"Edward M. Lerner - The Day of the RFIDs" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lerner Edward M)

smart store that with a few microwave pulses identifies every jar of pickles and can of cranberry sauce in
stock, including those orphaned items abandoned aisles away from where they belong. It's now possible
to signal a merchandise management system--even before the shopper meanders to the front of the
store--that it is time to reorder something.

Plan B required a newer gadget, one that took me inside the stores instead of staking them out. Wouldn't
it be interesting, I had decided, if merchandise management systems were to believe that phantom jars of
sauerkraut were selling like hotcakes? That quarts of eggnog were being abandoned in freezer cases? It
didn't take much to make my little gadget pulse random UPC, batch, and package numbers as I roamed
the aisles. My inventory gremlins were ephemeral--but, I guessed, troubling enough to reintroduce into
the ordering loop safely fallible and inefficient humans. Judging from the recent occurrences of stock boys
and girls wandering the aisles with clipboards, my first several ventures had been successful.

On foray number eight, the feds nabbed me.
****
After 9/11, everyone said everything had changed. After the 2/4 dirty-bomb attack on the Super Bowl,
everything finally did. The new Homeland Security Bureau was the most visible proof. The newest
domestic intelligence agency was not known for its candor: It appeared in media reports as Homeland
BS far more often than innocent typos could explain.

I was driven by two taciturn feds to the headquarters of the country's newest intel agency. Growing up in
outer metro DC, I had endured too many school field trips downtown to expect aesthetics from modern
government buildings--but this recent construction was just stunningly ugly. My impression, as our
nondescript sedan swept past armed guards and a security gate into the underground garage, was of a
concrete castle rendered by MC Escher.

I didn't see how what I had been up to could be illegal ... but oblivious and impervious as I was then to
current events, I also knew the government had taken to making rather expansive assertions under the
Patriot Act. It did not help that my perceptions of the FBI, a big chunk of which had become a core
component of the HSB, had been formed by "The X-Files."

By the time they laid it out to me in a spartan, windowless room, I was numb with shock. Big Bob's had
no intention of sharing their sales data, so a case could be made for theft. The exceptional sensitivity of
my Plan A RFID receiver notwithstanding, I had had to stand on Big Bob's property--the parking lot--to
get useful signals. That added a possible case for trespass. And, they mused, how confident was I a jury
wouldn't find hacking the most credible explanation for the indoor signals my Plan B transmitter had been
emitting?

Trespass? I had bought something on every trip, which made me, in technical terms, a customer. Theft?
Rival retailers had sent secret shoppers into competing stores since forever. More than once Dad, having
spotted a furtive note taker, had offered another store's spy a cup of coffee and a chair. Polling RFIDs
just made the data collection more efficient.

But possibly I had started down a slippery slope by injecting gremlins into Big Bob's inventory statistics.
How many, in a jury of my supposed peers, would be people whose VCRs endlessly flashed 12:00 (any
jurors who still owned VCRs would be worrisome enough) and whose children dutifully reset their digital
clocks twice a year? Could those peers be convinced my simulated RFID responses were not a hack
attack? How much was I willing to bet on that?

As my peril began to sink in, the special agent in charge hinted obliquely at the real deal. What the bureau