Ok, the RFID tags are everywhere. do they run on electricity? do the have battery packs that run out? Commlinks have filter settings to block them out yea? except the truly insidious ones anyway. Just trying to wrap the old brain around the everyday use of these things.

One of the most irritating things in SR4.


They last just long enough to screw over your character. Not a moment less.

Security Officer: Yeah, we got an unknown RFID in sector 12. Its broadcasting, 'Nummy, nummy, nummy, candy bar in my tummy,' send a unit to check it out.
Team Hacker Monitoring Radio: Okay, we got a unit inbound. Who's the idiot that ate before we went on the run?
Troll Recounting The Food Fight Module: I haven't eaten anything since.....the night.
Street Sam: The nanites told me to.
Team Leader: We're hosed..

the thing about rfid is that the most basic ones feed of the background radio energy on whatever frequency its tuned to broadcast on (or maybe even some other, if equiped with multiple antennas).

hell, i think someone guesstimated that SR tech uses morphing antennas and software radio, so that one can rework them quickly to work on different bands.

background radio energy?

is this real? or some SR handwaving?

No it's the same principal that RFID tags use today. When walking though the doors at the department store the antenna's on either side (or built into the doorframe) send out a radio freqency that powers the RFID and then it activates and transmits it's data.

I loved the RFID Tag on the Cow that my group stole once.

Created a huge banner above the cow in AR saying, "I'M BEING STOLEN!!!"

Yeah, RFIDS, we've taken to hitting everything we pick up with a tag eraser, even if we pulled it off the corpse of a hobo-ganger.

Isn't that from a Cyberpunk 2020 adventure? I remember hearing that story before.

Nope, it was from a story I told here.

It was a Bio-Cow that wasn't supposed to have the "Anti-Theft" RFID Tag on it, but did by mistake.

Needless to say, it was a problem for the group as they had YET AGAIN forgotten to get a Tag Eraser.

So they bought a Jammer at the Crime Mall, paying the cheap price for the one with no manual, then paying their Hacker connection to download the manual from the manufacturers website and tell them how to turn it down from jamming everything in a 100 metre radius to a 1 metre radius.

Found the Cow Story.

the reason a radio can pick up a transmitted signal is that when said signals energy interacts with a antenna, current is built up (unless i get my terms ass backwards), this current is then run thru a amplifier, and you get music, news or a whole lot of noise.

now, instead of running that current thru a amplifier, it can be run thru a microchip, powering said microchip (hell, a amplifier can be a microchip these days).

now add some capacitors and/or rechargeable batteries on top and presto...

lets just say tesla was on to something back in the day
(tho he may have misplaced a comma or something, getting the final results a fair bit out there)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_power
http://www.ted.com/talks/eric_giler_demos_...lectricity.html

the latter uses magnetics rather then radio but still...

Nevertheless, I believe that Shadowrun RFID chips and "Current world" RFID chips are somewhat different. Otherwise, you would have an unbelievable buildup of RFID chips after a while. I just handwave and say RFID chips in shadowrun are designed to stop working after 1 week, except for the ones that NEED to stay active for longer. So, like, the RFID chip in your breakfast bar stops working after 24 hours (because it's not going to be in you anymore.) The ones in your socks will stop working after a week, maybe, and the ones in your engine block telling your serial number work indefinitely.

Generally, I tend to ignore RFID chips, because it eventually becomes something on a checklist, and I can either be a mean GM and screw my players for not ticking it off on the checklist, or we can all continue to have fun.

For example:

PC "Okay, I find the McGuffin we are supposed to steal. I check it for booby traps."
DM "Okay, you disarm the trap"
PC "I check it for alarms"
DM "You disarm the alarm"
PC "I spoof the matrix connection"
DM "You spoof it."
PC "I put the security system on continuous playback, so it still looks like the McGuffin is there"
DM "You hack it"
PC "I turn the McGuffin's GPS tracking device off"
DM "You turn it off."
PC "Okay, now I take it and walk out the door"
DM "Haa haa! You forgot the RFID chip! You loose! All the security guards are alerted!"
PC "Eff me this is a stupid game"

i would just lump rfid under alarm, as that, along with basic inventory counting, is what its used for most these days.

i think wal-mart decreed that suppliers should use rfid in the packaging so that a whole shipment could be counted in one scan and so on.

hell, shelf space can inform when they are empty and more using the tech.

there is also some fun stuff about people rewriting the rfid on a expensive bottle of wine to report itself as a cheap soda to the checkout...

RFID tags can be used to trigger bombs. Page 4, section 2.4. Just thought this might interest you all. The whole PDF is good but this is my favorite part.

well, you learn something new everyday, thanks guys, and I agree that there is definately a build up of tags in the world.good hacker trick; turn off the spam filters and watch commlink grind to a halt.

This almost makes me think that in a world where there is this proliferation of RFID tags, old and new, that there might be bylaws against them, like they are graffiti, and clean up crews of sorts. Some places might even encourage the graffiti tags as art to try to brighten up ones ghetto, possibly even a sort of AR mural type thing to attract tourism to an area. Hmm, there might even be some sorts of Runner jobs in this, like sabotaging someone's ad campaign in a specific manner or proliferating the spam tags or some sort of Mr. J's scheme of illegal info gathering in public spaces aka not corp territory per se unless maybe in another corps place as a sort of propaganda campaign to ruin morale of the wage slaves in that corp... Hmm, probably more stuff there too but that is what I have brain stormed at the moment. Oh, maybe the Mrs. J wants you to screw up the inventory count of some place or maybe the Mrs J just hates the spam in the area and puts a hit out on the tags to forcefully clean up an area and those tagging the place?

the big question there are how many rfid are active (as in transmitting data every chance they get) and how many is passive, only transmitting when asked for.

actives are going to be easy to spot, as long as one is "looking", but the passives can be a issue, especially if they are waiting for the right code rather then a generic call for response.

all in all, i suspect signal stealth in SR4 is more about blending into the background noise, then being some black hole (see submarines and passive sonar, where its being joked that finding a sub these days is about finding the most silent part of the sea).

like say steganographing your com chatter into some diagnostics packages from the environmental controls of the building.

Well, they'd still need to have an antenna. And the simplest current (irl) RFIDs consist of nothing else.

Of course these tags also have a range of feet, as low power input results in really low power output. And it is essentially just a serial number that is only of limited use to anyone who doesn't own the inventory system. Plus really tiny RF tags have really tiny antennas, which doesn't help either.