Unsettling Thoughts about Reality, Virtual Reality, and "the Digital Force"
Remember the original Star Wars scene where Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker,
CP3O and R2D2 are entering the town of Mos Eisley, on the planet Tatooine. They're
stopped by a suspicious stormtrooper but Obiwan uses his Jedi powers to cloud
the man's mind: Obi-Wan: "These are not the droids you're looking for."
Trooper: "These are not the droids we're looking for."
Now, imagine that, instead of "the force" permeating the universe
of Star Wars, instead we use, to the same end, the digital and automated reality
our culture is currently constructing for itself. At the Black Hat Security
Briefings conference in Las Vegas recently, Lukas Grunwald, a German information
security consultant recently reported on one way he thinks he can use this "digital
force" to cloud retailers' minds.
Lukas Grunwald says that he has created software that will let him enter a
store and, using a PDA, copy product identification information from the RFID
tags on a number of products. Then, as an example, he can also use his PDA to
take the product information from the tag on a $3 carton of milk and feed it
into the RFID tag on a $15 bottle of luxury shampoo. In the currently hypothetical
fully-automated supermarket that is probably in our near future, he trundles
his cart through a checkout lane where the contents are totaled up and walks
away with the luxury shampoo for only $3. Consider that Lukas is in the role
of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the automated checkout counter is in the role of the stormtrooper,
and Lukas' PDA is the tool with which he manipulates "the digital force." (A
more chaotic version of manipulating the digital force with regard to RFID which
I read about on an anarchist website is to release, in a large store, cockroaches
with fake product RFID tags glued to their carapaces.)
Read the script below.
Grunwald has released his software, for free, to prove his point.
What a magical time it was in 1977 when Star Wars transformed science fiction
entertainment forever. Little did we know that we were already engaged in building
our own version of "the force." Every year and now it seems every
month I learn of a new technology twist that adds to the invisible-to-the-eye
sea of digital information that flows around us and creates the environment
we interact with.
"Really?" you say. "The force?" and I say, "Yes, the
digital force." It's nearly everywhere and it will be soon. It's certainly
in your office, and at the ATM machine, and in jet fighters, and you can even
tap into it anywhere inside the city limits of Grand Haven Michigan now.
And it's available anywhere you can get a cell phone signal, like on many interstate
highways. I was recently on a long trip in Clifford, my big red truck, through
Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, with my son driving at 70+ miles
per hour. For most of the trip I was able to work as though I were in my office
- using my Dell Inspiron 8500 which was getting power from Clifford and dialed
up to the Internet through my Treo 600 converged device, catching Sprint signals
nearly constantly. If that's not tapping into a digital force then I don't know
what is.
From the script of "A New Hope," "Star Wars" Episode IV
- a scene each of us knows almost by heart: