2026-06-26 –, Prime Dome
We've all done it, you walk out of the store and the exit portals start beeping.... So you just keep walking. Tag-based retail anti-theft systems have been with us for decades, and there are several distinct generations of technology in use. Some of them rely on interesting physics, others use state of the art RFID technology for integrating into point of sale and supply chain systems. All of them are, almost universally, hated and ignored. We'll learn about magnetostriction, visibility networks, and shopping carts that form mesh network swarms while they wait in the parking lot.
This talk will cover a timeline of retail loss prevention technology, and then focus on the current generation of mesh networking, IP-integrated systems with surveillance and marketing implications. We'll also discuss the business and technology reasons that loss prevention technology is widely installed but very inconsistently used, and efforts to apply similar technology to problems like armory and nuclear material management.
J. B. Crawford is a technology writer and DevOps consultant from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their interests include computer security, computer history, and the history of military communications. They are best known for Computers Are Bad (https://computer.rip) and for minimally provoked rambles. When not writing or speaking, they travel the southwest by road and explore the desert.