Forget Walmart. Hackers Conference Badges Show The Future of RFID Tracking [RFID]

When it comes to tracking people\’s every movement-or \” location-aware applications\” whenever you\’re seeking to sound less creepy-nothing beats the badges at hacker conferences.

This year, HOPE\’s Attendee Meta-Data or AMD badge reached new heights, and suggested more about what you can do with RFID attached to people-both good and bad.

\” This badge knows what talks you go to. It knows who you discuss with. It knows what places within the conference you go. It knows if you were there,\” says Rob Zinkov, of the HOPE badge team.

The HOPE badge was meant to be hacked and let people flash the firmware. \” It really appeals to people in both hardware and software,\” says Zinkov. The fundamental badge is an active RFID which could report itself and skim other active RFIDs up to 60 ft away, all in a tiny and fully open source package. It has a small bit of memory that lets it take down other badge ID numbers for later, and eight sensors the wearer can press with a finger.

Attendee Adam Mayer hacked his badge to let him steal the identity of anyone whose badge reported to his own, and walked around the social system as them for a couple of minutes before stealing a higher identity.

\” The badge works on multiple levels,\” says Aestetix, project manager and pointy haired boss of the AMD badge project. It allows its wearer to look what other talks have interested attendees that have attending similar talks, and find friends. \” On the flip side, we are able to take what we learn from it and we will apply that to the following conference.\” Aestetix pauses, and grins. \” There\’s also the large privacy aspect. We have now a system that knows exactly where you were all the time.\”

The overproduced badges of hacker conferences got started with Defcon\’s challenge to hack the badge, which typically involves a circuit board and wild imagination. (Last year\’s entries included attaching a Geiger counter to the badge and using three badges to fly a robotic blimp-and those were the losers.)

The other parent of the HOPE badge is the Sputnik experiment from the 23rd Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin in 2006, where roughly 1000 attendees wore RFIDs on their badges that reported to 35 stations within the conference, tracking anybody\’s movement. The creators of Sputnik mapped the movements of attendees and put them on display on large monitors.

HOPE went much further, adding in hardware hacking and a web site. They wanted to herald application software in addition as firmware and information visualization. HOPE\’s badge team connected the badge IDs to a social network, making an allowance for friending, deriving preferences from talk attendance, and letting attendees associate real world data like websites with their in-con personas.

\” It\’s form of perpetually in alpha stage,\” says Aestetix. They are trying to add enough to the badge each HOPE that it never quite works right, and stretches both the hackers putting on the conference and the hackers getting the badges. Work went into the badge through much of the year.

Zinkov used the social network data attendees added about themselves to spider their websites and build even more complete data about everyone. Now they’re building data visualizations and maps of correlations with conference activity. Anyone can get into the game, too. A torrent of the 8GB of collected data is publicly available. (Last year\’s data weighed in at only 20MB.)

The Hackers on Planet Earth conference is an outsized 2600 meeting that happens every two years in Long island. It\’s come some distance in its time, ideas of hacking expanding from software to hardware, society, food and even sex. Quinn Norton is reporting from Big apple.

Related: Wal-Mart Radio Tags to Track Clothing [WSJ]

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This post is tagged: badges, conference, Forget, Hackers, rfid, SHOW, Tracking, Walmart., [RFID]