BlackHat had a fairly technical presentation on weaknesses of the Microsoft fingerprint reader, but it boils down to the old problem that someone can potentially capture the fingerprint data and replay it instead of needing a finger.
Techweb has a nice write-up of the different perspectives on the BlackHat presentation.
I have been testing one of the readers myself for some time now and just stopped using it because of a number of inconveniences (ironically it’s billed a “convenience only” device). This news puts the nail in the coffin, at least until a new revision comes out.
I went to Tucson and it gave
me a headache. I don’t know how.
Everyone’s a cousin in this world.
I drove down a road of enormous houses
that encompass many toilets. Down hallways,
leaping left or right, you can crap at will.
A mile away a dead Mexican child slept
out in the desert on the wrong side of a mattress.
Jim Harrison is sometimes a satisfying source of insight. He has some clever quips that show he’s trying to avoid resting on the surface of things…
So I was fiddling around with some of the new online home valuation services, like Zillow, and found them disappointingly superficial. Who thinks up these algorithms? Can they be a real reflection of our society? For example, I noticed I could just keep adding bathrooms to increase an estimate of a home’s value. It does not matter how many bedrooms, kitchens etc. are in the house; configure a single-story 1 bedroom, 5 bathroom house and it is worth far more than a two-story 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom house.
Clearly, the more toilets, the better off you are.
