i am so upset at myself i could just spit for getting my laptop and digital SLR stolen last night. Ironically, they stole it out of my car while my brother and i were at the cinema watching Ocean's 13. Nothing like a little poetic justice to raise your spirits. ^^;;
In other new, Woody Evans, in the June/July 2007 edition of American Libraries wrote an article entitled Arphids in Ascendance which i found of particular interest. Arphids, as he describes them, are the artists (though i believe it would be more accurate to say "architects") of the RFID phenomenon. As Evans sees it, “In the 90s, we dreamed of an RFID future in which we would no longer shelve books—we’d just cram them into shelves and use a mobile gizmo to tell us the location and condition of any volume.” Yet this, seemingly lofty goal, has been plagued by the constant threat of malfeasance from patron hacking, virus susceptibility and the use of library technology to loan themselves to attacking retail computer systems.
Evans would contest these threats by bringing the hackers themselves into the fold and i can only applaud such a solution. Technology systems are constantly improving library service, but they have always had the sinister impetus for doing more harm than good. Although library systems could be the launching point for some insidious malware attack through RFID, like with stem-cell research, many would purport the benefits out way the risks. New technologies are spawning every time we turn around, “keitai [denwa], PDAs, Blackberries, laptops, Semacode Thinglink, arphids” and all seem to have the potential to connect patrons with libraries and information more readily than past systems. Though, if our RFID tags are already being hacked as Evans suggests, it gives us cause to pause. Could we survive without VeriChipped thumbprint IDing and “fulfill our geek dream of knowing where all our stuff is” (props to Warren Ellis)? Probably. Should we hesitate to enact more technology in our libraries simply in fear that it could be abused? i posit that throughout libraries existence, services have been abused: it has happened, it will happen. Let’s encourage those hackers to help better our systems and become invested in a future, rather than having them sing “I wanna be, an anarchy!”
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2 comments:
I know that the possibility of being hacked is very real. I am not denying that by any means. I was talking to three of my extremely computer savvy students this weekend at a graduation party. They were talking about putting together a "LAN van". They are big, big geeks... by their definition, not mine. They want to put together this 15 passenger van (don't ask me how they got a 15 passenger van), and set up their computers inside. They would drive around different communities/subdivisions and find unprotected Wi-Fi.
My question... "Why?"
Their answer... "We all live out in the country and none of us have high-speed internet... there are so many games we never get to play."
Despite the fact that this would look like a conspicuous activity... they actually have no intention of using the "LAN van" to cause harm. They just want to have fun.
I just thought it was funny that my mind went straight to the negative, and the end result just made me think of them as bigger geeks. It was awesome!
Wow -- the LAN VAN sounds really cool. Amber, Senbei, I still believe that welcoming the geeks (giving them reason to want to hang with us in the library) is the solution/prevention for much potential black-hat hacking. I heard a great presentation by a librarian at the Texas Library Association convention -- a real salty fellow who'd actually done all the work, crossed all the Ts to get RFID tags on his ENTIRE collection -- about how that, yes, in fact, swipes are already being attempted (I won't go into all the reasons why).
Amber's right to suggest we tilt our view to the fun side. Let's bring them in with honey, and not insincerely.
WE
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