Home Secretary Requests Fingerprint-Activated iPods

John Reid, Home Secretary, has called upon tech manufacturers to improve the security on their gadgets to help with his recent push to frustrate criminals. Inviting Apple, Sony, and several others to his crime fighting summit Reid hopes to attack the rising robbery numbers in the most recent Home Office figures.

Comments

Re:Useless

[geek]

Wipe the flash. Force a reload on the firmware etc etc etc etc. You can not secure a device when the theif has physical access to it. Anyone that has worked with ATM's knows this.

Re:What a fantastic idea

[dgatwood]

More than that, didn't anybody see MythBusters? Fingerprint readers are nearly worthless as a security mechanism. They are notoriously easy to fool.

Re:Obligatory "In communist Russia"

[eneville]

In communist Russia, phones steal YOU! that's not how the joke goes, it's SOVIET russia...

Re:Hey, disarming your citizens is working...

[ydrol]

Oh, wait, you aren't citizens, but subjects. Your rights are privileges granted by the monarch, and so can be revoked at the pleasure of the government.

Nice try

Re:Alternatively

[Lumpy]

doesn't stop Cellphone thieves.

cellphones, espically the expensive and popular ones already have hacks for the black hats to change the esn and get them de-blacklisted to be resold.

Re:In resoponse to the added security...

[Plutonite]

I don't know if you were kidding about the fingers, but it's already happened for luxury car owners!

Re:Useless

[Retric]

An encrypted filesystem does not help when it's the device and not the data that people want.

Re:Useless

[Yoozer]

I fail to see how these would be bad.

http://www.spritesmods.com/?art=biostick/
Cracked almost as fast as the previous one which got posted here on /.

As usual, the market would determine how much it's worth.

The target audience are all complete laymen who believe in any notion of "secure" with enough PR and handwaving. The market doesn't have a clue and there's no standard.

Re:Why?

[legirons]

"Basically it's to gear-up the public to be accepting to fingerprint scanning as part of everyday life."

And it's a very wide range of methods they're using to force this issue. See for example http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04/30/younger_id _card_voting/ suggesting that ID cards should be a requirement for voting...

For a slightly more scary example, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/29/school_fin gerprints_students/ where children are being taught to "get used to" having their fingerprints taken daily.

Reid is an idiot

[geoff lane]

Security requires at least two parts. These are commonly described as "something you are" and "something you know". The common username/password pair is an example. For fingerprints, the fingerprint is the "username"; it is not the password. The fact the movies and TV commonly show access control systems that only use the fingerprint doesn't mean that such systems are secure in the real world.

In the end, iPods and similar items are not sufficently valuable to bother with extensive access controls. It's doubtful that the UK police could even be bothered to investigate the theft of an iPod.

As for the content, well, that's what backups are for :-)

Re:Crimping resale value

[PygmySurfer]

Apple offers free engraving when you buy iPods from their online store (which I believe is what the grandparent was hinting at).