Slashdot Mirror
Mementos as Document Retrieval Keys
Dekaner writes "The BBC is running a story that BT has demonstrated a scanner that can be used to retrieve digital documents by associating them with a physical object. When the digital files are stored on the server, they are associated with a scanned image of the object, for example a seashell. Later, when the user wants to retrieve the files, the memento is again placed on the scanner. The resulting image is used as the retrieval key."
glad I'm not a zoologist. damn....
I can see a lot of people using their asses as the "memento"...
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Turning the paperless office into a huge junk bin!
"Mike, do you have the financial data for 2002?"
"Somewhere. Help me look for the squeaky red clown nose."
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
...Mentos. The Freshmaker.
Remember Dumbo and the magic feather? I can see it now, my mother will call up to say she can't access her files because she lost the shortcut object, because she's afraid to navigate the filesystem.
Some tech is just useless.
but if you used a car key, it'd suck if you forgot when you get a new one...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Was the Marketing Plan associated with one of these seashells or one of these pebbles? Or maybe it was my coffee cup?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
If they try to patent this idea, I'm citing Johnny Mnemonic as prior art!!!
Seem like reinventing the wheel here.
Guess you could have actual keys for database access. Then you can put all the keys on a keyring...
This is more stupid than anything else I've heard this week.
...
Please put penis on scanner to locate pr0n
: )
If ten years ago someone told me that in the year 2003 i would be using a seashell to retrieve data i would tell that person that he is fscking stupid.
Disco Stu was talkin' to you.
If my company adopted this system, what image would I use for my *ahem* corporate porn stash?
Since they're already using shellfish... eh?
Sig master! Sig master! Sig... faster?!
Ok, there's only one thought. This is dumb.
You wanna scratch your scanner everytime?
Who's to prevent anyone from scanning the item once and just using that image to unlock your stuff?
Why not just PRINT OUT the data and delete the digital file?
What's more secure than a printout in a damn safe?
Sheez. And for this universities are popping up like weeds to make MORE engineers?
Hand me that wrench, I'm becoming a plumber!
This situation seems much the same. Most of the files I save on a computer are NOT associated with some object I have lying around the house. For example, everytime I write a letter to Mom, I'm suppose to scan her picture? Why not just save it in a folder called, "Letters to Mom." Its easier, quicker, and I don't have to find Mom's picture. Similarly at work, most of my files are associated with some email telling me to do work on some project. Do I scan the email? Seems kind of pointless.
In my view, like metadata, this suggestion adds steps that the vast majority of users won't do.
....with my obligatory pr0n reference:
I'd like to use that system to organize and search my pr0n collection!
... Uh dear.. well.. uh I need you to sit on the scanner... Please, don't ask.
"Derp de derp."
If you already have to keep the keys around in the physical world, then what's the point of not carrying around the actual paper documents themselves, or a CD-R or DVD? Sure, it's sort of impressive tech, but it's a poor idea overall.
Will it retrieve my documents in a queer 1980s europop sort of way?
THE FRESH MAKA!
I know what I would use...to store my porn.
Scan a breast, and associate it with porn.
The trick is finding the woman when I want to make the retrival. Not to mention the encryption.
Why slashdot? Why not?
This is actually a good stegonography tool.
:)
However, Wouldnt it be cool if the object could deterministically return the same key, to be used as a cryptographic key?
Then, you could use objects as the keys to encrypt and hide your information.
Don't suppose that is very realistic though
I have no problem finding computer files. What I need is something that, for example, I can find the file associated with my soldering iron, and it'll tell me where in my house the damn thing is... RFID tags maybe?
Next your not going to scan a picture of the object but actually drag the object to a special platform. "Mom where's my M16, I want to play American Army
God made the natural numbers; all else is the work of man - Kronecker
But what if you're new in the office and don't know how to use the 3 Sea Shells?
But that's NOT why I associate this with Johnny Mneumonic. I associate it because in the beginning of the movie, they're going to store 80 gigs of information (about as much as I have in /usr/home/) in Just Johnny's head. They use three random images from the television to associate with and encrypt the information. These images are then faxed to the recipient. Obviously the bits aren't being used because they would change in faxing. A more associative method is used, kind of like a human memory. I think that with time, more technologies like this will be used as our computational needs advance; That is, unless these multibillion dollar corporations have their way and our computers become merely vessels for receiving garbage information (valuable intellectual property) like the stupid movies and music being made nowadays, while "real" computers will be labeled as "professional equipment" and will cost five hundred times as much as they should so that only the corporations can afford them to keep us under control.
In the world of the future, it will be corporations, not governments, that will oppress the people. The governments will only serve as a tool to those corporations. Capitalism is fine; I just think that one change needs to be made: The individuals should have a much louder "voice" in government issues than corporations. In fact, the "voice" of any party should be inversely proportional to its size and power. The RIAA should not have enough voice to mail a letter to a senator, let alone do the evils that they are doing.
Use the Memento pattern when
Sincerely,
Letter
Using images of physical tokens to access documents is a really old idea. Of course, that won't stop BT from filing a patent.
I can see comebody mistaking one of these scanners for the office photocopier come festive time and the office party period and instead of ending up with a momento of the occasion they will probably end up with a screen full of goatse url's. --these are not weapons of mass destruction, there mearly encryption keys to my sons trust funds--
I have this condition, I don't know if I've told you about it... ...I have, haven't I?
I first read the headline as: Mentos as Document Retrieval Keys which quickly brought to mind an image of people trying to stick them into various ports on thier PCs. This could create and a whole new industry dedicated to cleaning floppy drives.
This is how Lotus notes has implemented security for the past couple of years.
Mentos as Document Retrieval Keys
which quickly brought to mind an image of people trying to stick them into various ports on thier PCs. This could create and a whole new industry dedicated to cleaning floppy drives.
"I went to retrieve the files, but in their place were these damn 3 seashells..."
"Hahahah...he doesn't know what the 3 seashells are for!"
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
When I lose an important memento, I don't have to worry because I kept all the serial number and insurance info in a file which... DAMN!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It's really pretty neat. I can pickup old ticket stubs and remember things about concerts that I'd forgotten for years. An old T-shirt can bring back a memory of going shopping at Target with my sister while an old girlfriend was out of town. I've got a tie another old girlfriend gave me that brings back visiting her in the hospital. I could go on, but the really cool thing, is that I've figured out how to retrieve some of this information using abstract representations of things -- drawings or pictures -- or even sometimes simply writing some words about them. I don't have to keep the mementos around any more.
I'm thinking of maybe implementing a computer system for this, where I type in some small "key" representation, and get back some further "data" associated with it....
Kind of wish I could clean out and delete a few things from the brain system, tho'...
Tweet, tweet.
What happens when your psycho girlfriend breaks your memento?
This is a sure fire recipe for data loss of critical data. All the server backups you can make would become worthless if the seashell/encryption key falls into the hands of a three year old with crayon or is lost/ruined in any other way.
It's a nice novelty for encrypting your digital little black book, but it's not going to be useful at all for business databases.
a piece of paper with the filename written on it.
Because, really, a box full of small objects is harder to associate with unrelated files than the filename is.
If you can say to yourself, "lessee, did I use the blue pill or the red pill for 2003 Actuals?", you would get a lot further naming the file "2003 Actuals" and looking for that. Wouldn't you?
This might be somewhat cool if you could use a simple digital camera, and you didn't need to worry about angle (this would require an all-angles storage, of course)
Either way, it seems pretty useless for most people. As long as we can tell what an object is we could simply type it's name in and search that way. It could be useful for large museums and scientists, thought.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
"Ya see tos men? Tos men use mentos as mementos!"
So now I can lose all of my electronic files along with the physical ones in the piles of junk on my desk...
This is one of those inventions that makes technology easier a bit more fun and a lot more personal. It doesn't make sense for every day use - you wouldn't want to use it to store office documents or your taxes - but imagine the sentimental possibilities. Associating a ring that belonged to your mother with pictures of her and a slideshow, or the seashell in question with video and music from your romantic beach vacation.
So before you go off saying how complicated and pointless a system like this would be, remember that it won't just be geeks using it. But of course, it could make a very interesting password system in the right hands...
What Future?
Ala goatse
No one I know can stretch their anus as big as mine!
Unless the scanner can correct for the misplacement of the image (skew and position). I dont see how it can generate the same key for two different passes of the same image. Most likely the document will not be retriveable reliably with this method.
Chris
Buy the President
I may just be a little slow, but the purpose of this is...?
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
...but I would toss yours!
*Rowwwr*
If this product is designed to help people remember what they have on their hard drive, what happens when they loose the physical 'key' which is used to access it ? These same people are probably 2 times as likely to forget their physical key then forget about their data. This, in my opinion, renders the product as useless eye candy.
