BIG BROTHER

MIT to uncork futuristic bar code

"Put tags on every man woman and child, and suddenly the world changes," boasts the web site of the Auto-ID Center, the research group at MIT leading the charge on a new ID project.
"No more wasted time and money on traditional surveillance. No more costly undercover operations. No more guessing which citizens are likely to vote for which particular presidential candidate, who they associate with, or how effective the brainwashing is going..."

A group of academics and business executives is planning to introduce next month a next-generation bar code system, which could someday replace with a microchip the series of black vertical lines found on most merchandise.
The electronic product code or EPC Network, which has been under development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for nearly five years, will make its debut in Chicago on Sept. 15, at the EPC Symposium. At that event, MIT researchers, executives from some of the largest global companies, and U.S. government officials intend to discuss their plans for the EPC Network and invite others to join the conversation. The attendee list for the conference reads like a who’s who of the Fortune 500.
The EPC uses a 96-bit format -- large enough to generate a unique code for every grain of rice on the planet -- and under EPC, every individual item (not just each product type) on the shop shelf would have a one-of-a-kind identifier.