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Fingerprint Recognition with Linux & IBM's T42

Posted by timothy on from the nobody-said-*which*-finger dept.

Michael R. Crusoe writes "UPEK, provider of popular fingerprint sensors to IBM's T42 notebooks and others, has announced that they will be providing a BioAPI compliant library to perform biometric authentication under GNU/Linux. Will Linux be the first operating system to have integrated biometric user authentication 'out of the box'?"

1 of 156 comments (clear)

  1. Obviously not by shanen · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    Sorry, but the "stimulating" question is obviously foolish. By the definition implied by the question, the answer is "Obviously not", since the feature already exists for Windows on this particular IBM box, and there is no way that all Linux boxes will support it any time soon. Any way you try to slice that question, it comes out broken. The editors often add feeble attempts to encourage conversation, but this one is outstandingly feeble.

    I don't mind that the editors want to be slightly provocative. What I mostly mind is that the the /. moderation system frequently penalizes people who rise to the bait. I suppose I should also be bothered that such leading questions sometimes provoke trolling, but the moderation system usually handles the trolls pretty well. Not always, however.

    By the way, can any moderators (M1ers) out there answer a couple of questions about M1? My theory is that M1ers also do M2--but they do it differently than I do. I just answer honestly, the way it says in the M2 instructions, but I rarely agree with 90% of the M1s (I think it's more like 70% on average), and I think that prevents me from being asked to M1. Two implications are that the description of M2 is misleading (or false), and that some M1ers are probably gaming the system by always M2ing at 100% agreement, and this gets them more chances to do M1.

    Yes, I admit this meta-topic is wandering away from the current topic, but that's one of the side effects of picking a bad topic, so I'm blaming the /. editor. Well, actually the topic isn't bad, but (as already noted) the "provocative question" is terrible.

    Do they have a meta-funny mod?

    --
    Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.