Tattoo RFID

Bill Ray reported on The Register in January 2007 that a Saint Louis company known as Somark Innovations has successfully tested a new kind of radio frequency identification (RFID) medium. An identification number can be stored in a tattoo that is injected from an array of needles onto animals such as cows, mice and rats.

The RFID’s number can then be read from more than a meter away using a proprietary high frequency reader.

Existing tags are either expensive or can be torn out from animals.

Somark’s next market after animals will be to identify military personnel, meaning the tattoo also works on humans.

Again as evidenced, the last days are truly here.

“And it puts under compulsion all persons, the small and the great, and the rich and the poor, and the free and the slaves, that they should give these a mark in their right hand or upon their forehead, and that nobody might be able to buy or sell except a person having the mark, the name of the wild beast or the number of its name. Here is where wisdom comes in: Let the one that has intelligence calculate the number of the wild beast, for it is a man’s number; and its number is six hundred and sixty-six.” – Revelation 13:16-18, New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures

Links:

The Register – Cattle branding comes to the 21st Century: High-tech tattoo more than a pretty picture
<URL:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/16/rfid_tattoo/>

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Five Search Engines Old Timers Should Know

In the years before Google was anything but a simple colourful page, there were several legacy search engines still crawling the young and delicate Internet (or ARPANET). For those of you who first got online with a dial-up modem more than ten years ago, you should know these five common search engines back then.

1. Altavista

Old Timer Search Engine Altavista

Has always been so minimalistic in design and returns useful results consistently. One nifty app that I still use for fun and research is the Babelfish (a nod to Douglas Adams fans).

2. WebCrawler

Old Timer Search Engine WebCrawler

My second favourite search engine after Altavista. Its results are presented in a pleasant format.

3. Lycos

Old Timer Search Engine Lycos

Lycos was probably the first search engine with lots of news links and little applications that Google is so well known for now.

4. Excite

Old Timer Search Engine Excite

Excite’s design hasn’t changed much since the beginning: just as messy. The results are quite accurate though.

5. Netscape

Old Timer Search Engine Netscape

The darling of the early Web. Old timers were surfing using Netscape betas, cool! Back then, nobody heard of Internet Explorer, just Mozilla and mostly lynx (ahh beauty).

In another year, Google would be ten years old anyway.

Links:

Wikipedia – Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
<URL:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET>

Search Engine Watch – Where Are They Now? Search Engines We’ve Known & Loved
<URL:http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2175241>

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BorderWare MXtreme: E-mail Firewall Antispam Product

Sponsored Post

Sample image spam

Is this a familiar sight in your mailbox these days?

A relatively new breed of e-mail spam is becoming prevalent where the e-mail contains an image with the advertisement text and graphics inside. Traditional text-based anti-spam software is useless against such spam because the e-mail will not contain any searchable text at all. It is estimated that image spam now accounts for 35% of all spam.

BorderWare, a messaging security solutions provider, has a product called BorderWare MXtreme, which is an advanced anti image spam system. Check out the product information here.

In addition to the usual optical character recognition technology that can be used on the image spam, MXtreme has a patent-pending technology called Intercept Image Analysis. This performs image classification and more than thirty image attribute processing, such as word salads, random speckling, image manupilation, animated GIF, various colouration and fonts.

As a result, BorderWare’s anti-spam solution can detect 98% of all spam on the e-mail servers. If you are in the IS department and looking for a better anti-spam product, check out BorderWare MXtreme today.

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