This week’s WSJ.com/AWSJ column (subscription only, I’m afraid) is about biometric fingerprint readers. Microsoft’s new offering seems to have reinjected some vigour into an otherwise obscure corner of the market. As I say in the column, I’m not convinced that fingerprint scanners are the way to go, not least because of tested methods of fooling … Read more
Something I’ve noticed about biometric fingerprint readers. They don’t work well after a bath. Why is that? Are our fingers different after a bath? I mean, they look different — all wrinkly, for one thing — but why does that mess up the fingerprint reader? I do my best thinking in the bath, and it’s … Read more
Maybe I’m getting too wary, but when I received a press release from something called the Internet Security Foundation, I wasn’t convinced. And I’m still not. The email was provocative enough: The headline ran “Microsoft’s Policy Leaves Millions Open to Identity Theft; Internet Security Foundation Releases Free Protection Tool”. An explanation followed that users were … Read more
Singapore has netted a trojan phisher, the Straits Times reports. A Vietnamese computer engineering student at the National University of Singapore, Nguyen Van Phi Hung, has been charged under the Computer Misuse Act for tagging a keylogger onto an email invitation to fellow students to play an online game called ‘Bubble’. He then captured passwords … Read more
An interesting essay by security guru Bruce Schneier (via the brianstorms weblog) on the economics of fixing an election. Put simply: How much is it worth a party to fix an election, and so how much would they be willing to spend on doing it? Put another way, how much should the folk designing an … Read more