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High School Student Builds Gun That Unlocks With Your Fingerprint
An anonymous reader writes: Kai Kloepfer is a 17-year-old high school student from Colorado who just won the Smart Tech for Firearms Challenge. Kloepfer designed and built a smart gun that will only unlock and fire for users who supply the proper fingerprints. "The gun works by creating a user ID and locking in the fingerprint of each user allowed to use the gun. The gun will only unlock with the unique fingerprint of those who have already permission to access the gun. ... According to him, all user data is kept right on the gun and nothing is uploaded anywhere else so it would be pretty hard to hack." The gun can have up to 999 authorized users, and its accuracy at detecting fingerprints is 99.99%. For winning the challenge, he won $50,000 in funding to continue developing the smart gun. Some of the fund have already gone toward 3-D printing portions of the prototype.
Just what I need in a firearm. One more area that can fail epically. Also yet another battery to carry and eventually run out of.
Call me crazy but none of my firearms accidentally go off.
<happiness>beer</happiness>
This one will insist on checking your fingerprints first.
As soon as the Police and Military adopt these guns,I'll start considering doing so.
Until then, my old-fashioned guns will have to suffice.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
...the deaths caused by an innocent person not being able to defend him- or herself with such a gun due to no battery of malfunctioning electronics or software? Why is this risk not taken into consideration?
> The gun can have up to 999 authorized users
This really bothers me. What current memory hardware stores stuff in base 10? Just either use a byte or the wordsize of the device and be done with it!
Let us know when the police and armed forces widely adopt a tech that prevents a gun from firing in certain circumstances, till then it's not reliable enough for consumer self defense.
Children build guns
If the finger printer reader is anything like the iPhone 5s+ then I am in trouble. I cannot unlock my iPhone with my right thumb print and have to use my left thumb and that stinks to be me because I am right handed. Guns are pretty safe and have been for a while. Kids who get accidentally killed by the parents' guns have irresponsible parents. If I mishandled a gun while I was growing up I got quite the whipping to be taught a lesson. I guess you cannot whip children without being dragged to jail. Funny how children are out of control today.
There are loads of examples, and even real existing buyable guns.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If you are too incompetent to control the use of your own gun, then you should not have one. Period. Take the money you were going to spend on this smart gun and take a basic gun safety class.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This is certainly not the first time someone came up with this idea, nor the first time an actual implementation was made. This article and the award sounds like a publicity stunt, and it has all the usual elements: young wunderkind, technical gadgetry to solve some social or politically charged issue.
And other posters here are right: the last thing you need is a weapon that fails when you need it most. If you want a weapon that's safe at rest, get a gun safe with a fingerprint scanner so you can get at it quickly when needed. And if you really want a gun that is disabled when it's taken away from you, I'd go with a simple mechanical solution like a pin on a lanyard that will lock the gun when removed. But in reality, if you've pulled out your weapon with intent to use it, you want nothing to stand in the way of a shot being fired when you pull that trigger.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
It could also check your BAC and blood oxygen levels. Even if you are the owner you shouldn't be firing while drunk or high - or unconscious or dead.
This is more useful to cops, military and armed security who have guns issued to them rather than owning them - making sure their weapons don't get to the black market or used by enemies without some technical rework.
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all user data is kept right on the gun and nothing is uploaded anywhere else so it would be pretty hard to hack.
Is this serious? A person would need access to the gun to shoot it, therefore they would already have access to the gun to hack it. The hardest part of a hack is getting physical access.
> High School Student Builds Gun That Unlocks With Your Fingerprint
How did he know my fingerprint?
Also, how long does the fingerprint analysis take? Sometimes you need to fire in a hurry. One second might make the difference between you walking away and the other possibilites mentioned above.
anybody who has had to deal with fingerprint scanners knows how this will turn out.
Was that 99.99% test done on a fire arm that has been used much? I kind of remember one of the big problems with these kinds of devices is that if you practiced regularly with the gun the shock from all those firings tended to break this kind of hardware. (And yes, you're supposed to practice with the actual gun you're going to use to protect yourself with. Picking up a random gun and getting off a perfect only happens in the movies.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Guns must not be simply reliable. They must be infallible. They must work instantly, every time. Otherwise, any gun is useless.
See how fucking idiotic that sounds?
The fingerprint reader in Apple devices is not a photo scanner, stop spreading FUD and go read the complete article about the guys who were able to copy a fingerprint to fool the reader. It took much more than a simple photo, it took something that you might see on mission impossible.
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Forget guns, sell the technology to Samsung.
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You know what else would be an extremely useful tool for home-defense? ED 209. The voice recognition sucks, but the firepower is awesome.
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Is that none of the politicians demanding them, most of whom are big city liberal politicians, are saying "well if we had smart guns, of course we'd let all law-abiding citizens carry in public." It's just a measure intended to further lock down legal gun ownership disguised as a way to keep criminals from using stolen weapons. Even though theoretically smart guns should make it easier for police to account for gun crime, the people pushing this aren't going to let up because their goal isn't even really to balance freedom and security.
Yeah, I just bet it is.
This kid managed to make a rugged, reliable piece of hardware that recognizes many fingerprints, will withstand regular impacts from firing, and managed to make the failure rate only one in ten thousand.
Oh, wait - he made a plastic prototype, and hasn't actually tested it in a firing weapon?
Do tell.
Yes, we only want rich women to be able to not get raped or murdered by the abusive people in their lives.
Good job asshole.
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It is unreliable, only a fool would carry a weapon that has these sorts of "safety" features attached.
When it comes to defending yourself the simpler the better, if you can't control the situation or your weapon don't carry one to start with.
This article is filler.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
... but completely irrelevant when you can just hack the gun itself.
Does little Bobby Tables Jr. keep wasting your ammunition? Did your dog shoot itself while rummaging in the closet?
Then Inteligun is the gun for you!
- "Intelligun. Smart guns for stupid people."
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
You know what else would be an extremely useful tool for home-defense? ED 209.
Yeah, but you'd have to get one for each floor. I hear they don't deal well with stairs.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
to a well regulated militia.
Ahh yes the ol "regulated" argument
you are aware that "well regulated" at the time written simply meant "working weapons" right? I mean all you have to do is think about it logically and you would understand it does not mean regulated as we use the word today.
the second amendment was written as a way to protect us FROM the federal government. As such, why would we need to be regulated by the same people the amendment is supposed to give us the option of protecting ourselves from said federal government?? Its simply not logical on top of the fact that it doesnt mean what you think it means.
most of this problem is the NRA. the NRA targeted the first safe-gun and wiped it from stores everywhere. they spun uncited rhetoric about the unreliabiltiy or the technology and pounded the communism/fascism fear, uncertainty, and doubt into the public that a biometric or safer firearm was simply another cobblestone in the road to hitler/stalin/mao.
No we can blame places likeNJ who have laws on the books that bans all existing weapons as soon as one of these smart guns becomes mainstream. If it were not for laws like that, the NRA would not have to go out of their way to point out the flaws. Im no fan of the NRA as a whole, pulled my membership years ago, but the problem is with the government, not the NRA
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Did it take a laser printer?
'cause that's all the Mythbusters guys needed for pretty much every fingerprint reader they tested (admittedly, before the iPhone 5s came out, so I suppose there could have been some advances since then)
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the army and cops will not use this or any think like it.
In the army you want to have it so any one can use any gun at any time. Also they do not want something that needs batterers and / or can be jammed with EMP's.
it gets better when you realize the fingerprint sensor is in millions of phones and doesn't come close to that reliability. That same sensor can be hacked in minutes too.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Lots of folks need guns badly to defend themselves without going out and looking for trouble.
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technically, the people ARE the militia, therefore no need to distinguish between the 2
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
A gun is a radically different animal. Very few tools are designed to kill people and strike at a distance. A gun is not a tool. A gun is a weapon of war that has been (barely) domesticated.
They're 3D printing bits of the prototype? Given the furore that went down after people claimed that guns could be 3D printed, that's hilarious.
Seem pretty inconvenient. Now I'll have people all over asking me to unlock their guns. The worst will be the emergency runs. "Help! There's a man here whose gun you unlocked. I need you to unlock my gun or he'll kill my family!" *sigh*
Unlocks after an average of about 2.5 swipes. That's fine, for my phone, most of the time, and it would be fine for a weapon, most of the time, which makes it a viable mechanism... none of the time.
Guns must not be simply reliable. They must be infallible. They must work instantly, every time. Otherwise, any gun is useless. See how fucking idiotic that sounds?
It doesn't sound idiotic at all. Yes, the real world means that you will have some measurable failures-to-fire. Also IN THE REAL WORLD, quality ammo in a well-maintained gun simply doesn't fail. You'll see less than one FTF in a thousand, and that one will only happen after a long day at the range with the gun completely fouled. And even then, a tap-rack-bang will usually clear it (as opposed to a dead battery, which would mean a dead you when you have two seconds before a home invader gets from the door to you).
So yes, guns MUST be as close to infallible as possible. We have to accept the constraints of the real world, but adding a functionally unnecessary point of failure amounts to nothing short of suicidal.
1) You pull the gun and pull the trigger, and nothing happens. Dead battery. Your attacker kills you.
2) You get wounded. Your own blood runs onto the sensor. It stops working. So does the gun. Your attacker kills you.
