> I guess it's just a matter of time before someone is charged with disabling > the RF signature of one of these tags. I'd guess that here in the US, the > rule will be "if you bought it you can disable it, but prior to that you're > not allowed to jam it."
We will see. All depends on how detectable the fact of jamming will be. Considering the public awareness about how the technology works, the clerks will tend to panic that they are jammed when they kick off the cable from the antenna, or claim that "that damned crap broke down again" when they will really be jammed. If the "problem" will become widespread, jammer detectors will appear. Once they will get deployed, it's matter of couple days to few weeks until their full specs appear in 2600 or Phrack or similar zine, and stealth jammers will follow, spinning another round of arms race. > Humm...one wonders if there's already some common electronics that emit in > the same range as the scan, or if when "defective" (wink wink nudge nudge) > will jam such a signal. The RF tag frequency Benetton uses is something around 13 MHz. This is unlikely to produce accidentally on too high power, though maybe if a "well"-designed amplifier would start to oscillate (high-gain audio amplifiers realized on high-frequency op-amps could be likely candidates, dad had long time ago similar problem in range of 100s kHz with audio preamplifiers with MAC157 opamps). The problem will be with "accidental" antennas; in gigahertz-range frequencies basically any short piece of wire or a suitable PCB trace does the job, while with low frequencies we have to use either a large part of a construction as an antenna, or some coil. (Disclaimer: My high-freq-fu isn't nearly as good as I'd like it to. Which is also valid for more advanced analog electronics too. Working on it, but it will take some more time.) I think I posted some link here earlier about an accidental GPS jammer.
