If you've read some of my diaries you may know that I have a crazy mad crush on Mythbusters' Grant Imahara. So it is probably not surprising that I "keep up" a little bit with them. Today I came across this article that I thought y'all might be interested in.
It seems that the Mythbusters were working on a segment about RFID chips.
Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage said a planned segment of the program was going to look at how hackable, reliable and trackable RFID technology might be.
It certainly sounds like it could be an interesting and enlightening segment. There's just one problem, we'll never see it. The segment never even made lift off. When a researcher called Texas Instruments to get information about the RFID chips TI was not happy. TI, along with the major credit card companies, and all their lawyers contacted Discovery and quashed the segment.
"They [MythBusters production team] were way, way outgunned and they [lawyers] made it really clear to Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about how hackable this stuff was. Discovery backed 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."
Texas Instruments, of course, denies the claim, saying that they had one lawyer involved in one telephone conference. So, I suppose it is a he said/she said situation. I personally tend to trust Adam over Texas Instruments, though.
Source
Here's a video of Adam recounting the incident.