Friday, September 17, 2010
(Digital Identity)

There's a problem in Korea with the production of counterfeit whiskey, so the legitimate whiskey producers have an application in the Korea Telecom service. When the whiskey is bottled, the caps have an RFID tag added to them. This is coded with a URL and an identifier. When a customer, or a shopkeeper, or a policeman, or in fact anyone else wants to check whether the whiskey is real or not, they touch the cap with their phone and the URL launches a web site that knows the provenance of the identifier and can tell you when and where it was bottled as well as some other information. When the customer opens the bottle, the tag is broken and can no longer be read.
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(yeah right: "When the customer opens the bottle, the tag is broken and can no longer be read"! Just what one needs: one's location triangulated upon a bottle of whiskey - fc)