Texas Instruments Denies Adam Savage's Story About Killing RFID Mythbusters Episode

from the he-said,-she-said dept

In a followup to the story about credit card company lawyers killing an episode of Mythbusters concerning RFID vulnerabilities, Daniel Terdiman got a response from Texas Instruments, who had organized the call that Mythbusters host Adam Savage had described. TI's spokesperson tells a somewhat different story:

"In June 2007, MythBusters was interested in pursuing some great myth-busting ideas for RFID. While in pursuit, they contacted Texas Instruments' RFID Systems, who is a pioneer of RFID and contactless technology, for technical help and understanding of RFID in the contactless payments space," TI spokesperson Cindy Huff said. "Some of the information that was needed to pursue the program required further support from the contactless payment companies as they construct their own proprietary systems for security to protect their customers. To move the process along, Texas Instruments coordinated a conversation with Smart Card Alliance (SCA) who invited MasterCard and Visa, on contactless payments to help MythBusters get the right information. Of the handful of people on the call, there were mostly product managers and only one contactless payment company's legal counsel member. Technical questions were asked and answered and we were to wait for MythBusters to let us know when they were planning on showing the segment. A few weeks later, Texas Instruments was told by MythBusters that the storyline had changed and they were pursuing a different angle which did not require our help."

This bit of he-said/she-said could actually be true from both ends, with each side having a rather different perception of the call in question. The folks on the call may have been a bit combative over certain issues, and that resulted in Discovery producers getting worried about the episode and "changing the storyline." Either way, if what Huff says is true, is Texas Instruments willing to get the credit card companies to publicly agree that Mythbusters and Discovery should move forward on a story about RFID vulnerabilities? Update: Now Savage is backing down and saying he got the facts of the story wrong...

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Credit Card Companies Gagged Mythbusters Over RFID Vulnerabilities?

from the security-through-obscurity...-and-legal-threats dept

It's amazing to watch just how sensitive some companies are concerning the rather well-known security vulnerabilities associated with RFID tags and smart cards. We've seen time and time again, companies try to suppress such research from getting published -- and every single time, those efforts to suppress the publication of the vulnerabilities backfires, often badly.

But that never seems to stop companies from flexing their legal muscles.

The latest example comes to use via the Consumerist blog, who dug out a clip of Adam Savage from the TV show Mythbusters talking about what happened when the show tried to do an episode on RFID vulnerabilities:

Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else... They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it.

Check out the video of him saying this (while admitting he's probably not supposed to talk about it) here: Perhaps it's an exaggeration by Savage, but do the credit card companies really think that security through obscurity (with a healthy dose of legal threats) is the best way to protect their customers?

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Has Wal-Mart Lost Its Technology Edge?

from the every-day-low...-whoops dept

Chris Lindquist writes "Despite the late Sam Walton's self-proclaimed distrust of computers, Wal-Mart has long seen itself as a technology leader. The company was an early adopter of bar-code scanning and eventually established the gold standard for supply chain efficiency thanks to highly integrated point-of-sale systems, satellite-communicated inventories and even RFID tracking. But Wal-Mart seems recently to have lost some of its tech luster. Questionable business decisions and global economic realities have caused the retail giant's earnings to stumble while aggressive competitors such as Target match Wal-Mart's every tech move--and sell higher-margin products to more affluent customers. Now it's unclear whether the command-and-control, technology-enabled culture that allowed Wal-Mart to flourish will be able to help it maintain its market dominance."

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VeriChip Kept Quiet On Cancer Link... Yet Were Pretty Vocal On Fake FDA Approvals

from the well,-look-at-that dept

The Associated Press has a story that got plenty of attention this weekend, pointing out that a series of studies which found that VeriChip's RFID products induced malignant tumors in animals. This information was not made public as the company continued to hype the devices for implant into humans. The article notes that the devices were approved by the FDA... but leaves out a rather revealing bit of history. VeriChip and its parent company Applied Digital have done an amazing job generating publicity for the company, but often in very questionable ways. It might help to go through some of the history.

Back in 2002, prior to getting FDA approval, there was the too good to be true story of an entire family that just couldn't wait to get themselves chipped. The whole thing sounded sketchy from the beginning, and many suspected that the entire thing was merely created by VeriChip to get publicity. Soon afterwards, VeriChip announced that the FDA had said that implantable RFID chips were not regulated medical devices, and therefore could be used for chipping humans. Note that the announcement came from VeriChip. That's because the FDA did not say what VeriChip claimed it said. VeriChip had asked the FDA to declare the chips unregulated devices, and the FDA simply requested more information. VeriChip, in turn, took that request for more info and claimed that the devices were unregulated, leading to a rather unhappy FDA.

A few months later, the FDA finally gave conditional support for the device, saying that VeriChip could be used, as long as it was not advertised as a "medical device." VeriChip, of course, once again put out a press barrage claiming that it had FDA approval. And, not surprisingly, it kept advertising the chips as medical devices, leading the FDA to warn the company to knock it off. Then, the company went south of the border, and started focusing on convincing people in Mexico to get chipped for the safety of the children. See? Down in Mexico, you don't have to worry about the pesky American FDA. Two years later, we were a bit surprised that the FDA finally did approve the device for medical purposes -- but would you really want a company like that sticking stuff in your body?

Oh yeah, if that wasn't enough, the company had borrowed a bunch of money from IBM, and when IBM tried to collect, Applied Digital sued. Yes, they sued the company who gave them money when they were unable to pay back the loan. This latest article on the cancer link plays up the fact that former FDA head Tommy Thompson later joined the board of VeriChip, but leaves out his own reluctance to have a VeriChip RFID installed in his own body. Anyone else feel safe having this company stick RFID chips under your skin?

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California State Senator Wants To Save You From RFID

from the paranoid-much dept

In certain paranoid circles, there's a big fear that at some point, people will be forced to get RFID implants. North Dakota and Wisconsin have already passed laws making it illegal to force somebody to get an RFID implant, and now a California state senator has pushed a similar bill through. This isn't new ground for Joe Simitian, the senator in question. He's sponsored anti-RFID bills in the past, but with little success. The fact remains that few people have any interest in RFID implants, while even the federal government has said that tracking humans with RFID isn't a good idea. Perhaps the bill will assuage the senator's paranoia, but meaningless bans like this won't do much to deal with the real privacy issues surrounding RFID.

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