Please Have Your Brain Ready For Scanning
"Spit-locks" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/89817-Can-You-Protect-Your-Computer-With-Spit] are still some way off, but European researchers are testing other types of "body-locks."
The recent increase in terrorist activity has warranted new research to be done in finding out a 100% accurate analysis, that is also socially acceptable. An EU-funded inquiry has pushed money into conducting experiments to test the idea of heart rhythms or brain patterns as codes to determine your identity, but sometimes it can be a lot simpler to go for the less obvious determinations.
One of these projects uncovered by the inquiry is the "Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behavioral Analysis" or Humabio [http://www.humabio-eu.org/].
This consists of a special seat, fitted inside a truck, which records the driver's posture so that identification can be made that way. It's not hard to envision an engine lock that could only work if you sat in the same way as the designated driver.
In England, the Home Office is pushing facial recognition technology out to major airports, while the Foreign Office is looking to spend £15 million ($23 million) on biometric recognition checking faces, fingerprints, veins and eyes.
Anyone coming into (or out of) Manchester/Stanstead with a new passport has likely already been facially scanned. Laptops and mobiles are also increasingly having biometric locks added to them to check fingerprints before they allow access into any sensitive data.
The US, on the other hand, is shying away from "contact-type" biometrics, looking more at projects that "significantly advance the intelligence community's ability to achieve high-confidence match performance ... [for] high fidelity biometric signatures".
Source: The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/10/biometric-scanning-brain-security-checks]
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"Spit-locks" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/89817-Can-You-Protect-Your-Computer-With-Spit] are still some way off, but European researchers are testing other types of "body-locks."
The recent increase in terrorist activity has warranted new research to be done in finding out a 100% accurate analysis, that is also socially acceptable. An EU-funded inquiry has pushed money into conducting experiments to test the idea of heart rhythms or brain patterns as codes to determine your identity, but sometimes it can be a lot simpler to go for the less obvious determinations.
One of these projects uncovered by the inquiry is the "Human Monitoring and Authentication using Biodynamic Indicators and Behavioral Analysis" or Humabio [http://www.humabio-eu.org/].
This consists of a special seat, fitted inside a truck, which records the driver's posture so that identification can be made that way. It's not hard to envision an engine lock that could only work if you sat in the same way as the designated driver.
In England, the Home Office is pushing facial recognition technology out to major airports, while the Foreign Office is looking to spend £15 million ($23 million) on biometric recognition checking faces, fingerprints, veins and eyes.
Anyone coming into (or out of) Manchester/Stanstead with a new passport has likely already been facially scanned. Laptops and mobiles are also increasingly having biometric locks added to them to check fingerprints before they allow access into any sensitive data.
The US, on the other hand, is shying away from "contact-type" biometrics, looking more at projects that "significantly advance the intelligence community's ability to achieve high-confidence match performance ... [for] high fidelity biometric signatures".
Source: The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/10/biometric-scanning-brain-security-checks]
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