3) You have gloves on. The gun can't see your fingerprint. Your attacker kills you.
4) You take the gloves off, and its so cold you get frostbite and can't pull the trigger. Your attacker kills you.
5) A strong radio field interferes with the electronics in the gun. It won't fire. Your attacker kills you.
6) The gun gets wet, the waterproofing fails on your now 80 year old gun, it doesn't fire. Your attacker kills you.
7) You leave your gun in the car, its temperature reaches 190 degrees. The electronics won't work at 190 degrees. Your attacker kills you.
8) The electronics simply fails for any number of reasons. Your attacker kills you.
9) You're wounded. You throw the gun to your wife / friend / lover to continue the defense. It doesn't recognize their fingerprints. Your attacker kills you, rapes her.
10) The electronics fails. You get it repaired. Now it works sometimes, doesn't sometimes. The tech can't find the problem. Your attacker kills you.
You can to think about that. So it doesn't prevent gun suicides. The fact aside that someone can commit suicide with something else, the person doing it would be an authorized user of the gun. So no help there.
It doesn't prevent gun homicides. Again, these are done by authorized users of the gun, or people who have time to modify the gun. Remember for all the clever electronics, in the end guns are mechanical devices. So ultimately the electronics have to be something that mechanically disables the gun like a standard mechanical safety. A trigger disconnect, a firing pin block, that kind of thing. Ya well those are dead simple to bypass. So no help for stolen guns, the criminals would just remove the safety.
It doesn't prevent accidental shooting by any authorized user of the gun. Since they are authorized, it will fire. So any drunken games, etc, are still just as dangerous as they were before.
Already here we have, by far, most of the shootings that happen.
It may not prevent shooting where a gun is taken away from someone. Depends on how it works. If it has some way of reading the fingerprint when the trigger is depressed, then ok it could work. However if it works like a safety where you disengage it when you grab the gun, it'll still be disengaged if someone takes it away.
It would prevent accidental shootings where an unauthorized user gets their hands on the gun, like a kid coming across it.
Ok well, that doesn't seem very useful to me. The correct answer to the problem of kids is to lock up your guns. That is much more secure, particularly since something like this would only be effective if you didn't authorize you kids to use it, or remembered to remove their authorization when they were done at the range. Having them secured in a safe fixes the problem nicely. Likewise, that provides pretty good protection against theft.
So I really don't see what this will solve, and it will make things more expensive and complicated. It just doesn't strike me as very useful.
Was that 99.99% test done on a fire arm that has been used much?
If you check out the pics in TFA, you'll see that not only didn't they test fire this the hundreds of thousands of times it would take to come up with that claim of accuracy - This "proof of concept" wouldn't ever work in a real gun.
Apparently, this genius 17YO knows so little about the functioning of an actual gun that he simply filled the receiver with electronics (because nothing important goes in all that empty space) and produced what amounts a gun-shaped fingerprint reader. Because, y'know, who needs all those silly little things like springs or hammers or firing pins or magazines to also fit inside a working gun?
Have gnu, will travel.
I am not nor will I ever advocate smart guns.
In answer to your skunk anecdote, how many rounds was your weapon capable of raining down on said skunk. If you had a gun with 12+ rounds ready fly in less than 5 seconds, then I would say you had a weapon of war.
This is either a strong positive or negative depending on which side of the "gun issue" you are on, but I haven't seen much discussion on what the tech could lead to (and its ramifications to each side of the debate). There are many interesting potential ramifications:
We should have the morality to stand on our own, not rely on the authority of others.
I dont think you are aware of the irony of your statement
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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"Buckets seem so innocent -- how can a bucket kill a child? Unfortunately, about 20 children die in the U.S. every year because they drown in buckets."
If you're worried about one penis shot per year, and are willing to put fingerprint sensors on firearms to stop it, what kind of fingerprint sensor are you going to put on buckets, that *kill* 20 times more people?
Ready to regulate buckets, bitch?
Have you ever noticed that on Slashdot there are no good ideas?
The world would save so much time and money if they would just talk to Slashdot before trying to invent things!
I'm all for options, but some states have laws that mandate this type of technology for civilian use as a cynical and unconstitutional way to increase the cost of gun ownership and reduce the selection of guns.
And this is good thing. The second amendment doesn't specify how much it costs to bear the arms. Only that you're allowed to. So yeah don't ban guns, just increase the cost of possessing them so that only those really really really into guns will go for it.
If we are going to do that, pay for your constitutional rights, how about about $1,000 per year to vote?
