He said "could be," not "will be"

This report is filled with ridiculous assertions and fearmongering, you don't have to make one up.

Computers are already a memory upgrade for the brain.

You can write to most of them. Wiley MIT kids figured out how to add value to their rfid subway cards. It's actually kind of scary how insecure rfid stuff can be.

Plus I mean if you were going to put memory in your body you'd probably want to be able to change it without undergoing surgery.

chmod 777

OK but that subway card example doesn't make sense as I would expect the card only holds an ID and the actual points get managed by the Subway website which ratchets up every time the ID card gets swiped with a purchase. Not like adding points to the card itself but to the account that the card represents. So I saw this virus and thought, no it's the software that reads the ID that has the issue, not the ID itself.

You WOULD think the subway cards would work like, say, a debit card, and not store anything but an ID on them, but it actually does store the "money" on the card itself, and it's really insecure. You pretty much only need a card reader. That being said, that only happened because of how terribly-managed Massachusetts public transportation is, not really because of any inherent rfid issues.

You'd like to think that it was a problem unique to Boston, but apparently the same system is in use in San Francisco, London, and a few other places.

I assume the logic went something along the lines of 'who would seriously try to hack this?'

The answer to that question is always 'a whole lot of people'.

All the details are in here.
http://tech.mit.edu/V128/N30/subway/Defcon_Presentation.pdf

In a lot of cases the fare systems have to work without any network connectivity, and have to continue to work when there's no connectivity available. Most modern cards work on the basis of strong-key crypto so only authorized devices are able to change the value, and then there's a frequent synchronization between the readers and the base stations.

In Seattle, all of the buses are like this, and they only sync when the buses return to base. The base stations also tell the buses about registered payment autoloading and so on (so that your card knows that if you run out of funds it will automatically get another or whatever), and the buses tell your cards about asynchronous payments that came from the system. As a result, things get really weird if you try to load funds onto your card online but don't tag the card anywhere within a few days.

There are several implants (pacemakers, insulin devices, etc.) that are being equipped with smartphone interfaces so they can be monitored by their users.

Unfortunately, they've been shown to be easily hackable, which opens the door to all kinds of fun stuff.

How long until murder by iPhone?

oh my god