Poker Perambulation

Over a dozen years ago, my dog had an RFID chip installed. It was done with a hypodermic under the skin on her neck. When excited by a scanner, it could provide info that told the owner. It was a great idea for dogs. I’m not sure about the rest.

Walmart uses them. It allows better tracking of SKUs. The theft prevention aspect is easily defeated by a simple Faraday cage using aluminum foil to line a shopping bag. Your computer case is such a cage so an RFID chip inside it would not function. You could wrap a passport in aluminum foil; might look weird but it wouldn’t be readable from across a room.

The chips are minuscule and can be embedded in anything. They are thin enough to put in a sheet of paper and could be put in paper money to thwart counterfeiting. One of the targets for future installation is the credit card. You will be able to leave it in the wallet instead of dragging it through the current readers. Another is passports and they are already being installed. Walking through an airport you can be followed using the RFID chip. The little plastic wristband you get in the hospital will soon contain them.

There are advantages in all these areas. Less theft; easy checkouts, avoiding medicating the wrong patient. The cheapest are only readable at a foot or so. The best can be read from about 300′. The smallest contain 128 bits while the better ones can hold enough info to fully identify who the person is by name, address, social security number and whatever. And such info is so weakly encrypted that a crook can steal that info as you walk past him.

You can see this is a double edged sword. Some governments are even talking sticking one inside your body like I did to my last dog. Should that happen you will be traceable throughout your daily life.

RFID is coming to the casino. The chips and even the cards can have RFID installed. Your player’s card can have one. It would then be a simple matter for a casino to know every chip you played or every pull you make on a slot. When the future Lindas tap their toke and say thank you, that red bird will be known to have gone to her shirt pocket and tracked for withholding. And, their shills could learn that you like to draw to inside straights or raise with the hammer.

Now the casino will know more about our play than we can remember. They’ll know how much we played and how much we won. If they know that then the next step is for the Feds to ask for that info. Now the tokes are fully taxable. Now they have a full record of you wins and losses. The casino host will know who to invite back and who’s trying to scam a suite.

That may be a bit scary to the inveterate gambler. But, in our credit card society all that info we’ve been forced to share with the casino extends to our every purchase. Your buying habits become an open book. Hit a winefest, like MeanGene did over the weekend, and you could get a call from AA. You become a walking target for merchandisers, scammers and the nanny state. Your privacy is non-existent.

If you’ve gotten a recent passport, you have your own trackable RFID chip. Not a serious problem today in most areas. But, what will the future hold. A terrorist will know that a Yank just walked by. A friendly government will still know you ended up at the strip club. We’ll all have our own little Paparazzi that can follow our every move.

Welcome to the world of George Orwell. Instead of tin-foil hats, we may end up shopping for tin-foil suits and that will also be recorded and have an RFID chip on the exterior.

ADDENDUM:

Speaking of tinfoil hats…

Those who see a poker bot on every site taking their chips will not want to miss the Man Vs Machine contest between a poker program that will play against two pros – Phil Laak and Ali Eslami that will end the 24^th. It is a duplicate poker game with both sides playing both sides of the shuffle. As I write, the first days results are available:

• July 23, 2007 - Session 2 just finished, and Polaris pulled out a rather convincing victory! Phil had some really great cards in the public room, but Ali had a real tough time playing the other side of the cards. Session 3 runs on Tuesday at Noon.
• July 23, 2007 - Polaris pulls out a draw in the first match. It won by 7 small bets, but anything less than 25 small bets is considered a draw.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 at 3:25 am and is filed under Journal, Misc.. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.