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there's another one as well, it's ridiculously violent... what the bloody hell was it called...? "Shoot 'Em Up"? Guy defeated the fingerprint lock by amputating some dude's hand.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
What's the point of these statistics? There are thirty to forty-thousand deaths each year caused by cars, and nobody is calling for the abolition of cars. Yet, any time the gun subject comes up, everyone trots out their fave statistics. We have an unfortunate tendency to think we have the right to curtail the rights of others, simply because they may, or may not, harm themselves, whether physically or morally. Even worse, is this idea we can pre-empt crimes by curtailing rights. This is where the debate should be.
We already have laws, in most cases, against harming others, (apparently, it's perfectly legal to destroy the economy for your own gain). What gives us the right to dictate how others should live? The idea of liberalism used to be that we don't have that right. But now, those that call themselves Liberals have adopted from the Right, the idea that we do have the right to coerce others "for their own good," or gods help me, "for the children." Hence anti-gun, anti-soda pop, anti-smoker, anti-fast (and inexpensive) food legislation, etc., etc... How is this different from, say, the Right's blue laws? This is how we end up with travesties like prohibition. I would submit that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights deny us the right to pursue happiness only when we trespass upon the right of our fellows to do the same. Statistics have no bearing on this topic.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
So what's this kid's punishment for doing a gun related school project?
Looking at the article it looks like a 3D printed imitation of an incomplete Sig Saur handgun rather than an actual handgun. Though technically it may still qualify as a firearm receiver under BATFE regulation and violate statutes contained in 18 USC 922 (p). (DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer)
Since guns are pretty simple mechanical machines I'm curious as to what prevents someone from disassembling the gun and yanking out the electronics and whatever locking mechanism.
I was not disagreeing with gun ownership. I just think a gun is a weapon, not a tool. If you call a gun a tool, then what is a sword? An ad-hoc non-elective surgical instrument? Overgrown Cutlery? Guns are not tools. They are weapons. I have no objection to the ownership of weapons...within reason. I just think calling them a tool seems like an attempt to shroud their importance by mingling them with other more benign implements like screwdrivers.
This is exactly like when management tries to get you to use some technology that they know nothing about. It isn't a good idea. Anyone that actually uses a gun knows this.
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That's not really relevant in this context. In order to bypass the iPhone fingerprint lock, they need a clean print, a good photograph of that print, and a bit of time. It is easier to just go and buy a gun than to go through that process, if you've got the time to mess around doing such things.
In contrast, this is useful when someone else has just picked up your gun and you *really* don't want them to be able to fire it.
Depending on the ratio of illegal/inappropriate discharges of firearms vs valid defensive discharges of firearms, it may be that the one-in-ten-thousand failure to fire actually *reduces* murder and assault rates.
That's what happens whenever anyone tries to make progress on smartgun technology.
And this is good thing. The second amendment doesn't specify how much it costs to bear the arms. Only that you're allowed to. So yeah don't ban guns, just increase the cost of possessing them so that only those really really really into guns will go for it.
If we are going to do that, pay for your constitutional rights, how about about $1,000 per year to vote?
I like your ideas and want to subscribe to your newsletter.
Unfortunately, it will cost $100,000,000 per year to practice the free speech of publishing the newsletter, so it may never exist.
People who work in trades that wear down finger prints or damage fingerprints might have a problem with such things. Even fingerprint readers don't work very well if you scrape up your fingertips regularly.
accuracy at detecting fingerprints is 99.9%
Which means what exactly?
Does that mean it correctly recognizes 99.9% of valid fingerprints (with lots of false positives)?
Does it mean it correctly does not recognize 99.9% of invalid fingerprints (with lots of false negatives)?
99.9% accuracy with fingerprint recognition technology is an extraordinary claim.
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Judge Dredd had one of these! Sooner or later all Mega City tech will be real.
Not sure I'd want this on my own weapon but I could see it being useful for giving / selling firearms to possibly temporary allies that we arm to deal with today's enemy that might become tomorrow's enemy (or just leave the stuff laying around for today's enemy to use).
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Only in the USofA is gun ownership specifically guaranteed because it is in our charter that the people need to be able to overthrow their government. All the rest of this discussion is just chaff.
The statistics presented are part of the PRICE of that guarantee, and it is a fair use to use those statistics to ask if that protection (against the government) is worth the price, and given the way governments tend to evolve, one can ask if the USofA is really immune to the sort of evolution the Constitution was trying to protect against. And it is fair to ask whether the guns we are allowed to own are capable of protecting us against drones, black helicopters and the NSA.
But I must say that if I were confronted with a government that suddenly decided that atheists were amoral gits who deserved beheading (to mix metaphors), then at least I would be able to take one or two with me.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
Cue the guy who thinks a ban on all guns in workable, and in the next comment rages against the war on drugs and how it's been an abject failure.
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