Cal and the RFID update

On Thursday a friend of mine, we'll call him "Tyler," who had been intigued by the arsTechnica article about RFID in elementary schools that Joel sent out earlier this week, found this update.

It's hard to be happy about the end result here, since it wasn't parental uproar or the threat of multiple civil liberties lawsuits that ended the escapade, but rather the inability of the company furnishing the damned IDs to actually go through with the contract. This company, InCom, I can't find any information on; a Google search yields a variety of different organizations, none of which seem likely to be the group in question. Incom.com is a web portal of sorts. In any event, it's over, at least for a month or two when another school in another state using another supplier decides to do the same thing.

On the bright side, though, it seems the school was already knuckling under somewhat, as the scanners above classroom doors had been disabled, and the school had not taken up disciplining students who didn't wear the badges. This of course begs the question of why the school wanted to do this in the first place. I can't imagine what they thought was going to happen. Good publicity for being the first school in the nation to try it? Better publicity for being pro-safety? Nobody out there is smoking enough weed to have made that seem like a good idea.

What concerns me is that the news article is still talking about how some parents had "health concerns" about the chips. Health concerns from a microchip? They'd be better off worrying about whether the freemasons were trying to poison the wells. Focussing on mythical health concerns arising from chips that have actually been FDA approved for surgical implantation under the skin is a remarkable waste of time; worse, it prevents smart parents from taking aim at the much more significant privacy rights and civil liberties issues. As the ars writer says, you don't have to be a member of the tinfoil hat brigade to see these problems--but if you're more worried about radiation sickness from the chips you'll probably overlook them anyway.

Much better news than any of this is that Tyler sent the link out from work, so I received it at my desk in the office. Previously the Air Force censors had banned me from connecting to arsTechnica, for what reason I can't remember. I think they called it a "portal site," which is meaningless because they also call intellicast.com a portal site. Portal to what? Accurate weather forecasts? God forbid! Today we let pilots check the weather themselves; tomorrow, total anarchy.

Anyway, apparently sometime in the last three months the censors either lost track of arsTechnica or decided that there really wasn't any valid reason for blocking it, so now I can actually read that stuff at work. Now if they'll just let me in to Howard Bashman's How Appealing blog and the new Politics1 blog, I'll never have to do any actual work again.