@Edent what's so bad about <div> ... or: Why do you want to avoid them?

[edent@mastodon.social]

@fbinin how so?

[fbinin@mastodon.fbin.in]

@Edent I am actually trying to understand if this can be?
I am not from Europe or UK, and I may actually be reading it all wrong altogether, but if the reader is trying to read anything that is NFC, it might also be taking some sort of identity or tracking something? Or is this the normal infrared kind of reader?

[edent@mastodon.social]

@fbinin It is a passport gate.
Yes, it reads information from your passport when you place it in the reader.
So, yes, you need to show your passport to the guards at the border and they will track your entry and exit from the country.

[fbinin@mastodon.fbin.in]

@Edent apologies for my confusion earlier. I guess I read it incorrectly.

[moof@cupoftea.social]

@Edent I’m glad you managed to get the NFC ring working reliably for your needs. Are you going to update that blog post as as longer term review, and what you use it for these days?

I still want some sort of identity token in a ring, it would somehow be a throwback to signet rings. But nobody seems to be making secure tokens on rings any more. Even your ring is no longer available…

[ivor@social.ivor.org]

@Edent mystery solved. 👏 I'm always surprised how many NFC readers fail with multiple cards. (Eg train/tube etc)

[sjjh@hachyderm.io]

@rlonstein @Edent I'm interested to hear this from somebody who has worked with the technology. I've only read about RFID and NFC. The impression I had was that it should be possible to have multiple cards for different purposes present and the reader could select which to communicate with.
That wasn't borne out by my experience however. I couldn't use my office badge if my Oyster card or Southeastern trains Key card was next to it in my card wallet.

[edent@mastodon.social]

@moof it seems to be available at https://getcybernetic.com/product/ring/

There are a few similar products.

As for long term? It is really boring - I just use it as a FIDO token on my laptop and phone.

[moof@cupoftea.social]

@Edent That’s the equivalent of what apple calls passkeys, right?

Do you know of any European manufacturers or any that distribute in Europe?

[edent@mastodon.social]

@moof I'm not in the Apple ecosystem, so I don't know what terminology they use.

No idea about manufacturers, sorry.

[moof@cupoftea.social]

@Edent Thanks anyway. Still quite tempted by this, especially at the new price point.

[edent@mastodon.social]

@fishidwardrobe https://www.openhab.org/

[vale@fedi.vale.rocks]

@Edent@mastodon.social This'll be good to remember when I eventually get around to getting an NFC implant.

[spzb@infosec.exchange]

@Edent I’d always assumed they just randomly reject my passport to fuck with me when I’m already tired and cranky 😬

[dan@mastodon.durrans.com]

@Edent For many years I was unable to use the e-gates at any UK airport. One time a Border Force person told me, “The e-gates will never work for you, there is nothing you can do to fix this, and I can't tell you why”.

[knotnicky@ravenation.club]

@Edent I am feeling a palpable sense of closure even though this has never happened to me

[linker3000@mastodon.social]

Friend of mine, who is about 6ft 7 could never get them to work and was told it was because of limits on the camera positioning and his height.

[seabass@social.seabass.systems]

@moof @Edent Just hopping into this thread to mention that passkeys aren't Apple-specific. Google has actually been rather involved in the development of the standards, and there are lots of different implementations. 'Passkeys' just refers to a specific way of using FIDO2, so it's all the same technology as in hardware authentication tokens like edent's ring :)

[oh2xab@mastodon.radio]

@Edent Mine never works in the UK, I asked why once:

The passport cut the very top of my head off (hair) and apparently that's no good for the facial detection on the machines...

[rlonstein@social.stonetools.tech]

@sjjh @Edent I'm not an RF Engineer (or any Engineer, really...) but I had several months of hands-on work with it. I'll try to keep the trip down the rabbit hole shallow.

It depends on the type of card, the reader, and the software. RFID is a blanket term for many implementations using different frequencies and types of tags. Considering some common ones that are energized by the reader: UHF tags, used for asset tracking and inventory, signal a tag id and can be read at several meters, the readers will either report multiple tags for reading or return all the tags in range in a go. They're usually designed for durability and quick reads under imperfect conditions; "Proximity" tags in the kHz range, typical of door/gate/garage access passes, are read at a few cm or less and have only a tag id. Reading more than one tag is not supported with those as far as I know but I believe it's an implementation detail not an actual limitation; NFC tags, ISO/IEC 14443, which include MiFARE variants, the Oyster card, those wrist bands popular at events, credit cards, and emulated in phones, are read at a few cm (but under bench top conditions with a moderately large panel antenna I've done it at over half a meter, this is not normal or subtle). These can store more than just an id. They may have fields that can be fully or partially rewritten, counters, authenticated fields, and "burned" fuses setting fields or preventing changes. Some (DESfire, SAM, DUOX, etc.) implement encryption (I've seen DES, 3DES, AES) and some support "Applications" which manage particular data sectors or expose filesystem-like storage. It requires transactional interaction by the software driving the reader to perform operations.

So for your office badge and transit cards they're probably all using NFC and implementing several of the above features. The reader hardware and software driving it expects to perform a specific series of operations on a single card with a known set of fields or applications so it will either reject (if it reads tag id first or can detect it) or fail (I presume interference) when multiple cards are present.