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
This is a fascinating idea.
Maybe someday, a picture of the item could actually just be placed on the screen, without having to scan a real object. And when you want to get your file, you just point your finger at the picture.
This "iconic representation" could even be moved around the computer screen like you'd organize something on your desktop.
I know, you're laughing.. how can my Wang 80-column green screen actually someday show a PHOTOGRAPHIC QUALITY PICTURE?
Well don't laugh. Someday soon, we'll be able to see pictures on our computer screens, at 100x100 dot resolutions or even higher! Some advanced models may even show different shades of green for each pixel.
I hope that bright young man Steve Wozniak comes up with something! As soon as he stops hanging around that troublemaker Steve Jobs, all he wants to do is eat fruit and masturbate to Picasso paintings.
Slashdot is the best timesharing system EVER!
Where'd I put the damn seashell!? I need it to unlock the project I've been working on for the last year!
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
...of the file as my memento. To make the association more secure, each page will have it's own memento, consisting of the page printed out. That way when I need to retrieve the file on the computer to print out, all I have to do is scan each page, open the file, and print.
This technology has promise.
Using a tangible reference that can't easily be guessed/produced by a non-authorized party is a great idea in data security.
However, it seems flawed since you have to:
a) determine a method to reference the objects to their locked data if you use multiple objects as associations.
b) determine a method to securely store that object
c) Raise the question of the uniqueness of that object.
So for this to work, you'd have to create a secured storage location and a means to remember each items association.
And then each time you created a new object of association, you'd have to ask "Is this object unique or could someone easiliy go and obtain a comparable object to use in it's place?"
So while it's a novel idea and most worthy of continued R&D, it is not yet a practical solution as it only adds a layer of security that raises it's own potential security risks.
I could see an offshoot of this solution using imaging software to create complex patterns at the time of encryption that would be apparant noise to the human eye, but be read easily by a machine. These images could be small and stored on a memory stick. This method would be difficult to reproduce as the image itself would be based off the encrypted bits + the encryption key and stored on an external device. But unless they developed a biometric access mechanism(thumbprint scanning etc) on the access point or memory stick itself, there would still be the problems in secure storage/handling of the key.
But regardless, it is good to see new approaches to an age old problem.
I first read this as 'Mentos as Document Retrieval Keys'. Now that would be a story...
Hazards of using a scan of an object as a key include loss of the object or the scanner. A different scanner with different resolutions and color sensitivity would ruin your day. If you just happened to keep the original scan, you would be better off. Using many objects and hiding their images with many others would reduce the chances of others discovering your keys. You would then need a data base to associate the images with files. For smaller files you would do better to simply watermark your image with the encrypted data and do away with the "secret" files which are obvious targets. "Secrets? What secrets? All we have are employee family photo albums."
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You know, your Mom and Pop operations? Should they be muted, because in essence, their views gives the owner double the "voice" you talk about; the owner's vote and the corporation's vote. Or are they evil as well?
Those of you being snide need to think again.
To you it sounds pointless and silly and wastefully kludgy. The same sort of snide remarks were made about graphical displays and color monitors and mice. Such attitudes overlooked that people LIKED working with computers that had those features.
The proposal is not a data retrieval system - it's a memory retrieval system. And it isn't oriented to bringing up that memo you wrote last week - it's to bring back your images of your wedding or vacation of 20 years ago. And just a data point - my wife think's it's a cool idea. So maybe this is one of those things that women will understand and want more than men. (You know - women - those odd creatures that press flowers, save invitations from weddings, make shadow boxes, save children's teeth, etc? A digital memory box may very well be a highly desirable consumer product.)
simon greenwold at mit's aesthetics and computation group has been working on this for a while now. (EyeBox)
-Bb
But hey, the Navy's already working on the trained dolphins over in Iraq!
While this is true of the movie, this is not true of the original William Gibson story of the same name it was based on. There the mnemonic trigger was "Christian White and his Aryan Reggea Band."
>In the world of the future, it will be corporations, not governments, that will oppress the people.
Yeah, well, when you find a corporation which has killed 100 million people the way communism has, be sure to let us know...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Damn, for a moment I thought the heading was:
Mentos as Document Retrieval Keys
Now that would be cool.... I mean fresh.
Movie was terrible. Check out the Gibson short story though - much better. It's in the collection "Burning Chrome."
Your brain is not a computer.
