Talk:Radio-frequency identification

Better wiki page on rfid on a different language

http://64.233.179.104/translate_c?&u=http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFID Someone should tranfer some infomation from the german section of wikipedia to english!

• Ok i got the "Potental Attack/protection against Rfid scenarios" bit from that page to here. No time to do more though.

Just comming from the German page. Interested in tech details, less in how to jam, down to apparently impossible suggestions. How to sabotage a technology shouldn’t be part of an encyclopedia – in my opinion. Let us know what exactly you like in the German version and I’ll be happy to help translating it. Fritz@Joern.De – Fritz Jörn (talk) 08:55, 18 November 2011 (UTC)

How much abuse can these take?

Can these chips resist repeated abuse as in the instance of workshop or oilfield tools? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.99.66.195 (talk) 23:32, 30 August 2011 (UTC)

How is data encoded and read?

I came to this article knowing where these tags are used and so forth, but I wanted to learn how the data is encoded on the tag and how the reader reads the data. It seems to be missing. Are there magnetic bits on the tags, as in computer technology? I think the article needs such an explanation.

Deschreiber (talk) 13:51, 3 October 2011 (UTC)

Working on this. I have some good references now. Data is usually stored in a EEPROM on the "chip" part of the tag, not magnetically. (Turns out Wiegand effect cards are more like mag-strip cards and have to be run through a reader). --Wtshymanski (talk) 15:47, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

Also look at the SAW (surface acoustic wave) tags Example IEEE Article. These mechanically encode the data (ID) on the tag using reflectors and have no chip or digital logic. 152.3.216.59 (talk) 22:24, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Balise tags in train control

Permit me to suggest the inclusion of prominent mentioning in this article of the safety-critical application of RFID technology in railroading worldwide, for which a link to /wiki/Balise would be appropriate. Paul Niquette (talk) 20:26, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

"RFID on the web"

What is this? I keep seeing this term. How would a web site read an RFID tag? Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.250.7.198 (talk) 21:07, 6 January 2012 (UTC)

Where's the beef?

This article is much too long, and contains too little information. Most of the article is a long list of example applications. The only technical details are historic. Other editors are also asking for more technical information.

I suggest a reorganization. Perhaps most of the application examples could be moved to a separate article. Perhaps we should create a new article "RFID Technical".

I found a technical overview in Circuit Celler Magazine, and added an external link to the article. I would like to add some of the technical details to the article, but the article is already too long. I would like advice from more experienced editors. Wikfr (talk) 03:43, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

You know what to do. I'm going to have a crack at the intro myself. --Wtshymanski (talk) 16:05, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

We don't need to list every transit authority in the world that uses RFID. Overview! Not catalog! There's a suspiciously large amount of text that feels like it was paraphrased from manufacturer's sales sites, not from actual books on the topic. We're not selling RFID here, we're just giving the facts. --Wtshymanski (talk) 21:04, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

intro is wrong and potentially misleading

from the article-- Radio-frequency identification (RFID) is a technology that uses radio waves to transfer data from an electronic tag

1960s-1970s tags were primarily radio wave based, current tags such as the ISO 14443 found in passports uses inductive coupling (magnetic only). Radios waves are both electric and magnetic. See http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/wavebasics/basicwavesjavafigure1.jpg for what a radio wave would look like. The RFIDs which use inductive coupling do so at "radio frequencies" meaning that an ISO 14443 RFID has a magnetic field that pulses at radio frequencies such as 13.65MHz but it is not a radio signal. I had changed the intro paragraph to reflect this and the change was reverted to say "simpler language is better" even though that simpler language is incorrect for most if not all the current tags in use today. 65.166.100.202 (talk) 14:31, 7 December 2011 (UTC)

I feel the entire article in its present form is misleading. For instance, in the introduction, there is a picture of a 13.56 Mhz tag next to a grain of rice. The caption only mentions that it is an RFID tag. The text in the introduction (near the picture) states that tags can be read up to many meters away. For the tag in the photo to be read from many meters away would require EXTREMELY high field strength and for all intents and purposes should be considered impossible or at least highly impractical. The article should strive harder to differentiate between the different types of RFID tags (near-field coupling, and far-field coupling). (edited slightly from previous version) 152.3.216.59 (talk) 22:34, 15 February 2012 (UTC)

