Slashdot Mirror
Iris Scans Are the New School IDs
An anonymous reader writes "Winthrop University in South Carolina is testing out iris scanning technology during freshman orientation this summer. Students had their eyes scanned as they received their ID cards in June. 'Iris scanning has a very high level of accuracy, and you don't have to touch anything, said James Hammond, head of Winthrop University's Information Technology department. 'It can be hands free security.'" I wouldn't want to be locked out a building because of a scratched lens or a system outage, though.
from being locked out due to a broken/lost/defective key/card/etc in any other building access system...?????
I wouldn't want to be blocked out a building because of a scratched lens or a system outage, though.
Yeah, use badge readers instead. Those never have system outages.
Privacy issues aside...
A bit of sand paper or a scribe the system is down until it's replaced. Rinse and repeat till the school is broke.
Since it's all about the money (school is paid per seat filled) it don't see it taking very long till this big brother system is gone.
Is a scratched lens a common occurrence?
The reader will beep if they're on the right bus and honk if they're on the wrong one.
Or you could teach them to read the numbers on the side of the bus, but that's just my zany, wacky idea. Or are the kids too stupid to get on the exact same numbered bus day after day?
Not to have kids.
We are conditioning them to live in a police state.
to pay attention to school board and municipal elections.
I feel bad for the kid who gets locked out because he's too short for the scanner to see him.
My eyes are very sensitive to bright light. Every year, when I get my eyes examined, I have to have them dilated so that the inside of the eye can be properly examined. This procedure is so painful that the ophthalmologist has to hold my eyelid open because no matter how hard I try I can't keep it open otherwise. I've offered to do i, but she always prefers to take care of it herself. And, from what she's said, this isn't exactly uncommon. I can just imagine what's going to happen the first time a student finds out that they can't keep their eye open long enough for the scan and can't get into class without it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Just watch the pink eye spread like wildfire
I'd prefer it over fingerprint scanners as it is much less usable for mass surveillance. You don't leave it all over the place like DNA or finger prints and at least for the moment the technology doesn't exist for setting up mass scanners for public areas (think "Minority Report"). That said it has the same deficiency as all biometric systems, if your "password" gets stolen you can't change it. And don't think that "you can't fake iris scans", they have said that about every biometric security system invented and within 5 years after it becomes widely used someone is parading around a method of beating it, sometimes in hilariously easy ways.
So when someone steals credentials, how do you change your "password"?
Biometrics are good for surveillance but not for authentication. A good authentication method supports revocation of an identification key, such as would be needed in the event of its compromise. It should not be trusted as a factor in authentication either, for the same reason. Great for theater though I suppose. Article about it here growingliberty.com/thumbs-down-for-fingerprint-identification
About 20 minutes in some whackjob will rip out my eye and feed it to the scanner. Much rather have my card stolen thank U very much...
We covered a story just like this one two months ago.
What exactly is the security issue that's significant enough to warrant such extreme and invasive measures? Is it such a prestigious institution that there are hoards of non-registered kids trying to sneak in? Is there a problem with rampant crime or extremely bad behaviour? What possible real reason could they have, other than, "hey, we got funding for this fancy new tech!" or conditioning them to the future of a police state?
43 comments and not a single reference to Minority Report? Is this Slashdot? Nor is it just a silly geek reference.
Wisconsin 7-year-old loses 2 toes to frostbite when the iris scanner wouldn't let her in the door. School officials say the inside surface of the lens was frosted over, preventing the scanner from functioning correctly.
We train our kids for more than a decade in a school system that is the opposite of the kind of society we want: it's a draconian, nearly totalitarian system that promotes belief in centralized authority and subjugation to expert opinion. And now, in addition to that, it trains kids to accept intrusive around the clock tracking and biometric identification. This does not bode well for the next generations of Americans.
I have to say this is the first time I heard about this Winthrop University. Random small universities always seem to have more money than those more prestigious ones. Well at least they seem to have more money on this kind of random programs.
