Implanted RFIDs - your stories?
Hello everyone
As those who've seen my thread on hacking hearing already know, I have a regular BBC Future column, Beyond Human, about transhumanism issues:
I'm working on a piece about RFID implants, and I wanted to hear your stories - why did you get them, what do they do? I'm struggling to find a really persuasive case for implanted RFID, seeing as it's not -truly- embedded in the body - functionally they are little different to an RFID wearable (ring, brooch, etc).
It's something I've tinkered with in the past: I made this video showing how to extract the RFID from a London Oyster transport card in 2008:
I was planning to implant the chip under my skin - even had an army medic willing to do the dirty and prescribe ABX and everything else - but the project failed as I couldn't find a source of medical-grade silicone to coat the chip. I moved away from London in 2009, which nixed the idea. That said, I'm moving back next month, so I'll probably pick it up again.
So that's my (somewhat disappointing) RFID implant story. What's yours?
Comments
I've had piercing reject due to getting snagged on clothes or worse getting trashed by doing something foolhardy. I've scraped up a labret piercing bead, along with my face, while longboarding. Then there was the time I had a nipple piercing tear after getting tackled by a friend in a parking ramp. We're still friends. The idea of having a GLASS tag embedded in my hand didn't appeal to me.
Instead I checked the diameters of available rfid against common piercing diameters.
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9416
That is roughly the same size as a 12 gauge piercing. As fate would have it, I already had a 12 gauge piercing in my left ear as a conch piercing. You can just barely see the tag in my profile picture. I simply hold it in place with o-rings.
Mine clearly doesn't count as an implant but I wanted to get the ball rolling on this thread.
Once that was working, I got my RFID implant in the right hand by a vet. The actual implantation took... I'd say about half a second. Healing went fast and after a few weeks there were no signs of the procedure anymore.
Since then I carry my external HDD with me, and lock and unlock it just by putting my hand over it. I use it on a daily base, more than four years now. It's not offering real security, but it does prevent most people from accessing/manipulating/formating my HDD.
A fun and convenient toy. Would certainly do it again :)
I can also stick small magnets on the back of my hand and they won't fall off, for all those interested in "party tricks".
I never ran into any problem so far. The only occasion where I can feel it is when someone else tries to feel it and presses the thing against a bone. Other than that, not a single negative moment in all those years.
I can't tell too much about MRT with an RFID implant yet. I may be able to participate in a study involving fMRT, but i'm still waiting for the feedback from the technicians to see what precautions etc must be taken. So maybe I can report back on that in a couple of weeks.
location on my body makes it inconvenient. The hands make sense when
you consider that an RFID readers can be installed in a door jamb but I
don't want to headbutt my apartment to get in. Although, after saying
that it's slightly appealing.
If anyone knows of a 2mm diameter NFC tag I would be eager to make my cellphone react, or not react, when I hold it to my left ear.
I don't think implanted chips will replace something as ubiquitous as credit cards anytime soon. I think that until RFID chips come with validator-style number generation they won't be used as anything but an extra layer of security on an already robust system.
About the replacement of ID tokens etc. it's not going to happen anytime soon, not unless everyone agrees on a single good standard. It's pretty easy to pull such a trick as diy solution tho. Even building your own tags with crypto ability is possible at reasonably small sizes.
general info on diy tags: http://scanlime.org/2008/09/using-an-avr-as-an-rfid-tag/
About 9 years ago (maybe 8), I decided it would be really cool to get an RFID implant, I think it was after I read about a bar that would implant them and let you use it to pay the tab.
So I decided I wanted one. But back then they were fairly hard to get, except for.. animals. So I went to a local veterinarian and told him I was doing a school presentation on RFID implants and I wanted to buy an RFID with applicator (big needle), so I can use it to show during my presentation.
The veterinarian did look a little bit suspicious at me, but sold me the kit. Then I crossed the street (might have been two streets over, not sure anymore) and went into a body piercing studio. I pulled out the applicator and asked the body piercer: "Can you implant this above my wrist?" He looked at the needle with big eyes and said with great enthusiasm, "that's a big fucking needle! I've never stuck something that size in someone. I'll do it for free!"
Once home, I decided to look into actually using the implant (before you ask, 9 years' older me does tend to look with considerable disdain at some of the actions of 9 years' younger me, this one being a particularly enlightening example). I found an RFID reader with a serial interface and hooked it up to my PC (worked fine) and then eventually to one of the early Arduinos (well at least it was an Atmega168), but I couldn't get it to work - mind you I didn't know that much about electronics back then - or now for that matter). I must have spend dozens of hours tinkering, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, but I just couldn't get it to work. In the end, I decided the project was too hard for me and dropped it.
Years went by. Not sure how many, four, five. During that time I decided I wasn't smart enough for the work I was doing, so I turned to nootropics, followed by a DIY tDCS device and training program and lo and behold, it worked, it worked wonderfully well.
So I turned back to the RFID project. In a matter of a few hours I had figured it out. The manufacturer of the RFID device had tuned it for about 9500 baud, not 9600. A PC doesn't have a problem with that, an Arduino on the other hand can't cope with it.
Anyway, at that point I added a touch screen, some nice RGB leds and printed an enclosure to stick it all in. I'm still using it daily to authenticate to my computers (which I have to do fairly often for various reasons, probably 20 times a day or something).
It turned out to be a successful project. When I use it to authenticate and the LEDs glow up and I'm logged in, even now it still gives me tiny bit of pleasure, particularly when I use it the first time during the day. And whenever there's a new person at work, it's a delight to see their expressions and I use it as a crutch to set their initial impressions of me in a way that pleases me.
And it does go beyond just that. It has a much deeper meaning for me.
Externally, it is my way to signal to the prevalent culture I'm surrounded with that I'm not conforming and that my nonconformist approach makes my life easier in some ways. That instantly creates different, more interesting conversations, it allows me to interact with people in ways that wouldn't be acceptable for others, but that I can get away with, because hey, it's the RFID guy right? He's a bit weird.
Internally, I've created a narrative where I've grown over the years and have proven to myself that I now can take on projects and problems I would never been able to tackle in the past, so it's a great self esteem booster (not that I needed that, but fine, now I'm even more arrogant than I already was I suppose) and motivates me to make my life miserable by taking on insanely complicated projects, just like practically everyone else in this thread.
First you need an RFID HDD enclosure. When i bought mine they were all out of stock, seems like they are available again. From the 3 HDD enclosures i bought, all three contained a combination of chips from innmax. http://www.innmax.com/en/rfidhd.html . The two yellow pictured boxes are actual chips located on the PCB. i tapped into the connection between those two, besides GND there's only the Clock and Data signal to be connected. The clock can be directly connected to a microcontroller, the Data line has to be cut and looped through the microcontroller. The firmware on the microcontroller basically forwards the data of the receiver chip to the main controller unit, it keeps checking the incoming signal for a known key (like the one in my hand). if it detect it, it sends out a copy of the sequence from the original keys.
Having said that, i only needed this because the chip in my had used a different signaling standard than the keys delivered with the HDD. When first connecting a HDD you have to teach in the keys. So if your implant is compatible with those keys, it may even work out of the box.
One issue has been the range with implanted tags. It works for me since i'm very skinny, i had some trouble with some combinations of coils and cases.