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

truly wanted was my evident smarts on RFID transceivers. Mine had better range than the gear they
were buying.

The best I could hope for in this situation was massive legal bills I would be years in paying off. Worst
case would be legal bills plus who knew how much jail time?

What would you have done?

It was only much later that I realized the one thing the feds wanted above all else: to avoid a trial.
****
Despite a life-long fascination with the space program, there was never any realistic chance I would
become a rocket scientist. As kids, sparklers were the only Fourth of July fireworks my brothers and I
were ever allowed--and the way Mom winced on those rare occasions Dad brought sparklers home
sucked all the fun out of the experience. Then Sojourner rolled its first few yards onto the Martian
surface. Problem solved.

NASA, it turned out, was not the only group that developed robots. By the time I graduated from
college, DARPA--that's the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--was putting more funds
into robots than was NASA. I'd never had any interest in defense contracting, but lots of
DARPA-supported research was and is just way cool, cutting-edge stuff. That's how I wound up
working for a Beltway Bandit on a DARPA contract. My bosses no doubt thought about one kind of
"dual use" for the new technology while I was imagining another ... and while I nursed my dreams, if and
when NASA ever again had money, of someday building robots at JPL.

It did not, amid the never-ending and ever-expanding war on terror, take much to outspend NASA on
robots. My piece of the DARPA project was, not surprisingly, on the electronics side, and the budget
scarcely covered salaries. To keep costs down, I did my proof-of-concept work using what the govvies
call COTS. That's "commercial off the shelf," an acronym which, despite the plain semantics of its phrase,
had been nounified. I needed a radio link between a lander and its rover--or, at customer briefings,
between a war fighter's handheld controller and the tiny, semiautonomous scout vehicle it controlled. The
cheapest, most accessible COTS used unlicensed radio spectrum. You know: the frequencies used by
low-powered gadgets like WiFi wireless LANs and cordless (not cellular) phones.

It was the damnedest thing. My rover would work just fine for days and then, for no apparent reason, it
would glitch. Long story short, there was intermittent interference on the command link. My colleagues
razzed me about my ill-advised choice of frequency (I didn't mention the dearth of cordless phones on
Mars), and, rather than rebuild, we moved the project into a shielded lab. It didn't help.

Okay, NOW, long story short. Much time and expensive test equipment later, the problem was traced to
several items of new clothing.

Would you care to guess what inexpensive labeling mechanism also uses low-power RF at unregulated
frequencies?
****
There's no reason to drag my erstwhile employers into this, not that much detective work would be
necessary to identify them. For purposes of this history, "the corporation" will do just fine. Given the
dual-use nature of my work, and who was funding it, I had been asked to apply for a Top Secret
clearance. I had reluctantly gone along, comforted by the two-plus year backlog in clearance
investigations. I was new enough to the real world to still be thinking in college-student time: Nothing
matters if it can be postponed past the end of a semester.