p2pnet - rss feed: Advertisers kill Mythbusters spy-chip story
p2pnet news view Cool | Advertising:- “Credit-card companies killed Mythbusters segment on RFID vulnerabilities,” says a Boing Boing headline.
“Check out the first two minutes of this clip of Mythbusters’ Adam Savage telling the folks at the HOPE hackercon about how the Discovery Channel was bullied by big credit-card companies out of airing a program about how crappy the security in RFID tags is,” suggests the text, in turn linking to Bruce Sterling on Wired.
“Huh,” he says.
“That sure explains a lot.
“Terrific speech by the godlike Adam Savage here; he’s in his element surrounded by these hacker scofflaws.”
‘… way, way outgunned …’
In the video, “We were gonna do RFID and on several levels how hackable, how reliable, how trackable, etc, and one of our researchers called up Texas Instruments and they arranged a conference call between Tory and the head producer over there for the other team, Linda Wolkovich (spelling?), and one of the technicians at Texas Instruments,” says Strange.
“We were supposed to have a conference call to talk about the technology.”
Then, he goes on, “On Tuesday at 10:00 am, Linda and Tory get on the phone … Texas instruments comes on, along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover and everybody else. I mean ….
“And I get chills just as I describe it. They were way, way outgunned and they absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was and Discovery back way down being a large corporation who depends upon the revenue of the advertisers.
“Now it’s on Discovery’s radar and they won’t let us go near it.”
Strange adds, “Tory still gets a little white when he describes that phone conversation.”
But, but how can that be?
Like, everyone knows, because the corporate media keep telling us, advertisers have absolutely no sway over editorial ………..
Stay tuned.(Cheers, Luvie) 
Boing Boing - Credit-card companies killed Mythbusters segment on RFID vulnerabilities, August 30, 2008
Wired - Arphid Watch: Mythbusters and RFID, August 30, 2008
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September 1st, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Is this the next phase in the trend of computer-generated typographical errors? First, we had the wonderful spelling checker which could correct our spelling, and yet, bad grammar and homophones which are not homonyms would get through. Now, we appear to have mechanical dictation, where a word such as “hackable” can be transliterated as “a couple” and pass “into print” without anyone noticing that it bears no resemblance to the correct word.
September 1st, 2008 at 2:23 pm
Sad, that was the last HOPE conference…..
September 1st, 2008 at 4:51 pm
@ Andy
“mechanical dictation, where a word such as “hackable” can be transliterated as “a couple” and pass “into print”
Sorry, Andy. It was just me. I got ‘reliable’ and ‘hackable’ the wrong way around (fixed), and in between trying to get my daughter’s new laptop up and running (she paid for it herself), and doing a few other things on this supposed holiday day, I keyed in what I thought I heard without checking the sense, something I admit I’m prone to do all too often.
As far as ‘mechanical dictation’ goes, I bought the IBM voice-to-text converter many moons ago for $200, I think it was (that was back when I had an income), and it was next to useless. It’s still sitting in its box somewhere, unused and unloved. I can’t bear to throw it out. Maybe one day ………
Cheers!
Jon
September 2nd, 2008 at 11:51 am
Wow! You can’t get anything by the Internet Grammar Police these days. Ever vigilant, the IGP scan the internet for the most awful of all crimes: poor grammar. While they feel quite superior to the criminals that they hunt, they almost never comment on the story in which the infractions occurred.
P.S. This story seems typical of how big business operates. The consumer is put at risk, but is at the mercy of corporate greed.