What are the procedures when the information that the iris scanner has recorded is no longer valid? The human iris is not a static unchanging feature of the body. Obviously it changes with the intensity of the light it experiences, but it also changes as a result of the fact that it's moving, and the components of the iris do break down over time. This is going to chang ethe pattern of lines in the iris. This may not be significant for a 4 year degree (does anyone really get a 4 year degree in 4 years anymore?) but if you ad in graduate and postgraduate work, as well as separate degree tracks if those become necessary for some reason, you can easily spend 12-16 years in college, which is a reasonable period of time over which your iris may change.
Additionally, if the iris scan for ID is required of instructors, administrative personel and custodial service staff, it's practically guaranteed that you will encounter these changes over time. Unless the scanners are designed to tollerate, and over time adjust for, such changes, the system is likely to run into issues over the tenure period of a professor, the career of staff, or that doctoral candidate who suddenly can't enter the building the day he needs to appear before his examiners to defend his thesis.
You never know...
Bear in mind these new scanners are using UV or blue LEDs with a phosphor on them to produce a 'full spectrum' of light. These LED bases are well known to produce blue/Near-UV radiation that triggers or aggravates macular degeneration.
So enjoy your children going blind before they ever graduate. The levels will go up in tune with the increased implementation of these scanners.
Signed,
Your local LED product manufacturer
P.S. What're you going to do? Not a goddamned thing, you cowards. We already own you and your government.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I've been voting against the incumbent since I've been allowed to vote. How should I step up my opposing?
And then the access control system fails when the mechanism that moves the nozzle to eye height fails.
I visited one of my post-secondary schools and noticed two things: considerably less books in the libraries and wayyyy more security guards roaming the hallways giving hard stares and ready to start trouble. DRM computers in the classrooms and DRM programs as part of the mandatory curriculum. The professors and program coordinators seem to have no clue as to what is going on and why it is bad for both the students and the future. In the time I left school things clearly took a turn for the worse in education.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
What sorts of public campaigns have you witnessed for school boards where these sorts of asinine discussions are raised? This would be injected into the meeting agenda as a minor item lumped with a bunch of others which would have all been approved with a single quick vote so they could move on to much more important topics such as wasting money on some frivolous sporting event or booster club meeting.
These sorts of discussions only come up during campaigns AFTER they've been put into place and one person in the community stands up to say WTF and is ignored at meeting after meeting by the administration who put it into place with the consent of the morons on the school board and then runs solely on the platform of removing this one item.
After they spend $1500 running, get on the board and abolish the decision, something else comes up which is possibly worse and they are powerless and clueless to stop it.
This is the problem with all local level government bodies (city, county, etc). People run on a single stupid platform, are elected, and stay there forever or are booted out because someone else has another single stupid platform of the day.
Most everyone else just shrugs, says ok, and their kids get scanned.
(As an aside, my kid is NEVER, EVER, EVER, EVER getting their fucking eyes or fingerprints or any other biometric data scanned for school -- fuck that noise).
How will they absolutely guarantee that the optical scanner won't apply too much photonic energy to my retina? How will they ensure that as the scanner fails over time, that it won't lead to these kind of defects? Considering that schools cut budgets often, how is this not a real concern? Better to attend another university instead rather than to risk reduced vision in old age!
I haven't seen anyone yet comment about stolen or sold iris scans. It's not like you can get a new iris. If the companies/institutions get sloppy or unethical what then?
celle
cap- quagmire
Another good article that makes the same point by Bruce Schneier himself. Biometrics: uses and abuses.
Some Large Lecture Classes are next to useless to be at each Lecture and the last thing needed is forcing people to go all of them.
1. remove all surveillance and tardy punishments. They aren't needed.
2. the kid doesn't have to be in class everyday as long as he passes his tests and hands in his projects on time. if his grades suck, he fails the course and has to retake it.
3. repeat offenders are dealt with according to their situations.
