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As reported by Computerworld and further to a previous post on the matter, Wal-Mart appointed Rolling Ford as its new CIO earlier this month. Ford used to be the company's executive vice president of logistics and supply chain.

A statement answered the open questions on his support of Wal-Mart's RFID Initiative and reaffirmed the company's commitment to the Electronic Product Code (EPC) standard.

Computerworld reports that:

"Researchers at Australia's Edith Cowan University have proved that first-generation radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be breached to cause a denial-of-service attack on the tags, using cheap store-bought radio transmitters."

Viviane Reding will love this: SecurityFocus reports that three researchers from the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam released a paper outlining the potential risks of viruses using the small amount of memory contained in everyday RFID tags. And yes, they have a proof of concept.

Computerworld reports on a press briefing at the CeBIT trade show in Hanover, Germany, where Viviane Reding, European commissioner for information society and media, declared that:

"RFID is very important to businesses and it is very important to citizens, but it also raises concerns about trust. (...) Citizens have to be sure they are in control of their data, and to have this control we must have worldwide legal certainty."

The bottom-line is the EC will consider revising the existing directive on e-privacy if new threats to EU citizens' privacy are identified.

Computerworld reports on a panel that took place at the RFID World conference where Wal-Mart gave feedback on one year of live RFID usage.

Wal-Mart claims a return on investment, even without extensive process changes (i.e. out-of-stock items that are RFID-tagged are replenished three times faster than before).