ID I'll hold out for a nicely woven metallic cloth folder or something.

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