Human-borne computer viruses... a sign of things to come?

Casually flicking through the bbc news website, as I tend to do whislt drinking my tea in the mornings, I came across this rather worrying article...

It tells about the rather cavalier experiment performed by Dr Mark Gasson, on himself. (Haven't countless comics/movies warned against doing things like that?!). But yes, Dr Gasson had apparently been issued with one of those new spangly RfiD chips.

They've been used on barcodes and merchandise since the early 1990s, and have recently been developed to sizes which make them applicable to money, passports - and animals. Recent applied to say, pet identification, then to something which can be inserted into people which contains their medical records, which was taken up happily by some American hospitals. Then there was the happy application (which I'm sure George Orwell would have shuddered at), where the Jacobs' family in America all volunteered to all get inserted with RfiD chips which permanently track their location using GPS... for their own safety.

But Dr Mark Gasson helped to illustrate one of the more scary disadvantages of such technology, by having a chip inserted into his hand which he then infected with a computer virus. Which was then able to be passed onto the various devices the chip interacted with. This has some fairly awesome implications, not limited to what could happen if the computer chip virus could be passed from one RfiD chip to another. The potential consequences for data corruption for medical records alone could be quite scary - and that's certainly not going to be the limit of this technology.

Food for thought...