So how good is biometric protection really? In a recent TV series, I watched as the good guys artificially massaged the bad guy's heart to activate the biometric-fingerprint system on his phone. Many modern biometric systems require some evidence of life to work, so the old system of just severing a finger is no longer reliable.
The most commonly available biometric systems are in the later generation of mobile phones, including fingerprint scanning as well as iris and face recognition. As reported previously, these systems have not been all that safe. Take the researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, for example. They have had success by removing the faces from photographs and replacing them with computer painted replicas.
Then there were the people at Bkav in Vietnam who made a printed mask for US$150 (4,900 baht) that worked reasonably well but took a bit of manipulating. Since then, they have swapped to one made from a stone powder that looks closer to real human skin. Adding 2D printed eyes was enough to easily unlock the latest Apple X device, on the highest security setting. This latest technique was easy to create, making it dangerous for even the causal phone user, let alone high-level personalities.
While biosecurity can provide a level of security like many other security systems, it can be defeated -- especially, it seems, for locked phones. Do not rely on only one method of protection if you have anything sensitive to keep safe.
Some people support the concept of build-it-and-they-will-come, and this is sometimes applied to IT. Take for example the Australian government's A$1.7 billion (42 billion baht) My Health Record system. There was an initial public uptake, but registrations have declined dramatically in the past month. There are fewer than 300 specialists connected to the system, and only around 2,000 documents were uploaded by users in September for more than 5 million registrations. Of all the patient records entered by general practitioners, only 200 were looked at by hospital staff in August. All in all, this is an expensive system that is not being used, and a great example of the principle not working. In general, it's better if governments stay away from IT systems, as they tend to be more expensive and rarely fit for purpose. Compare this to, say, Facebook, where it was built, and people came in droves.
On the other side of the equation are small business that write systems companies do use, but support is lacking. The danger of buying products from a small business are many. Sometimes it all works out. Other times, there is no documentation, the people who know how to fix things leave, and you could end up with data-dictionary documents dated 2008 for the latest update, as I recently discovered.
Facebook now has software that examines material on its social network to identify and offer help to people who sound potentially suicidal. How it works, by invisibly watching and assessing the mental state of over a billion users, then alerting human handlers, is being kept top secret, but supposedly uses "pattern recognition" and "artificial intelligence". If the algorithms decide you may be suicidal, a dialogue box will appear recommending mental-health helplines or someone to talk to and helping you work through your problems. No, I'm not making this up.
The technology will not be employed in Europe, due to the EU's new privacy laws. A well-known news site asked Facebook six reasonable questions they would not answer, like how the system works, how it's trained, how representative the data is, and how the results have been so far? There are well-trained humans who will help those in need across the globe. It's better if you give them a call instead of responding to some secret Facebook system.
If you are an Apple macOS High Sierra user, then you will want to apply the latest security patch if you haven't already. If not, there are people who will be able to log into your Mac as an administrator, without a password, and gain root access. Apple has apologised for the issue. Some Apple users still can't believe there was a problem with anything Apple.
On the subject of Apple, the latest Apple X continues to be unimpressive. I know one person who bought it and soon afterwards bought a Samsung S8 to use instead. Some will love it, but for the price I just don't get it.
Toshiba has expanded its video-storage hard-drive range to include a 10TB model with a 6GB/s Sata interface, a million-hour mean time between failures and spin rate at 7,200rpm. It's a fair amount of video storage -- 10TB -- for those looking for this kind of thing.
Google has quietly updated their Wear software for watches, to version 2.6. There is nothing impressive, mostly updates and fixes of some annoyances. Apple's device is already up to version 4 of their OS, with about 20 million units moved, compared to about half that for Google.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
