I can also imagine Spammers groping people on crowded subway trains in order to spread their crap ads.

I'd hate to even fathom what kind of advertising methods would be used to 'sponsor' these systems. Nike swooshes appearing on the skin by triggering 'tans' in the upper epidermis. Ok, thats a stretch.

Reminds me of the Drummers from Stephson's The Diamond Age

This will finally be closure to the long-running, nasty D&D geek argument about whether Mud Golems or Flesh Golems have a higher data-transfer rate.

New ways to connect to a computer for Las Vegas cheating!

We could turn "Hands Across America" into a giant MP3-sharing fest. The RIAA can't have us all arrested...

Much more interesting for subcutaneous instruments such as pacemakers and other devices.

Edited by author 10-07-2002 01:28 PM
Oh, the irony of downloading some worm or virus that wipes out your hard drive through the shaking of another person's hand, thereby making human skin the vector of your computer's infection.

Tom Zimmerman was doing flesh-networks at the Media Lab in 1995, though they only worked at about 4kbps. I wonder what became of his work?

http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED3-12.html