Monday, March 03, 2008

Face (note) book

"From today, your face is your password" - so reads part of the ad for Lenovo's new IdeaPad Y510 notebook computer which is "introducing a revolutionary idea" - "face recognition security". Fingerprint security has been around a while ... I use it on one of my computers - which is how I know that with fingerprint security, you have to scan two fingerprints into the system. It would be interesting to know how the face recognition component works ... because it seems unlikely that you will have to rub your face over a scanner or that anyone has two (real) faces! In the interest of politeness, I'm not even going to speculate on what would happen if someone wanted to gain access at some place where you were not - we've all seen the movies (and heard about it happening in real life) where the necessary appendage for access is removed from its rightful owner, stored on ice, and then used to "break in". We know the medicos can now do successful face transplants (yes, I know it doesn't make the user look like the donor).
My interest is sufficiently piqued to find out more about this "face recognition" stuff because I know I could certainly use some of it - but in real life, not on my computer!

2 comments:

Deb said...

Hi Kaz
the technology you are talking about here is a photo of both of your profiles (left and right) scanned into the computer. when you log on there is a laser scanner in the computer that scans both profiles and if you match you get to sign on. Stealing the skin off a face wont get you access as the profile would change.
Interestingly decapitation would be futile as well as the face would be too relaxed (or not depending on the cause of death) and wouldn't match the stored scanned image.
I'm not sure if a plaster cast of your profiles would work and what happens when you get old and your skin saggs or you put on or lose lots of weight.
Fraught with failure I reckon.

Deb said...

and spelling mistakes