So you whip out your handy asspass and flash it at the camera, and it don't know you, your ass has sagged in the 20 years since your first flashed it and sag recognition was not implemented.
Anything physical that wasn't designed for LONG term stability is going to cause stupid frustrating problems. Hell even a mag strip card is near worthless for more than a few months.
I do know of an old, moldy, lower than low but still electronic tech locking system that the access device will last for decades can be immersed in salt water, partially erroded, bent and still access the device and unlock it. If the material were not laminated plastic but metal it would last much longer.
It's an optically read plastic card about three to four times as thick as a credit card with these little square holes punched in it. Amazing that it works with Radio Shack quality parts from ages ago. It was built for some untended fleet fueling company and they really don't DO much to the pumps electronically to keep them running either.
I don't need a scanner or such I can grind my encryption key onto a STONE of suitable durability and put it face down in my yard. Done correctly it will still be legible in 20 - 30 years.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
"He doesn't know how to use the seashells!
if, for instance you work in a museum -- how useful would it be to be able to put an object on the scanner, and the computer automatically retrieves the information or data for it, without you needing to know what the object is or what it's called.
It's gonna be pretty useless for security or encryption, but in some fields it would be brilliant.
An interesting twist to this idea is *pre* associating data with an object. Imagine a central db for scanned objects that people/corporations could register physical objects with.
You place a bottle of coke in front of the scanner, and presto coke.com pops up. Or less annoying, imagine putting an object in front of the scanner and instantly being redirected to the manufacturers support page for that item. Printed copied of magazines or newspapers might jump to the online version of the article you're presenting, perhaps with additional info or audio/video extras.
Even more interesting... you have some wierd part to something you can't identify or can't figure out how to work. Place that part in front of the scanner to instantly jump to a web page of info on that part... maybe fully identifying it. "1/4 inch snubblewart"
...a scanner that can be used to retrieve digital documents by associating them with a physical object. When the digital files are stored on the server, they are associated with a scanned image of the object,
This should really say, "...a scanner that can be used to retrieve digital documents by associating them with a digital blob, that could be another scanned image, Word document, or random bits."
Now, if someone had a scanner that could do some image recognition the way people can, and automatically create some sort of keyword list w/o human intervention, that would definitely be cool. But I would bet that such a scanner would have to have a preloaded database of images to try and recognize.
And then what do you really want it to associate with the images? Object physical attributes? (i.e., red car approx 3/4 frontal view, shot in a grassy field with trees in the background), or more personal details (my '65 Alfa Romero "John" at Whatcom Falls Park, 5/8/2003)?
How is this any different than ECM systems like Documentum, or the Microsoft Office "Fast Find" feature that attempts to index all your Office documents?
1. Just crumple up a piece of paper.
2. Trace the creases in pen.
3. Scan the piece of paper.
4. The image is the key to the document.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Methods of authentication:
Something I know
->Something I have
Something I am
As something I have, this method is really rather poor. Ideally, the 'something' should be difficult to duplicate. Here, a photograph of the thing (taken from the right angle) might be able to fool the scanner. Or just look at the HotWheels car your target is using and find an identical one. Interesting idea, but I can't see it being secure.
that bloody communism, always killing people... now fascism, that never killed anyone! we should embrace our new fascist masters, and quickly, before communism sees a revival!
Encrypt the drive with all your work with a donut, then put it on the desk in front of you for the rest of the day :)
...a use for the thing your aunt gave you that you don't know what it is.
Go here to create your own Slashdot dis
"What's the last thing you do remember?"
"My wife..."
"That's sweet."
"...dying."
And what is stopping someone from making a color copy of your "memento" and open your data?
It seems to me like this would be most useful for cataloging. A museum, for instance, could take a scan of each item in their collection, and then use that as one means of bringing up all of their data on that item. Or a stamp collector could use it to store information on each stamp in his collection. I think the stated uses in the article are kind of silly, but I can definitely see this having some value.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Somebody staring at the floor in disbelief at their shattered cofee mug, crying in their cube.
And its not because of the coffee on the floor!
Whoops!--dropped the seashell!
Looks like Grandma's estate is going to probate.....
how could this possibly be useful? how ridiculous. why not just use a printout of a picture of the object instead? i could keep it in my wallet.
You need it to retrieve your doctoral thesis. Remember?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I believe it was 380 gigs, and he used a doubler to make his capacity 160 gigs. Sad part is I only saw that one once ;P
Banaaaana!
