Did Credit Card companies stop MythBusters?

The first two minutes is MythBusters' Adam Savage explaining why MythBusters will not be doing a show on the fallibilities of RFID technology.

In the video, Savage says that a conference call was arranged between co-host Tory Belleci and Texas Instruments to talk about the RFID vulnerabilities. But when Bellici and a MythBusters producer got on the call at the appointed time, "Texas Instruments comes on along with chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else....(Bellici and the MythBusters producer) were way, way out-gunned and (the lawyers) absolutely made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was, and Discovery backed way down, being a large corporation that depends upon the revenue of the advertisers. Now it's on Discovery's radar and they won't let us go near it."

Of course Texas Instruments is claiming that is not quite the true story and offers their own version of the call. Who has more reason to lie? Texas Instruments/Credit card companies of course. They are the ones with money on the line if the technology becomes cracked/hacked or otherwise manipulated. MythBusters just loses a segment or a show so thus they have nothing to lose by exposing any problems with the technology.

This should be fairly frightening if you use any RFID technology. If they don't fully trust their product why should you?
As reported on cnet.com

Labels: Television

- posted by Doug @ 11:22:00 AM