Now I know its a bit of an odd thing to bring up, but shouldn't there be anti theft and tracking devices that are offered for a yearly or monthly fee? If Lone Star is a police force/corporate entity then wouldn't it make sense for vehicles to have a bunch of hidden activate on wireless signal chips?

*Ring ring* "Hello this is Lone Star my name is Cherryl how may I help you?"

"Hello Lone Star? Yes my vehicle has just been hijacked my ID code is 5587-9B7-2XV9."

"Thank you very much sir our vehicle locater puts your car in the vicinity of Crazy Dan's Chop Shop. A Lone Star Patrol Car is on it's way right now to retrieve what's left of your vehicle."

"Um.... thanks.... I guess...."

"No problem sir. Is there anything else I can help you with."

"No... you've been a great help."

"Thank you for using Lone Star and remember if you upgrade your anti theft package for just 200 a month we offer the Lone Star rapid response deployment, which means we can have a team track down the vandals and eliminate them in four minutes or your money back. Have a nice day!" *click*

tracking device = stealth RFID.

the service, however, you're on your own =P

Well, considering services like this exist now..
..They'd definitely exist in the future, might be compulsory for certain vehicles [squadcars, armoured vehicles, etc], and would be easy to implement with the wireless networks.

So how much for a missle to home in on that RFID stealth tag, if I really care more about hurting the thiefs than recovering my Jackrabbit.

It's really the only way for assassins to get thier kill on

Tags have crappy signal ratings, it's impractical.

...I'd just have it set up so if they bypass the normal starting system, the vehicle's windows and doors are locked and cabin is flooded with Seven-7, Green Ring, or something like that. Of course explaining to the Star why your theft deterrent system employs a military grade neurotoxin is another matter entirely.

unless the Tag links in with another wireless device like a wifi enabled lamp post. This would allow the signal to travel further.

It's a stealth tag that he was talking about using, it's not going to be read unless that lamp post knows the code it responds to and knows how to read RFID tags. Hell, if you want to load your missile with the hardware to make use of the matrix you're not necessarily going to be able to identify the position of the tag anyway, since it doesn't transmit GPS co-ords. Targetting a missile at a tag is not practical, but targetting it at a singal 6 transmitter is.

Has everyone forgotten jamming and tag erasers? No good thief goes without!

A few years ago someone stole a professor's laptop at UC Berkeley, and his angry lecture that day was for some reason on the internet and I listened to it. He pointed out that the wifi was on and pretty much everywhere on campus was registering his computer as the thief passed by the, er, nodes. I'm not sure if it was a bluff but you basically *can* track wifi-enabled devices that way, *now*, provided there's connectivity. The wireless matrix works because there are a gazillion devices communicating with each other. Yes, that means your text message to your pal two km away went through two commlinks and a pantsu vending machine; for most purposes this is not important. The routing is unlikely to be predictable enough for someone to do a man-in-the-middle attack, and besides if they had the resources/skills to do that they would just hack one of your comms. The GPS data is stored in the local access point (the canonical lamppost; technically it could just be "coordinates" as the lamppost is not expecting to move around); RFID tags are very much detectable (in some sense) outside of their meager signal range.

Provided, that is, there is wireless connectivity around. Out in the desert or the Barrens there may or may not be. Static zones or spam zones would be a problem. But holy crap, a missile homing in on your signal is effing cool and has to be possible solely for that reason.

EDIT: Jamming, yes. Tag erasers, though, should not work on a "hardened" security or stealth RFID. A wifi-inhibiting chest or something would be good too, as jammers are muy illegal while a painted box is just a painted box.

Speaking of modern wifi triangulation:

When I was up in Victoria visiting UVIC last year I visited a Electronics Engineering exhibition of student projects. One group was working on a way to tell where you were on campus by the MAC addresses of the wireless routers your pda was communicating with. Far from complete, but in the quasi real world of SR, finding the exact location to within a meter should be cake.

This also brings to mind something I have been wondering about Jamming for quite some time now: since communication will be lost within a radius, won't the system know exactly where you are when you begin jamming? After all, any jamming that is going to be useful to you may dump some people out of VR jump by being in their vicinity. How can you safely use Jamming in the middle of Seattle (or whatever city you are running in)?

A couple of years back I attended a presentation by Intel that mentioned the same technology, with considerations for multiple different scales. Perhaps they're both working together on it, though I don't really know.