DailyDirt: Fingerprints And Watermarks On Everything?

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Mon, Jun 6th 2016 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Making copies of physical goods is becoming easier and easier all the time. Some folks want to make sure that all these physical items are authentic, devising fingerprinting or watermark technology to identify objects uniquely. Dollar bills, documents and all kinds of valuable things could be tracked with this kind of anti-counterfeiting tagging. Here are just a few other examples of making a mark on stuff that could be useful.

SmartWater is a chemical fingerprint spray that can help identify thieves (who get caught) by covering them with a durable watermark. This stuff can stay on skin for months, and SmartWater has been a commercial product for decades now. [url]
Actual fragments of DNA injected into underground wells could help track hydrothermal water for drilling optimal wells for geothermal energy production. DNA-encoded materials can identify where water flows underground, and they're a bit more environmentally friendly and durable than radioactive tracers or chemical dyes. [url]
Wrinkled silica polymers can be formed into artificial fingerprints that could be used as anti-counterfeit tags. If artificially intelligent robots are going to take over the world someday, maybe we should give them fingerprints just like us. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: anti-counterfeiting, dna, energy, fingerprints, geothermal energy, smartwater, watermark

4 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Anonymous Coward, 6 Jun 2016 @ 6:04pm

Great. Just when manufacturing is becoming cheap and abundant, people gotta make it more expensive with DRM.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Anonymous Coward (profile), 6 Jun 2016 @ 6:28pm

From the 'We don't actually have a really really clear picture of what is down there or we wouldn't be doing some of the things we are doing department.'
While I have long been intrigued with the concept of geothermal energy, or at the very least thermal control (heating/cooling) the advent and actuality of fracking has cooled me on the concept. Fracking scares the shit out of me and it is not clear to me what the essential differences between fracking and geothermal energy production might be.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Anonymous Anonymous Coward (profile), 6 Jun 2016 @ 6:34pm

I'm not fine with SmartWater
Think about the cross contamination possibilities with that SmartWater shit. You touch one product in a store, then another, the first has SmartWater, the second did not, but now it does. Then, some skell comes along and steals the first product and they come looking for you because your 'contaminated'. I see many many many problems from this, and of course they will put the onus on us to prove we didn't even though the law says it is supposed to be the other way around.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Skeeter, 7 Jun 2016 @ 9:05am

DNA to track groundwater?
Seriously, the scariest 'tracking technology' listed, by far, is the DNA fragments used to track underground water flow. This could VERY EASILY be the next Monsanto Glyphosphate monopoly, just as various farmers have been sued by Monsanto over having 'Round-Up-Ready' crops growing in their fields that the farmers claim 'were never Monsanto crops, but were cross-contaminated' via cross-pollination. Imagine having a well in your backyard, drawing your water (that you paid $7k for drilling that well), and getting a bill at the end of the month because some schmuck can 'prove' you are drinking from his billion-dollar underground aquifer - all because he injected traceable DNA into the water you are also tapped into? Reeks of 'Big Brother Underground'.
[ link to this | view in thread ]