The Firehouse

RFID, which stands for Radio Frequency Identification, is ubiquitous in our lives. We find RFID tags in our library books, grocery, consumer goods, printer cartridges, and are even implanted into people’s bodies.

The basic principle behind RFID is that a simple, passive device responds to a burst of RF with a unique number, which can be used to identify the object to which the device is attached. There are many types of tags, some of them can even be written to. When I have the time, I will write an in-depth article on this subject.

RenderMan, Thorn and Audit have written a book on this topic, titled RFID Security. You can get this book at Amazon.com. RenderMan is very active in the Church of WiFi, Thorn has participated in other books, such as Wardriving: Drive, Detect, Defend. Audit is a very active moderator of the Netstumbler forums, hosts personalwireless.org, and also participates in many WiFi-related projects.

Believe me, I tried. Frustration was high, but so were spirits. The challenge: to purchase videos from Apple’s US iTunes store, while not being a United States citizen, nor living in the country.

For some obscure reason which they don’t make public, but one can guess emanates from the RIAA, Apple does not allow you to purchase music or other content in their iTunes stores, unless you are from the country that the store belongs to. So, a UK citizen cannot buy music in the US iTunes store, and so on. Fine. Whatever DRM was for…

It is very frustrating to see that in your music store, Bowling for soup only has some 70 songs available, whereas the US music store has 150 songs.

Being based in Barcelona, Spain, I was stuck in the spanish iTunes store. The Office videos (both seasons), were however stuck in the US iTunes store. I would have been quite happy to pay the $2 they asked for each show. I firmly believe in paying fair prices for good, reliable content, and so I set about trying to break down the barriers set against being a satisfied costumer.
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This is where my blog starts – intending to discuss technology-related issues from a different perspective than usually given.

If you search around, you will find hundreds of blogs dedicated to technology, from Mac fans to hackers finding how to modify roomba robots. However, there are a good many of these blogs that don’t present the other side of the technology, the reason why things behave the way they do.

I intend to dwell deeper into these aspects, and focus on issues that are usually looked over, and also explain how to do stuff I found difficult or poorly documented.