Hackers get theirs, RFID tags follow them everywhere at CCC

After spending the better part of '06 ripping the things to shreds in just about every physical and metaphorical sense, hacker attendees of this year's Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin are paying 10 euros to don RFID tags that track their movements all over the conference. What's different about this, in comparison to the RFID-based privacy invasion that these hackers usually eschew, is the visibility and open source nature of the system being used. "The idea was that most of this surveillance technology slowly faded into our lives, and we accepted them," says Milosch Meriac, one of the leaders of the project. The "CCC Sputnik" badges, as they're known, are tracked by 35 monitoring stations, which in turn export a public XML feed so that anyone who wants to can track the wearers around the expo. To generate an accurate position, the tags broadcast at five different power levels, with far-away receivers only receiving the highest powered signals, and close receivers receiving all five, the system can then triangulate the location of the wearer. The technology is par of the OpenBeacon surveillance suite that Meriac is prepping for release under the GPL and Creative Commons licenses.

[Brennan @ Dec 29th 2006 10:28PM]

omg..........that guy looks 100% like my face, but the hair is wrong.

i swear i look like him, not saying i am but that looks a lot like my face, i do have facial hair.

HOW IRONIC!!!

[GJP303 @ Dec 29th 2006 10:36PM]

dude, he looks just like me also!!!

[ShaolinDolemite @ Dec 30th 2006 1:23AM]

"HOW IRONIC!!!"
That's not irony. That's happenstance.

[Kauz @ Dec 30th 2006 2:09PM]

I mean this in the kindest possible way, but get a razor, overgrown peachfuzz lip hair is definately gross.

[Caleb @ Dec 29th 2006 11:06PM]

WTF why does that guy look exactly like me?

[omg @ Jan 18th 2007 11:46PM]

OMG i look like a guy too!

[Brennan @ Dec 29th 2006 11:55PM]

no no guys, im not kidding, if i sent any of u guys a pic of me then u all will go like "oh, he wasnt kiddin".

[Blue @ Dec 30th 2006 12:10AM]

prove it...itsblueb[AT}gmail[DOT]com

cuz he looks just like me too...;)

[sendeth @ Dec 30th 2006 7:48PM]

i saw my doppleganger in traffic once. very unsettling. i've actually seen two other me's, one younger and one older.

about the rfid, why did they wear them??? was it so they had an alibi??? i swear i didn't hack the vending machines!!! check my rfid!!!

[Mark @ Dec 30th 2006 12:38AM]

Dude, and he looks just like me, too, in the sense that he has eyes and a nose! :)

[Mark @ Dec 30th 2006 12:40AM]

Oh, I see what is going on. The jpg is actually a *mirror*! This Beryl window manager is amazing!

[mark @ Dec 30th 2006 12:45AM]

Thank god I don't look anything like all you ugly bastards.

[Dan @ Dec 30th 2006 12:45AM]

Wow you guys sure are ugly! :D

[ShaolinDolemite @ Dec 30th 2006 1:16AM]

Hey kids, it's Mexico's version of Kevin Rose!

[cjrenaud @ Dec 30th 2006 8:12AM]

Not according to Alanis, it isn't, buddy.

[Brennan @ Dec 30th 2006 1:58AM]

ok ill prove it then, someone give me their email address n ill send a pic of me. Heck, ill even try to pose like this dude just for a better comparasion.

[Shane @ Dec 30th 2006 8:55AM]

He doesn't look like me but that guy looks an awful lot like my buddy Kevin....

[deadpool @ Dec 30th 2006 10:36AM]

omg!!! mother?!

[Mark @ Dec 30th 2006 4:38PM]

I like that no one read the article but just looked at the picture. The Engadget posters could save a lot of time by not bothering to post text, but just a picture of some poor guy holding something. Doesn't even matter what he's holding!

[Isaac @ Dec 31st 2006 10:14AM]

True Story: When I went through the local school system I had several teachers and staff who kept calling me Adam. They said I was the absolute spitting image of this kid who went through the system 3 years ahead of me. Figures when I became a freshman in HS, "Adam"'s family moved away, so I never actually got to meet him, but all through HS I had people coming up and asking me, "Hey Adam, I thought you left!" It's really rather creepy.

So why badges? If they really wanted to prove how |-|@R|)(0R3 1337 they were, they'd get implants. :)

BADGES? We don't need no stinkin' RFID BADGES!