So now instead of looking through the my documents/history section on my computer for that paper on George Washington, I have to dig through all my old stuff to find his bust? Sounds like much more work with this "new" system. I think that if you organize your files in a logical manner, then it is very difficult to lose them. Personally, I would much rather have a faster/better search tool for Windows than having to dig up a physical object to look up my files.
SIGFAULT
Memento mori!
Anyone who aquires a momento must now register a duplicate with the FBI as part of their Collector system.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
... Johnny Mnemonic, anybody ?
What kind of practical uses can this have? I mean a computer does the same thing...it associates 1's and 0's to their respected files so why is this considered a step forward??? So now to open a document or a file we have to scan in an image...isn't that counter productive?
Did anyone else misparse the article title and summary as Mentos?
I was visualizing someone putting a strawberry Mento on the scanner, and pulling up whatever.
Then I began to think -- well jesus, all the mentos look the same, how freaking secure is that? And, just what the hell do you do if you *eat* that mento? Your data is unretrievable!
da w00t. mtfnpy?
...that's appropriate for ideas like this. "That's the dumbest idea I've ever heard!"
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Say I use a seashell that I found by the seashore as my memento... All is well. File is filed, encrypted, and safe.
Seashell sits on a shelf...
Enter small child: Plays with seashell. Seashell dropped, cracked, lost, stolen, eaten, flushed down toilet, or otherwise becomes flawed...
NOW WHAT?
I think I'll stick to my brain for remembering the passwords (OK, so not the night after a jolt binge, but U get the idea...)
It seems to me this is targetted at people who are too dumb to maintain a summary index of what they keep on their machine. Not that such people don't exist - I'm a Brit living outside the country and when I visit I could swear that 80% of the population are now in that catagory, and it's been getting steadily worse over the last 20 years. Maybe I'm missing the point of the exercise, but this strikes me as merely yet another example of the 'dumbing down' trend that's become so noticable in the UK over the last decade or so.
Communism hasn't killed anyone. Corrupt communist politicians have.
Genocide does not have political allies.
Why does my head hurt after reading that?
Just great. As an Easter Egg homage to the movie Memento, I suggest the following as default things to retrieve for pictures of Joe Pantaliano:
Do not believe his lies.
He is the one. KILL HIM.
Of course, this would be hell for Joe's friends, relatives, and associates. Maybe we better chip in for Joe's plastic surgery now...
Mechanik
Now i have to get a girlfriend to retreive my porno
Great, so BT are now going to start going after people infringing on their patent for hashtables?
John Dvorak aside, really - back it up.
Snide remarks about mice and gui and color monitors - at Doug Englebart's Mother Of All Demos? which is pretty much when this stuff hit the fan? About the Macintosh? Nope. Know why? Their jaws were too far dropped to make such remarks. People recognized the value. The sensation of of-course-this-is-what-i-wanted-all-along. And it has less to do with "like" than the fact that those things increased effectiveness, intuitiveness and productivity.
I think it's cool idea too. But if it's not practical or effective, it won't stick.
They abovementioned inventions saved steps. Particularly steps like trying to visualize our work in color, then revamping it when it didn't match, etc... Like trying to remember the explicit, error-intolerant text strings you need to type to get the computer to do something you could simply verbalize and recognize... the list goes on.
But attaching a scanner to my computer so that when I pull out my wedding invitation it'll come up on my computer? Given that the whole wedding is now in iPhoto, iTunes and iMovie, it seems like a big kludge.
To illustrate, several years ago I was invited to work on Portfolio Assessment software for education at a Very Big Educational Publisher. We had about a dozen people brainstorming a system to journal everything a kid did on the computer, scan everything a kid did on paper, photo everything 3-d, and put it all in a time x topic x evaluation matrix that could be analyzed, summarized, etc. We got all fevered about how simple this woulf be, and that the machine would have all this data, then we realized of course that kids and parents wanted a handle on it, so everyone said yes, just print out the scan and the kid can even take a copy of their artwork home to put on the fridge!
Hello?
Just give the kid his damn artwork after you scan it.
This is another example of thinking too hard, and you'll be filing it next to Microsoft Barney.
I'm betting you'll see good voice recognition before you see this thing go pervasive.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
"Dammit! Who's been dunking madeleines in tea and sticking them on the scanner bed again?"
