Senator Joe Simitian (D-Palo Alto) seems to be fighting an uphill battle with AB 682, a bill originally designed to prohibit the use of RFID in driver's licenses, student IDs, government health and benefit cards and public library cards. Now, instead of prohibiting the use of RFID, the bill mandates security measures that must be used when employing RFID on such documents.
From RFID in Libraries, Laura Smart writes:
The California Senate has had the first reading of bill SB 682, the identity Information Protection Act of 2005.
The legislation would make it a misdemeanor to include a ?contactless integrated circuit or other device that can broadcast personal information? on any government issued ID card.
The bill Ed: broken link removed 2011 contains this excerpt:
At the California Library Association's Annual Conference, I moderated a panel of RFID vendors entitled "The Vendors Answer the Tough Questions."
The format was a pointed Q&A by me followed by some questions from the audience. In anticipation of the questions I posed to the panel members, I had sent each panelist the same set of questions and told them that, based on their responses, I would be picking who the respondent for that question would be.
I recently took advantage of a term paper assignment for one of my classes (you did know I was in library school, right?) to study RFID very thoroughly. The result was a whopping 60 pager on the topic. That got whittled down to something a bit more accessible with the help of Beth Rosenberg, the managing editor of the upcoming book Wireless Privacy: RFID, Bluetooth, 802.11 to be published in early 2005 by Addison-Wesley/Prentice Hall. Simson Garfinkel is Rosenberg's co-editor.
There's a lot of talk about RFID tags and whether or not libraries should be using them given the possible privacy abuses inherent in the technology. Rather than point to another big long list of articles to read on the topic (although I can do that too....contact me offline), I'm going to refer you to this one, very technical, article:
Privacy and Security in Library RFID Issues, Practices, and Architectures Ed: broken link removed 2011 by David Molnar and David Wagner.
Network Computing, 3-18-04 issue has a buyer's guide on "untethered notebooks." Here's some highlights and my commentary. Standards: 802.11b is still the most popular but 802.11a and g are gaining ground fast. Used to be safe to invest in 802.11b -- at least safe in the sense that everything would be compatible for a year or two. But no more.