Adam Savage’s RFID implant activates, orders him to change his story

September 4th, 2008 by

It’s no secret that RFID isn’t the most secure thing in the world, so we mostly took Adam Savage’s story about Discovery telling the Mythbusters to back off an episode exposing the tech’s flaws after a conference call with various cred card company lawyers as a bit of laughable corporate insecurity, but it looks like Adam got himself in a bit of trouble by sharing — Discovery’s now sending out a release in which he basically retracts the whole thing. “There’s been a lot of talk about this RFID thing, and I have to admit that I got some of my facts wrong… Texas Instruments’ account of their call with Grant and our producer is factually correct [and] the decision not to continue on with the RFID story was made by our production company, Beyond Productions, and had nothing to do with Discovery, or their ad sales department.” Sure, that doesn’t explain why he said that Tory “still gets a little white” when he remembers the phone call, or why he said RFID was “on Discovery’s radar,” but we’re guessing it has more to do with simple exaggeration than devious conspiracy. At least we hope so.

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Mythbusters RFID hacking episode canned by credit card company lawyers

September 2nd, 2008 by

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Although it’s no secret that RFID is easily hacked (see: train passes, passports, credit cards, one billion other cards, etc.) it’s still not necessarily common knowledge, and it sounds like the major credit card companies want to keep it that way — according to Adam Savage, Mythbusters was all set to do a show exposing the weak security behind most RFID implementations but was shut down by lawyers from “American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else… [who] absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode.” Since Discovery is an ad-supported channel, it’s not surprising that it backed down, but we’d say that the credit card industry would be far better served spending money on actually improving security rather than lawyering up and trying to keep consumers in the dark. Video after the break.