This might seem a little petty but some hotels are now adding washable RFID chips to their towels and robes that are a staple of every hotel room you have ever stayed at.

The tags are from a company called Linen Technology Tracking and are being marketed to hotels as a way to cut down on losses due to the theft of their towels, sheets and robes. In addition it is also giving them a way to monitor their linen inventory for re-ordering purposes.

So far, three hotels  —  in Honolulu, Miami and Manhattan  —  are using the chip, said Linen Technology Tracking’s executive vice president, William Serbin. He said the hotels did not want their names used.

Mr. Serbin added that rising cotton prices were a motivation: “A bath towel that might have cost $5 last year could cost $8  or $9 now. High-end hotels want to watch those assets.”

The Honolulu property, which introduced the technology last summer, has reduced theft of its pool towels from 4,000 a month to just 750, saving more than $16,000 a month, Mr. Serbin said.

via New York Times

 

Those towels you kept from your last hotel stay are now being tracked is a post from: The Inquisitr

As much as we may like to give advertising the cold shoulder when it comes to technology the fact is that it drives much of our growth in the tech world. A perfect example of this is the idea of those touchable and interactive computer walls in Minority Report. Today we have companies like Microsoft working on Surface but as well we also have a company like Schematic, the interactive agency responsible for those famous Minority Report advertising walls, who are bringing these ideas to fruition today.

For the 2009 Cannes Advertising Festival Schematic debuted their large multi-touch wall, a 12 foot by 5 foot display that provides a visual interactive display for the attendees to interact with. Using the wall which also includes RFID technology allowed the attendees to check the festival schedules, 3D venue maps, information on local attractions all with their hands.

This video gives you a 3 minute glimpse into what they have achieved so far.

Pretty incredible.

via Fast Company

An absolutely amazing Minority Report touchwall – today is a post from: The Inquisitr

We’ve heard a lot about the so-called advantages of sub dermal RFID type chips that could be used for a whole variety of purposes. Even now they are used to make it easier to find our lost pets and there is a lot of discussion about implanting them in our children in order to make finding them should anything terrible happen to them.

There is also a branch of thought that all criminals, terrorists, fugitives and other such illegal immigrants along with political dissidents be required to have GPS enabled transmitters implanted. The idea being of course that they would be easier to track and would make us all safer. As questionable as that argument might be, one Saudi inventor is trying to patent a unique twist on the idea.

It is the inventor’s idea that in addition to the typical GPS function his model would also carry a dose of cyanide that could be remotely released into the “offender’s” system. Fortunately for us at this point the inventor tried to get his patent in Germany and was promptly turned down. Apparently the idea violates a part of Germany’s patent laws "The invention will probably be found to violate paragraph two of the German Patent Law — which does not allow inventions that transgress public order or good morals”

Lucky for us but I wonder if some country somewhere wouldn’t be willing to bypass that transgression and grant a patent. Could make for some interesting movie plots to say the least.

found via Fox News

Those under the skin chips could be a real killer is a post from: The Inquisitr

The device which Chris built in his spare time operates out of his car and contains everything needed to sniff out and then clone RFID (radio frequency identification tags) tags. In a recent demonstration he drove around for 20 minutes in downtown San Francisco and successfully copied the RFID tags of two passport cards without the knowledge of their owners.

“It’s one thing to say that something can be done, it’s another thing completely to actually do it,” Paget said in explaining why he built the device. “It’s mainly to defeat the argument that you can’t do it in the real world, that there’s no real-world attack here, that it’s all theoretical.”

Source: The Register

Here is  the video showing his little excursion

Currently the range of Paget’s device is about 30 feet but he says with a little modification it could read the tags up to a mile away. Apparently the Feds are not too concerned with this as they say they have no plans to overhaul the technology being used. So not only do we have to worry about excessive government intrusion with this new technology but we also have to worry about our identities being stolen.

$250 plus a little war-driving equals stolen identities [VIDEO] is a post from: The Inquisitr