Cyber Sneezes

Two sciencey stories caught my eye this morning. The first one about RFID has actually been rumbling on for the last couple of days. It’s how the tags have the potential to propagate nasty and malicious software such as computer viruses. Today, it turns out that just such a virus has been created in the lab.

For those who don’t know – RFID tags are being touted as the best thing since the barcode. It involves implanting tiny computer chips with unique codes into labels, packaging and oodles of other bits and pieces so they can be identified when a particular radio pulse is sent out asking "who are you" or even "where are you". At the moment many people have them in their company ID cards for releasing door locks and it’s basically what Londoners have in their Oyster travel cards for the Tube.

Eventually, we’re told, every manufactured thing or thing that’s sold will have an RFID tag (just as most have barcodes today) so it can be tracked all the way from its making or growing to the checkout or final delivery and even beyond. So for the consumer it will mean things like loading your trolley at the supermarket and being able to scan everything at once by pushing it through a magic gate. You’d never have to take anything out and re-load – you simply pay and go. However, the beyond bit is getting lots of civil right people hot under the collar as they say it will mean companies and governments will be able to track goods, animals or even people in a very big-brother way.

The second story is about a different but slightly related technology all about a new system of drug delivery which relies on wireless technology to deliver the dose. The idea is that diabetics (for example) have a large set of doses implanted into their body and each dose is released when a computer system sends a radio signal to the implant. This is all very clever and would certainly be beneficial to people who have trouble remembering what dose to take and when.

The big but comes when you put those two stories together. So we have drug implants with the potential for being controlled by malicious computer viruses which have hijacked radio devices. Who’d have thought we’d end up in a world where a computer virus could actually make a person ill!