Australian bankers: Cash to be replaced by microchips within years

Cash to become extinct as chips take off

6.15.09 / Anthony Keane / The Advertizer

CASH is accelerating down the path to extinction as new technologies threaten to mark the end of loose change within a decade.

Bank and credit union bosses say cash won’t be alone, with wallets and credit cards also likely to disappear too.

They told The Advertiser’s round table forum that cash and cards will be replaced by computer chips embedded in mobile phones, watches or other portable devices.

Australian Central chief executive Peter Evers believes cash will be replaced for most transactions in five-to-seven years.

“Cash will disappear as there will be other forms of carrying cash, stored value in your phone or whatever it might be. It will transfer automatically,” he said.

“We’re very close in countries around the world. If you go in to Hong Kong or Singapore, the low-value transactions have already disappeared. You can’t go anywhere, like on public transport, without pre-purchasing a card.

“I think the Australian Payment Systems Board is very much on top of it and is trying to move down a path, but hasn’t publicly put things into place yet.”

BankSA general manager strategy and operations Chris Ward expects Australia to follow the offshore lead, with small cash transactions disappearing first.

“So you can’t go and buy a bottle of water from the deli with cash; you’ve got to go and buy it with your chip,” he said.

Bendigo and Adelaide Bank state manager SA/NT John Oliver said it was easier for retailers to use electronic transactions than manual cash transactions.

Savings & Loans chief executive Greg Connor said the concept of the wallet would go.

“Whereas now we have a wallet and purse, it will be a chip in your phone or your watch or something like that as your access,” he said.

Mr Evers said credit cards were on the way out as well.

“The access to credit is still going to be there through the mobile phone, but you don’t need the card because that’s really only a means of identification,” he said.

“There could be another way of identifying, but the product, revolving credit, will still sit there.”

Microchips in pills tell doctors when they’ve been digested

Microchip that tells the GP if you’ve taken your pills

4.12.09 / Jo MacFarlane / Daily Mail

Microchips in pills could soon allow doctors to find out whether a patient has taken their medication.

The digestible sensors, just 1mm wide, would mean GPs and surgeons could monitor patients outside the hospital or surgery.

Developers say the technology could be particularly useful for psychiatric or elderly patients who rely on a complicated regime of drugs – and are at risk if they miss a dose or take it at the wrong time.

It could also be used for the chronically ill, such as people with heart disease, to establish whether costly drugs are working or whether they are causing potentially dangerous side effects.

The sensors could even remind women to take the Pill if they forget.

The ‘intelligent’ medicine works by activating a harmless electric charge when drugs are digested by the stomach.

This charge is picked up by a sensing patch on the patients’ stomach or back, which records the time and date that the pill is digested. It also measures heart rate, motion and breathing patterns.

The information is transmitted to a patient’s mobile phone and then to the internet using wireless technology, to give a complete picture of their health and the impact of their drugs.

Doctors and carers can view this information on secure web pages or have the information sent to their mobile phones.

The silicon microchips are invisible to patients and can be added to any standard drug during the manufacturing process.

Two major drugs companies are investigating the technology, developed by US-based Proteus Biomedical. Trials are to begin in the UK within 12 months.

Professor Nick Peters, a cardiologist at Imperial College London, who is co-ordinating
trials, said the technology was ‘transformative’.

‘This is all about empowering patients and their families because it measures wellness, and people can actually be tracked getting better,’ he said.

‘Psychologically speaking, that’s hugely helpful for patients and enormously reassuring for carers.

‘Normally patients would have to be in hospital to get this level of feedback, so the hope is that it frees up beds and saves the NHS money.’

Australian academic says all Australians could be implanted with microchips within two to three generations

Humans ‘will be implanted with microchips’

1.30.09 / Josephine Asher / Ninemsn

This VeriChip microchip contains identity and health information and is embedded under the skin. (AAP)

A protest against microchip implants planned for Alzheimers patients in Florida. (AAP)

All Australians could be implanted with microchips for tracking and identification within the next two or three generations, a prominent academic says.

