[CST-2] Active Badges

[Martin Harper]

Virtua Assasins: object being to get in the same room as your target, 
and press one of the buttons before they press theirs. Then curse as you 
realise that you've run out of batteries again, and decide that the 
people doing the same thing with mobile phones have probably got this 
market sewn up.

Corporate Assasins: Make them mandatory to wear, and then use it as an 
excuse to fire that lazy SOB you never liked. Claim at the tribunal that 
it's essential to know how often employees are visiting the coffee 
machine. For added effect, make them highly unfashionable.

Real Assasins: invite high ranking royalty/politician who you dislike to 
visit your place. Give them an active badge, and neglect to tell them or 
their security escort that this makes their location world-visible. 
Better with a bat, of course, since then the terrorists can find out the 
(almost) exact location of their heart in 3-D space.
--

In all seriousness, routing desktops could work because there's only one 
or possibly two free desktops in each room (if you have more than a 
couple PCs unused, you're rich enough to afford bats...). You could use 
the buttons to switch between a few options. You could also use badge 
data to kick all unlocked computers in the room out of power-save mode 
so that the badge user can log in to hir chosen machine more quickly. Of 
course, the fifteen second beaconing rate makes this trickier.

Follow-me audio works. Follow-me lighting works - and probably better 
than motion sensors as you don't need to stand up and wave your hands 
every ten seconds. Where is X, Where is the nearest person with Y skill, 
Where is the nearest free person with Z job; think of an intelligent 
hospital, for example - better make it private, or *nobody* will be free.

Security probably doesn't work - if you put a badge on a computer so 
nobody nicks it, then the smart thief will take the badge of before 
stealing it. I guess you could weld it on or somesuch - but even that is 
problematic - consider the conditional probabilities P(stolen|badge 
invisible) compared to P(battery run out|badge invisible) - do you get 
thieves on a greater than yearly basis?

The key really to such Qs is complete suspension of disbelief and 
cynicism - and try to pretend that they could actually work... :-/
Martin