This saves buttloads of money because the kids who want to learn or at least graduate will do so, the teachers wont' have to waste time with those who don't want to be there, and when those people do finally drop out, they will flip burgers instead of filling university seats because they can play football. Maybe the NFL can set up recruitment camps for them.
You know what's valuable now?
The best kind of fake ID -- someone's eyeball, removed.
"It's him, we've got the iris scan... it does look a little dead... oh well, ring him in just in case."
Futurist Traditionalism
Surprised no one has cited this great eyeball scene from the movie Demolition Man:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbM--4-z0cs
is the biggest piece of crap I have ever encountered. If you have a lazy eye and are tired, that scanner won't be worth shit. It probably also won't work if you are coming down with something. The iris tends to change over time. Ignoring how stupid and fascist it is, iris scans have been shown to be horribly inaccurate. I use the fingerprint reader to enter the US but I never bother trying the iris scanner to enter Canada anymore and just use the regular customs line. I've had an operation to correct my eye turn a bit but if I am tired, I am going to have trouble co-ordinating my eye positions.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
So if the server at the back-end performing password authentication is compromised, you ask everyone to change their password.
What do you do when the server at the back-end is performing biometric authentication?
Biometrics is the dumbest authentication scheme on the face of the planet and anyone who relies on it is a moron.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Two words..Spray paint.
Why is everyone discussion the actual method, and not mentioning why the hell any sort of security system is needed in the first place?
Ok, maybe i'm going to sound like an old fart here, but when i was a kid school doors were only locked overnight. Otherwise it was open access. Not sure how it is in the UK these days, maybe they are also becoming scaredy cats like the 'muricans. I'm now in Russia and our kids' nursery didn't lock the doors either, they go to private school now, and while the door isn't locked we do have a security guard at the entrance, but i'm pretty sure that is more to stop people coming in and nicking stuff rather than protection of/from the children.
Why do i think this is only about control and security theatre? Making sure he kids actually attend? Hell, when i was at school it was normal to occasionally skive off school but the class register would show your absence anyway. If kids are not attending then its time to have a word with the parents.
So umm, wouldn't revoking authentication be as simple as banning eye #1234 from the scanner?
This is a school, not a top secret research lab. The chance of a student being killed and his eye pulled out of its socket in order to get through a locked door is minimal. It would usually only work once, too, after which the eye would decay too much to be used in the scanner anyway, which serves as a built-in revoke.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Biometrics is only useful when you have a guard who physically checks if you are not faking the system.
For biometrics he will need to check for scar tissue in the eye and contact lenses. Then he will need to personally guide the subject's head to the iris scanner, to make sure the subject doens't use sleight of hand or anything, best to put cuffs on the subject first.
He also needs to make sure the scanner has not been tampered with each time.
The scanner should then show the guard the photo of the subject for a second visual check, and if the person is allowed to pass. The door should not open unless both the scanner and the guard agree. The guard should have guards for protection.
All biometrics are easily faked, therefor a guard should always make sure it isn't. A standalone biometrics is completely useless from a security point of view.
is the biggest piece of crap I have ever encountered. If you have a lazy eye and are tired, that scanner won't be worth shit. It probably also won't work if you are coming down with something. The iris tends to change over time. Ignoring how stupid and fascist it is, iris scans have been shown to be horribly inaccurate. I use the fingerprint reader to enter the US but I never bother trying the iris scanner to enter Canada anymore and just use the regular customs line.
I've had an operation to correct my eye turn a bit but if I am tired, I am going to have trouble co-ordinating my eye positions.
I often use iris at heathrow, it has never fail to recognise me on the first attempt, I've used it about 50 times over the last 3 years.
Having larger brains than cows, their acclimation to our invisible fences and behavior modifiers had to be more gradual and less painful, but every bit as effective.
Using Body Parts is a BAD Idea.
Think about it. If someone else wanted to pretend to be a different person and gain access, either
* kidnap a hole person
* pop out an eyeball and take it.
