Mythbusters Were Allowed to Air RFID Segment?

Yesterday, I posted about Adam Savage and his talk given at the The Last HOPE conference back in July, where he talked about the Mythbusters show’s inability to broadcast a segment on RFID… and well, it seems there are a few inaccuracies there. All it took was an explosion of this talk all over the web to find out!

According to a new C|Net post, an RFID segment actually did air, although I don’t recall ever seeing it. By how it seems, it only aired once, but chances are it wasn’t, given how often the Discovery Channel plays old episodes. Adam also is now backtracking:

“If I went into the detail of exactly why this story didn’t get filmed, it’s so bizarre and convoluted that no one would believe me, but suffice to say…the decision not to continue on with the RFID story was made by our production company, Beyond Productions, and had nothing to do with Discovery, or their ad sales department.”

While the episode did air, it apparently didn’t talk about any insecurities, so I’m really not sure what ‘myth’ was being covered. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but something still doesn’t seem to add up. If they are indeed able to cover RFID, maybe they should do it again, this time covering the fact that it’s an insecure technology. Who out there thinks that’ll happen?

From his statement, it’s also logical to conclude that when he told the Last HOPE audience that co-host Belleci was on the conference call, he had meant Grant Imahara, another MythBuster co-host. Further, a Discovery Channel representative told me that MythBusters did end up running an episode, last January, on RFID, but that the issue of the technology’s security holes was not addressed.