From article, (Today, the biggest hurdle when it comes to designing new gadgets is battery technology. These big, bulky things restrict the forms our smartphones, computers, and wearables can take, and unfortunately, battery technology is so stagnant that there’s no promise of things getting better any time soon.
But what if you could leave the battery out of the equation entirely? That’s just what the University of Washington’s Sensor Lab has done. Researchers there created the WISP, or Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform: a combination sensor and computing chip that doesn’t need a battery or a wired power source to operate. Instead, it sucks in radio waves emitted from a standard, off-the-shelf RFID reader–the same technology that retail shops use to deter shoplifters–and converts them into electricity.
The WISP isn’t designed to compete with the chips in your smartphone or your laptop. It has about the same clock speed as the processor in a Fitbit and similar functionality, including embedded accelerometers and temperature sensors. “It’s not going to run a video game, but it can track sensor data, do some minimal processing tasks, and communicate with the outside world,” says Aaron Parks, a researcher at the University of Washington Sensor Lab.)
Me, "So, if this technology is real? It means that the U.S. government, which is usually 10 to 20 years ahead of anything commercially sold, in tech gear, has the technology to spy on you, with bugs, placed in your home, that operate on any radio frequencies, emanating from your house, or from outside your house. Think WiFi, or anything that admits radio waves. Meaning they would operate indefinitely as long as it had access to radio waves. Very nice. Like we weren't paranoid before."
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