Bergen County in New Jersey had a problem. They needed to keep track of how often homeless people received services like food and shelter, but they didn’t have a reliable way of identifying them. So they’ve started scanning their fingerprints.
New research says your ears are like snowflakes – completely unique in the world. Which is neat! But it also means you have two giant fingerprints on the side of your face, and airport security wants a look.
A new report out of the US National Research Council asks that you leave the severed fingers and popped out eyeballs at home when trying to fool biometric scanners.
Another year, another DefCon, another litany of epic security fails. Like this Biolock Model 333, a high-tech and high-priced bit of protection that surely requires expert tools and technique to override. Here’s how it does against a paperclip:
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For those people who still have trouble figuring out which way to slide George into the vending machine, a prototype from Hitachi makes things a little simpler: it identifies caffeine fiends by reading the pulse in their fingertips.
The electrode-equipped Galvanic Skin Response Bouquet doesn’t give the couple much question about wearing their hearts on her sleeve: a blue LED glows when they’re calm but a white one turns on when they becomes nervous. But that’s not all.
To me, the biometric readers you see on most laptops are obnoxious blemishes—they really can’t make them more discrete? Apple feels the same way, so I like their ideas for seamless biometric security.
