Right, but how do they uniquely ID an individual?
I’ve seen the procedure done. If a microchip was on the point of that lancet, it would be readily visible.
Many years ago, I heard a talk by a guy who did early work with retail RFID tags and “anonymized” cell phone data. His comment that stuck with me was “if I know where you spend 8 hours every day and where you spend at least 8 hours every night, I don’t have to know your name, I know who you are”.
There is an external antenna. I posted a picture of one upthread (post 32). The antenna is the coil on the right side of the device in the picture.
The device is beam-powered, meaning that it gets all of its power from the incoming radio beam that it receives. Initially, the incoming radio signal charges up a small capacitor. A capacitor is just two metal plates with a dielectric material in between them to make them more efficient at storing charge. Once the capacitor is charged, it functions as the device’s battery. Since the capacitor isn’t very large and the incoming radio beam doesn’t have much energy in it anyway, this capacitor does not store very much power at all. But this is what the device uses for its power.
After the chip switches on, it decodes the signal in the incoming radio beam and checks to make sure that it’s a valid request. If it passes the check, the microchip sends out its reply, which is another encoded signal that (among other things) contains a unique number encoded into the chip. This unique number is the chip’s ID number.
Since the only power comes from that teeny tiny capacitor that was charged by the incoming radio signal, the microchip doesn’t have much power to transmit its reply with, and it sends out a very weak reply. This limits the device to a very short range. For pet microchips, you have to get the scanner fairly close to the pet for it to be able to scan the chip, typically maybe an inch or so away from the pet’s skin at the most.
The RFID tag just contains a number. That’s it. The number is programmed into the chip when it is manufactured. Part of the number programmed into the chip is some sort of reference number to identify the chip’s manufacturer, so that someone reading the chip knows what database to look in to find information about the chip. Often, this reference number is just the phone number of the chip’s manufacturer or the phone number of whatever service is running the database.
When your vet implants the chip into your pet, they record the number in the database provided by the chip’s manufacturer, along with the pet owner’s name and phone number. If your pet is ever lost and found, a vet can read the ID number and phone number from the chip, call the database phone number or access that manufacturer’s web page, and can then use the ID number from the chip to look up the pet owner’s name and phone number.
Some databases will also store medical information about your pet, but most just store the owner’s name and phone number and that’s it.
ETA: @beowulff’s post wasn’t actually part of the pet discussion (oops) but the info is still relevant so I’m leaving it.
The RFID tag just contains a number. That’s it. The number is programmed into the chip when it is manufactured. Part of the number programmed into the chip is some sort of reference number to identify the chip’s manufacturer, so that someone reading the chip knows what database to look in to find information about the chip. Often, this reference number is just the phone number of the chip’s manufacturer or the phone number of whatever service is running the database.
The whole idea is ridiculous, but the point I was trying to make is: it would be difficult to tie a chip to a person if it was possible to be injected with an arbitrary number of them (as postulated above).
I suppose if they could be scanned from space, then it would be no problem.
No their mothers were fitted with self-replicating microchips that made a copy of itself and inserted that into them in the womb. It’s all far, far too late now.
As you go out after your appointment, the doorway is a high powered scanner that knows your name (from when you made the appointment) and programs the just-injected chips accordingly. Of course in my case I went with my dog and he went through the doorway just before me. And now every time he takes a dump on the sidewalk, I get charged with an offence against public decency.
Pronounced, of course, my-CRAH-mə-lee
I know, which is why I said horrified 
They were interesting times. SGI committed corporate suicide when they sold the Cray corporate division to Sun. They probably thought that 100 million was a tidy sum for an unwanted asset. Little did they realise how badly the E10000 would eat their lunch. SGI should have put the prototype machines in a crusher and wiped the memories of all the engineers. SGI’s run in with Microsoft pretty much ensured their demise. A great pity.
We had an interesting time with Sun back then. Although they ruled the roost with servers, they manifestly failed to crack the HPC market, and failed to bring to market stuff we thought we had bought. The E-cache problems were also fun. All ancient history now.
That’s a great point. I don’t know where you got vaccinated, but where I got vaccinated (in a hospital) no one was writing down scads of long hex codes. And you get yet more during the second dose - which I got drive through with even less paperwork.
I also wonder if they’d get excreted. If so people tracking someone might wind up in an interesting a appropriate place.
Did you work on it? Because the disaster visible outside was nothing like the disaster on the inside. People were quitting before their sabbaticals. No one at Intel wanted to transfer in, and we weren’t allowed to transfer out. My psychotic boss tried. I tried to go to the CAD group. When they refused I quit. Then they said I could. I laughed at them.
I could write a book, but Intel would no doubt sue me. Maybe an sf book some day.
They don’t have to write them down. They just have the black helicopters scan your unique population of hex codes.
Ah, I stand corrected. I had a mental image of something visibly sticking out from the chip, like the antenna on my wireless router.
So going with the hypothetical that such a thing COULD be made small enough to be injected with a normal-sized syringe, and readers built into, say, doorways that somehow are strong enough to read a chip from a meter or so away (without somehow frying other nearby electronics like phones or pacemakers), then the whole microchip conspiracy theory is quite plausible.
Or, oh wait, the OTHER thing. Pretty sure we’re not quite the point of either of those hypotheticals.
Intel used to sell keychains with embedded chips in their (very early) online gift store. I used to have a P54c and a Pentium Pro, back when the Pentium Pro was still a high-dollar item.
When I was there we got given some of these. There was an I think 150 MHz Pentium which just got replaced by a 155 MHz version, and rumor had it that the chips in the jewelry were good.
I’m pretty sure the Sparcs on my project awards didn’t work, but I knew the yields.
I’ve also heard that a lot of the flawed first-generation Pentia, with the bad floating-point-division look-up table, got turned into jewelry. They also would have been functional, if one didn’t mind that division was slightly off.
I just remembered I have photos that show the old keychains.
My brother worked at Intel for a while during the Pentium era and I have one of the Pentium keychains but it doesn’t look like any of those – it’s simply encased in plastic with an Intel logo on something thin and opaque underlying it to hide the back.
The one on the right is a full CPU that I used to run. I was just comparing the die sizes or something when I made the photo.