UK Thieves are using Bluetooth phones to scan for and detect Bluetooth enabled laptops left in the trunks of cars. Detective Sargent Al Funge, from Cambridge’s crime investigation unit, said:

“There have been a number of instances of this new technology being used to identify cars which have valuable electronics, including laptops, inside. The thieves are taking advantage of a relatively new technology, and people need to be aware that this is going on. ”

MORE (via Schneier on Security).

This new automatic door from Japan creates a minimal opening for an object to pass through. The door is composed of a series of strips which open when activated by the infrared sensors on their edges. It’s said that the door also can identify people (RFID?) for security. Such doors can help manage energy loss in a a room, garage or freezer and protect a space from unwanted dust, pollen, bugs, and germs. Plus, they are cooler than the doors on Star Trek. See this video.

Here’s a marketing tip: get the door to occasionally say “Gee, you’ve lost weight, haven’t you?” and it will sell like hotcakes.

The South Korean government is investng US$800 million into RFID research and development. Link

Daeje Chin, the Korean Minister of Information and Communication, said after several pilot projects the government believes RFID to be as important as the mobile phone business.

Chin said: “This will be very important for us in the next 10 years. The handset business is very big but RFID will be as important. We are trying to procure a number of goals with RFID and the application of new technology brings benefits in all social systems including the individual family.”

South Korea is also pushing ubiquitous computing (”anytime, anywhere, and on any device”) as a way to keep it’s mobile IT business expanding. Korea is a country with 47M people and 35M mobile subscribers. Link

Pirelli announced that their X-Pressure AcousticBlue tire pressure monitoring system will be able to send low-pressure warnings to your Bluetooth mobile phone. The the X-Pressuxre AcousticBlue is said to be available in September 2005. (spotted on Gizmodo) I’d guess that this will require explicit pairing with your phone. Maybe this is a good application for the use of RDF and a simple automated publish-subscribe protocol. I’d subscribe to messages tagged as warnings from devices owned by me, a member of my family or University lab. Helpful service stations would subscribe to public warnings from devices that are part of a vehicle. Also required would be a simple security and privacy mechanisms, perhaps driven by RDF-grounded policies used by both the sender and receiver. I might use such a policy to delegate access to securityWarnings from my office computer to our department sysadmin. and he would configure his policy to accept such delegations from current department members. Rounding out the picture would be a reasonable approach to the GUI, lest we reinvent Clippy. I might want to configure my phone to show only urgentWarnings immediately and log the rest for viewing on demand.

So the major players have joined in the WiMax game. This report from the Washington Post describes Intel coming to DC area to release their new WiMax chipset.

Hitachi has said it can fit 230 gigabits of data per square inch on a disk using “perpendicular recording”

The storage industry currently makes hard drives using longitudinal recording, which is reaching its limit.

eWeek has a reasonable article summarizing the weaknesses in TI’s RFID systems.

After uncovering a security weakness in a radio-frequency identification tag from Texas Instruments Inc., researchers from RSA Security Inc.’s RSA Laboratories and The Johns Hopkins University are now eyeing future exploits against other RFID products in the interests of better security, one of the researchers said this week.
     Meanwhile, TI will keep making the compromised RFID tag in order to meet the needs of applications more sensitive to speed and pricing than to privacy, according to a TI official. …

IBM Zurich comes out with miniature data storage with data storage density of 1 TB per square inch –

“Given the rapidly increasing data volumes that are downloaded onto mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs, there is a growing demand for suitable storage media with more and more capacity. At CeBIT, IBM for the first time shows the prototype of the MEMS*- assembly of a nanomechanical storage system known internally as the “millipede” project. Using revolutionary nanotechnology, scientists at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland, have made it to the millionths of a millimeter range, achieving data storage densities of more than one terabit (1000 gigabit) per square inch, equivalent to storing the content of 25 DVDs on an area the size of a postage stamp.”

The Cabir bluetooth virus has been reported found in the wild in the United States. Cabir originated in the Philippines and infects bluethooth enabled mobile phones and (maybe) other device running the Symbian operating system. F-Secure offers this description:

Cabir is a bluetooth using worm that runs in Symbian mobile phones that support Series 60 platform. Cabir replicates over bluetooth connections and arrives to phone messaging inbox as caribe.sis file what contains the worm. When user clicks the caribe.sis and chooses to install the Caribe.sis file the worm activates and starts looking for new devices to infect over bluetooth. When Cabir worm finds another bluetooth device it willstart sending infected SIS files to it, and lock to that phone so that it won’t look other phones even when the target moves out of range.

The Brittan Elementary School in California now requires students to wear RFID badges that can track their every move. Students must wear identification cards around their necks with their picture, name and grade and a RFID tag. The system was imposed, without parental input, to simplify attendance-taking, reduce vandalism and improve student safety. The district superintendent told the parents concerned about privacy that their children could be disciplined for boycotting the badges.

“It’s not an option, (The badge) is just like a textbook, you have to have it. I’m charged with running the school district and I get to make those kinds of rules.”

The badges were developed by InCom Corp., a company co-founded by the parent of a former Brittan student. The company has paid the school several thousand dollars for agreeing to the experiment, and has promised a royalty from each sale if the system takes off. See stories here and here and a NYT article describing parent protests..

Anupam Joshi pointed out a good story on recent work by Avi Rubin and his students on cracking TI’s cryptographically enabled RFID tag widely used in anti-theft car locks, the ExxonMobil SpeedPass system and other RFID enabled applications. A draft of the paper is available online. Apparently the TI chips use a relatvely short key (40bit?).

Graduate Cryptographers Unlock Code of ‘Thiefproof’ Car Key
By JOHN SCHWARTZ, NYT, January 29, 2005

BALTIMORE - Matthew Green starts his 2005 Ford Escape with a duplicate key he had made at Lowe’s. Nothing unusual about that, except that the automobile industry has spent millions of dollars to keep him from being able to do it.

Mr. Green, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, is part of a team that plans to announce on Jan. 29 that it has cracked the security behind “immobilizer” systems from Texas Instruments Inc. The systems reduce car theft, because vehicles will not start unless the system recognizes a tiny chip in the authorized key. They are used in millions of Fords, Toyotas and Nissans.

All that would be required to steal a car, the researchers said, is a moment next to the car owner to extract data from the key, less than an hour of computing, and a few minutes to break in, feed the key code to the car and hot-wire it. …

Cracking the system took the graduate students three months, Dr. Rubin said. “There was a lot of trial and error work with, every once in a while, a little ‘Aha!’ ” …

Mr. Sabetti of Texas Instruments argues that grabbing the code from a key would be very difficult, because the chips have a very short broadcast range. The greatest distance that his company’s engineers have managed in the laboratory is 12 inches, and then only with large antennas that require a power source.

Dr. Rubin acknowledged that his team had been able to read the keys just a few inches from a reader, but said many situations could put an attacker and a target in close proximity, including crowded elevators. …

Gizmodo has the neatest things. “This Quattro prototype alarm is a solid translucent block that has no visible buttons or markings. As the Quattro is rotated, its function changes—on the side it’s a radio, tilted up it’s an alarm, and horizontally it’s a clock, each indicated by a contextual change in the display on the front. It gets better: the Quattro recognizes when you get close and lights up touch-sensitive buttons. Then it gets even betterer: a wirelessly connected teddy bear triggers the alarm’s snooze function when you give it a hug.” Too bad it’s just a prototype done by design students Didier Hilhorst and Nicholas Zambetti.