Good pick up. I've been working hard on the near and far field article and was hoping somebody would come along and tell me if there are ANY RFID tags that do NOT use near-field inductive coupling, i.e., electromagnetic fields at RF freqencies ala metal detectors and MRI machines, but rather instead use electromagnetic radiation, as in ordinary (long distance) RF transmission. Do you know of any? The end of this article makes it sound as though they exist. Yes, I'm aware that most of them are only near-field induction devices. Certainly the grain of rice ones that are used to ID your pet, are inductive near-field devices. See also near field communication SBHarris 01:35, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes, there are TONS! The field exploded several years ago (circa 2005) after the long-range (far-field, EM radiative coupling) tags came into existence. Googling for "UHF RFID" and you should see some. (Examples: Example from 2003, Recent Textbook (google books), Example Industry Site although there are others. Impinj, Alien, TI also are tag manufacturers). These tags operate in the far field region and use radiative antennas (not coils) to couple. The main protocol is EPC Class-1 Gen2 and there are several IC manufacturers that have more info (again, see Impinj Monza, Alien Higgs). Most of the main industry thrust (i.e. following the RFID Journal LIVE! recent trade shows) is in the far-field, long-range coupling tags and readers. However, these are not useful for implantables (Due to antenna size which must be relative to wave-length and radiating field decay in skin/water). These tags operate in the worldwide 868-950 MHz UHF band (902-928 MHz ISM band for US). Another technology is SAW (surface acoustic wave) tags that are "far-field" devices but do not use IC's or digital logic to transmit their ID. Generally these operate in the 2450 MHz band. All in all, there are many tags that operate in the far-field with an advantage of long-range reading. A problem that all far-field coupling tags face is that close proximity to skin will detune the antenna (See IPhone_4#Antenna) causing the tag to not power-up, or not be able to backscatter its response. I'll take a look at the NFC article. I'm not as up to speed on the near-field state-of-the-art as I am the long-range UHF RFID. 152.3.216.59 (talk) 16:42, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Cool. We should make the distinction between the two fundamental types in the lede (i've done a bit of that already), then have a first intro section that explains this distinction better (with near and far field as the main article) and then split the rest of the article in general into two MAIN sections, dealing with the near-field small magnetic types first, then these latest UHF true-radio-wave-transmitter types last (the article sort of follows that style now, but not perfectly and not explicitly). Can you start moving all sections about true radio-transmitter tags toward the end of the article, as you identify them as such? For some of these, I can only guess. SBHarris 18:10, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Spychip

I've recently redirected spychip here since it was a blatant anti-RFID POV fork. I'm not expecting this to go un-noticed or unopposed so anyone who wants to put that page on their watchlist is welcome to. GDallimore (Talk) 11:39, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Mark of the beast

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/21/schoolgirl_expelled_rfid_chip/

Is a single lawsuit notable enough? Hcobb (talk) 22:24, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

A lawsuit by itself is not WP:notable. A lawsuit is a primary source, and WP needs a secondary source to tell us it is notable. That said, notability is a requirement for a separate article; it is not a requirement for inclusion in an existing article.

The story you cite is not the lawsuit but rather an article about the controversy. If The Register is a reliable source, then it can be used to add information to an article. A google search turns up other sources for the story.

The question becomes does the story merit inclusion. I'm on the fence. The story has human interest and is growing, but WP is WP:NOTNEWSPAPER. The story is more about privacy in general than RFID. There are additional privacy issues: the badge barcode is apparently her Social Security Number. On the flip side, the WP article has a lot about RFID privacy issues: Radio-frequency identification#Privacy. Maybe that section will spin off.

Consequently, I'd say be bold and put something about the story in the article -- but keep a neutral tone.

Glrx (talk) 17:45, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Be aware that most of the headlines you'll find are incorrect. The student was disenrolled only after refusing an ID card without an RFID chip. Almost all articles claim, usually in the headline, that it was because she refused one with a chip. Very sensationalist, sells papers, but one would hope we at Wikipedia care about facts. See the copy of the letter from the district referenced in some of the articles for a direct reference to the disenrollment. It does no good to merely regurgitate bad journalism. -- Wguynes (Talk | contribs) 20:51, 26 November 2012 (UTC)