Seems like a terrible thing in either mode. People that use body parts for access control as just idiots.
I'd much rather they steal a key-card than steal an eye. There are very few places that I'd be willing to lose an eye to protect and I've never worked anywere worth that.
I wonder how many of these systems have a "master lock" pattern to do servicing and such
all it would take is a kid wearing contacts with this to do some very fun damage.
"Okay Bobbi after you get inside run to the west hall service office and then type %this string% into the computer"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
What about the blind people that have no retinas? What will they do? So other forms of identification will still have to be used anyway. I'm not kidding either. I have worked with the blind.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Can't wait until the first time someone looks into a scanner and is blinded by an intentionally amped-up light. Easy hack, no? I do not, ever, wish to put my eye against a mystery light source in a box. You see, I believe that people, even white rich people, can spawn evil assholes.
We'll give up every freedom we have for "security", yet we'll put our eyes into a laser/light on demand.
Now say someone learns to fake the data..... "I'm sorry, your eye has been compromised, let me issue you a new one"?
So what happens when someone learns to fake someone else's eye? Unlike a card-based system, issuing a new one is a bit more difficult....
Every system will be cracked at some point. Lets not put ones in that become completely useless when they're compromised.
The chance of a student being killed and his eye pulled out of its socket in order to get through a locked door is minimal.
Ok, so it's less frequent but there's still a chance - even schools hold things of value to criminals. Since we're playing numbers, how many senselessly blinded children (who never agreed to this) would be worth the benefit of a cardless ID system?
So now we can replace a cornea, a lens and much more in the eye - good thing, because all we need to do know is transplant the entire eye successfully after freezing it, and then tinker with the new ball - so John is really Susie WHY? do we need to go do an iris scan in order to get an ID on a college campus???? DNA, retina, fingerprint - and other types of measures make sense, depending on what you have access to. We're not talking nuclear devices, NSA snoop cam or the lowest level Bio-virus lab for the CDC - we're talking a college ID here folks!!!
The problem with the higher level education is that is the most expensive EVER in our countries history. Badges and ID's should be FREE and simply to do (which they are BTW) This is yet another effort to "curb costs" for someone's shiny spreadsheet, without giving one moment of time to the consideration of why they need iris detection systems... Prisons...yes Nuclear launch sites... yes Tomahawk Black Ops/Navy Seal operators... yes College students - no
Say someone found a way to fake out the scanner (not a long shot fingerprint scaners can be faked out, auto-visual identifiers were faked out by printed out pictures, etc.), you could impersonate a student then. Now, consider that you are the admin, how do you separate the faker from the legitimate student. You still have to allow the student access, but you must keep the faker out. This is why biometrics suck for authentication, because you cannot issue a new authentication token (revocation is, as you said, still simple).
When you can't lend a guest your ID card to run down to x and grab y, or run back to your room to grab z, all it does is encourage door propping. My college allowed access to neighboring residence halls during daytime hours precisely because of this (if access is granted legitimately less people will bother propping doors). Trying things like door alarms when they're held open too long simply results in more creative and difficult to fix door props (like crazy-gluing cardboard over the door latch, or welding a penny over it).
I once worked with someone in an ID card center who would almost never deny anyone card access to additional buildings. The reason? They're going to find a way into the building anyway, and if it was via a card it will at least be logged (and even if it was a borrowed card, it at least points to a person as a starting point if an investigation is needed).
As was alluded to in the OP's username, This seems to be a clear case of shifting baselines. Or mission creep. Your choice. Either way, it seems that it allows the indoctrination and acceptance of this type of personal space violation. And if this sounds mildly conspiracy theory, I agree. But remember, Just because you may be paranoid, it doesn't mean you are wrong.
You make it sound like a student is going to be frustrated at being blocked out. It's a built in excuse for being late to school.
because of these problems
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
"Stare-Into-Laser-With-Remaining-Eye" Department?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"