Digital Water Marks Thieves

[mis at seiden.com]

at the risk of being accused of being humor impaired:

the particles are ignorant.  it's the police officers that need to
know to look for the taggants.  civilians could look, but might not
have access to the semantic content in the database.

this is similar, i think to the taggants that are imbedded in industrial
explosives to indicate the explosive batch number (to try to trace the
pre-bang chain of custody).

google for taggants if this interests you particularly.




On Wed, Feb 16, 2005 at 10:36:33PM -0600, Matt Crawford wrote:
> 
> On Feb 15, 2005, at 12:40, R.A. Hettinga wrote:
> 
> >Instant, is a property-marking fluid that, when
> >brushed on items like office equipment or motorcycles, tags them with
> >millions of tiny fragments, each etched with a unique SIN (SmartWater
> >identification number) that is registered with the owner's details on a
> >national police database and is invisible until illuminated by police
> >officers using ultraviolet light.
> 
> That's amazing!  How do the tiny particles know that it's not a 
> civilian illuminating them with ultraviolet light?
> 
> And how does Wired reporter Robert Andrews fail to ask that question?
> 
> 
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