Michael G Michael from the University of Wollongong’s School of Information Systems and Technology, has coined the term “uberveillance” to describe the emerging trend of all-encompassing surveillance.

“Uberveillance is not on the outside looking down, but on the inside looking out through a microchip that is embedded in our bodies,” Dr Michael told ninemsn.

Microchips are commonly implanted into animals to reveal identification details when scanned and similar devices have been used with Alzheimers patients.

US company VeriChip is already using implantable microchips, which store a 16-digit unique identification number, on humans for medical purposes.

“Our focus is on high-risk patients, and our product’s ability to identify them and their medical records in an emergency,” spokesperson Allison Tomek said.

“We do not know when or if someone will develop an implantable microchip with GPS technology, but it is not an application we are pursuing.”

Another form of uberveillance is the use of bracelets worn by dangerous prisoners which use global positioning systems to pinpoint their movements.

But Dr Michael said the technology behind uberveillance would eventually lead to a black box small enough to fit on a tiny microchip and implanted in our bodies.

This could also allow someone to be located in an emergency or for the identification of corpses after a large scale disaster or terrorist attack.

“This black box will then be a witness to our actual movements, words — perhaps even our thoughts —-and play a similar role to the black box placed in an aircraft,” he said.

He also predicted that microchip implants and their infrastructure could eliminate the need for e-passports, e-tags, and secure ID cards.

“Microchipping I think will eventually become compulsory in the context of identification within the frame of national security,” he said.

Although uberveillance was only in its early phases, Dr Michael’s wife, Katina Michael — a senior lecturer from UOW’s School of Information Systems and Technology — said the ability to track and identify any individual was already possible.

“Anyone with a mobile phone can be tracked to 15m now,” she said, pointing out that most mobile phone handsets now contained GPS receivers and radio frequency identification (RFID) readers.

“The worst scenario is the absolute loss of human rights,” she said.

Wisconsin, North Dakota and four other states in the US have already outlawed the use of enforced microchipping.

“Australia hasn’t got specific regulations addressing these applications,” she said.

“We need to address the potential for misuse by amending privacy laws to ensure personal data protection.”

Uberveillance has been nominated for Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2008.

Hackers scan up personal details from RFID chip in US passports during 20 min drive-by

Hackers clone passports in drive-by RFID heist

2.4.09 / Lain Thomson / iTNews

A British hacker has shown how easy it is to clone US passport cards that use RFID by conducting a drive-by test on the streets of San Francisco.

Chris Paget, director of research and development at Seattle-based IOActive, used a US$250 Motorola RFID reader and an antenna mounted in a car’s side window and drove for 20 minutes around San Francisco, with a colleague videoing the demonstration.

During the demonstration he picked up the details of two US passport cards, which are fitted with RFID chips and can be used instead of traditional passports for travel to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean.

“I personally believe that RFID is very unsuitable for tagging people,” he said.

“I don’t believe we should have any kind of identity document with RFID tags in them. My ultimate goal here would be, my dream for this research, would be to see the entire Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative be scrapped.”

Using the data gleaned it would be relatively simple to make cloned passport cards he said. Real passport cards also support a ‘kill code’ (which can wipe the card’s data) and a ‘lock code’ that prevents the tag’s data being changed.

However he believes these are not currently being used and even if they were the radio interrogation is done in plain text so is relatively easy for a hacker to collect and analyse.

The ease with which the passport cards were picked up is even more worrying considering that less than a million have been issued to date.

Paget is a renowned ‘white hat’ ethical hacker and has made the study of the security failings of RFID something of a speciality.

In 2007 he was due to present a paper on the security failings of RFID at the Black Hat security conference in Washington but was forced to abandon the plans after an RFID company threatened him with legal action.

He points out that RFID tags are increasingly being used in physical security systems such as building access cards and the technology needs significant security adding before it could be considered safe for commercial use.