This could be great for archaelogists, police records, biologists, astronomers. One could use any device for detecting a memento which would be the key for retrieving all info on the object. For example a scan of a particular artifact would bring up all data on that artifact that an archaelogist or many archaelogists had saved. Instead of using a scanner one could use much more sensitive devices and create very large memento profiles for complex items. This could be developed for archiving data of all sorts, especially for collecting data on one subject from a wide variety of sources and data types. Anyone who thinks this is useless does not spend enough time in the real world. Real object recognition is totally necessary to have any way of compiling information about real objects with machines.
This is an interface for mom and dad, not for someone who understands what a hierarchical filesystem is. This is for someone who thinks computers (by which I mean PCs and laptops) belong in the office and not the living room. It's not trying to be a better storage and retrieval system for power users, or for added security, or anything like that. Personally I'd much rather show friends pictures of my vacation by putting a memento from the trip on a screen than by having to boot my computer, start up mozilla, go to a web site etc. etc. That type of technology and interaction doesn't belong in my living room.
James
I think they got the idea from the associative nature of human memory.
Unfortunately, this would really only be of value in a semantic web of such memento objects, with an inference engine that could automatically create useful associations between them.
Not just a traditional filing system like the article seems to describe. We already have a system that works for that: it's called ... surprise! ... a filesystem.
World of the future? Where the hell have you been for the past 30 years.
> Yeah, well, when you find a corporation which has killed 100 million people the way communism has, be sure to let us know...
- to bacco.htm
o ki ng
Tobacco companies are getting there, running up an estimated 80 million by now.
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/tobacco/who
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm#Sm
Doesn't anyone remember Johny Nuemonic? This was how they enctrypted the information in and out of his head. You know, that whole fight with the picture getting cut in half. Remember how much trouble that caused. I still say a password would work better. At least you can't lose or damage it, and for the love of god it isn't that hard to remember them, if you don't set your computer to remember everything. That, and, in the end, the user will just put a copy of the picture on their computer (likely named "password image" or "key picture"), anyway.
I went to a smart card exhibition for work and there was a lot of stuff about bio security such as retinal scans and fingerprints.
;)
One thing we were told was that there are only so many unique features on the human body (I'm trying hard to remember exactly how many) and that one of them was in fact your anus print.
I'd love to see goatse man's ID card
Heh, I hate biometrics. If it can be copied, it's worthless.
Those signature collectors for credit cards are not legally binding though I assume a jury would rule so if it came to trial. It would be real easy for an ailing company to slurp off pocket change and be protected by using such captured data, or slip the data out to someone who'll kick back some money.
Biometrics are hard to forge, but hacking whether hardware or wetware hacking is as easy as it always has been.
Shared secrets are the way I want to go, preferably with a third party moderating (not the grubermint).
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Heh, I hate biometrics. If it can be copied, it's worthless.
I dread to think how you would copy goatse's anal print.
Any single security system would work better in conjunction with another. Your post reminded me of this similar story story (also duped) about using images as passwords. Assuming there was a limited set of mementos in an environment, you could use them as an index key and also as part of an auth system along with biometrics.
Thinking about it, it could make for decent security in some situations with people who do not use good passwords. It's obviously slower though.
And OT, captured signatures will go into decline as PIN transactions come in and then become the only customer verification method; customer not present fraud will be harder to get rid of though.
Uuhm, I wonder if Gyno's will use it. They can personalise their clients files.
If access can be had the key can be copied. Granted using some massaged binary from an image to encrypt something is interesting, but stuff changes over time and could become worthless unless the generated key was stored. If it were too sloppy then it'd be about as useful as voice print identification.
Information that is of a 'slightly less than life threatening' level could be stored off as a shared secret with severel trusted key management companies and/or friends. Reliability of either determines the number of shares and the number of shares needed to remake the secret.
But if I cannot remember the password, nor keep the password stored securely I don't need or deserve the privacy and should act accordingly so as to avoid social or legal consequences.
As to copying any biometric, the data has to be stored at some point. Unless I have hardware (smart card) which I authorize with a biomentric scan that does the challenge/response with a private/secret key pair then I GIVE THAT BIOMETRIC DATA to whomever scans it for authorization. So I wound'nt be able to copy an asspass but uber hacker could get hold of the digital data, either hacking the soft/hardware of the machines storing the data or by using a really nice axe on the wetware managing the machines storing the data.
Chop...chop, how do I get all the retinal scans?
No?
Chop...chop....Now?
No?
U. Hacker consults wireless PDA.
Your daughter has brown hair and blue eyes and a teddy bear named Chuck, she should be leaving school about...now.........
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty