January 19, 2018

Gizmodo: The Very Good Reason Why You Can’t Get That Google Art-Selfie Feature in Illinois or Texas

Gizmodo: The Very Good Reason Why You Can’t Get That Google Art-Selfie Feature in Illinois or Texas. “…regardless of what Google is doing with the face photos, some people are prevented from participating in the digital Dorian Grey exercise. The app feature isn’t available in every US state, and that’s probably because of policies that are meant to protect their residents from handing over personal data for the sake of amusement and convenience. As Chicago Tribune and Houston Chronicle have pointed out, both Illinois and Texas have laws that block the collection of biometrics—like finger, retina, and face scans—for unclear purposes.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
January 17, 2018

Newsweek: How Google’s Viral Selfie App Matches You To A Famous Painting—and Why It’s Raising Privacy Concerns

Newsweek: How Google’s Viral Selfie App Matches You To A Famous Painting—and Why It’s Raising Privacy Concerns. “Facial recognition software has its pitfalls—serious ones like racial representation as well as other hilarious ones—but it’s becoming an ever-larger part of the social media landscape. Facebook recently raised similar concerns when it helpfully offered to locate photos of users that they hadn’t been tagged in, according to Slate. Instructions on the Google app include an assurance that it ‘will only store your photo for the time it takes to search for matches.’ Still, the app’s light-hearted nature notwithstanding, it’s begun to raise concerns about how exactly this sudden wealth of biometric facial recognition data might end up being repurposed. “

Security & Legal Issues 0
January 7, 2018

Naked Security: Microsoft could soon be “password free”

Naked Security: Microsoft could soon be “password free”. “As each New Year rolls by, someone somewhere usually predicts the death of passwords as a trend for the coming months. Every year so far, they’ve been proved wrong – somehow passwords cling on despite an exhausting list of maladies, mostly to do with how easy they are to forget, steal and misuse. The moral would seem to be never to listen to predictions about passwords. However, post-Christmas comments by Microsoft chief information security officer Bret Arsenault offer a small but tantalising sign that the password age might finally be nearing its end.” I’ll take passwords paired with 2FA over biometric security any day – at least at the moment.

Security & Legal Issues 0
December 28, 2017

Engadget: LastPass fixes fingerprint security flaw in its Authenticator app

Engadget: LastPass fixes fingerprint security flaw in its Authenticator app. “Password manager LastPass has an extra layer of protection for its Authenticator app, in the form of a fingerprint and/or PIN that ostensibly keeps people out of your passwords if they find your phone unlocked. Last week, a developer posted that he’d been able to bypass this security feature on the Android version of the app. As of right now, though, LastPass users can download an update to the app that fixes the issue and adds a one-time code when the fingerprint/PIN feature is first enabled.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
October 24, 2017

China Is Creating a Database of Its Citizens’ Voices to Boost its Surveillance Capability: Report (TIME)

TIME: China Is Creating a Database of Its Citizens’ Voices to Boost its Surveillance Capability: Report. “The Chinese government has collected tens of thousands of ‘voice pattern’ samples from targeted citizens and is inputting them into a national voice biometric database, according to a Human Rights Watch report published Monday. The idea is that an automated system, thought to still be in development, will use the database to pick out individual voices in telephone and other conversations, boosting the government’s already expansive surveillance capabilities.”

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
August 4, 2017

The Stack: New tool allows smartphone camera to record fingerprints

A little outside my remit, but cool: New tool allows smartphone camera to record fingerprints. “A new prototype biometric tool, designed by researchers in India, enables a smartphone camera to act as a fingerprint scanner. Saksham Gupta, Sukhan Anand and Atul Rai from Department of Computer Science at Delhi Technological University used an Android smartphone to extract fingerprints from close-up shots of a finger. The researchers used a 16MP camera with a 1920×1080 resolution to get the results.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
May 4, 2017

Gizmodo: 130 Million at Risk of Fraud After Massive Leak of Indian Biometric System Data

Gizmodo: 130 Million at Risk of Fraud After Massive Leak of Indian Biometric System Data. “A series of potentially calamitous leaks in India leave as many as 130 million people at risk of fraud or worse after caches of biometric and other personal data became accessible online. That’s according to a new report from the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), which details breaches at four national- and state-run databases, all of which are said to contain purportedly ‘uniquely-identifying’ Aadhaar numbers.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
April 19, 2017

TechSpot: Passengers leaving the US will have to pass facial recognition scanners at all international airports in the future

TechSpot: Passengers leaving the US will have to pass facial recognition scanners at all international airports in the future. “Visa holders looking to board international flights out of the US will soon be required to pass a facial recognition test at all US international airports, The Verge reports. Facial recognition systems at airports have been around since 2015 in a handful of airports around the globe. As part of his first 100-day agenda, Donald Trump has expedited a system that will track every outgoing passenger from the US. The system is currently being tested on a flight from Atlanta to Tokyo with wider adoption to come in the summer.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
August 19, 2016

Beating Facial Recognition Systems with Facebook Photos

Shocked not shocked: beating facial recognition logins with Facebook photos. “Earlier this month at the Usenix security conference, security and computer vision specialists from the University of North Carolina presented a system that uses digital 3-D facial models based on publicly available photos and displayed with mobile virtual reality technology to defeat facial recognition systems. A VR-style face, rendered in three dimensions, gives the motion and depth cues that a security system is generally checking for. The researchers used a VR system shown on a smartphone’s screen for its accessibility and portability.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
July 21, 2016

Police Will Try to Unlock Dead Man’s Phone With 3D-Printed Fingers

Investigating a murder case? Can’t unlock the victim’s phone? Well, hey, maybe you can just 3D print his fingers. “[Anil] Jain and his PhD student Sunpreet Arora couldn’t share details of the case with me, since it’s an ongoing investigation, but the gist is this: a man was murdered, and the police think there might be clues to who murdered him stored in his phone. But they can’t get access to the phone without his fingerprint or passcode. So instead of asking the company that made the phone to grant them access, they’re going another route: having the Jain lab create a 3D printed replica of the victim’s fingers. With them, they hope to unlock the phone.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
May 8, 2016

Lawsuit Against Facebook Over Biometric Data Will Go Forward

The lawsuit against Facebook over biometric data will go forward. “Facebook Inc (FB.O) lost the first round in a court fight against some of its users who sued the social networking company, alleging it ‘unlawfully’ collected and stored users’ biometric data derived from their faces in photographs. The judge presiding over the case in a California federal court on Thursday turned down Facebook’s motion seeking dismissal of the suit.”

Security & Legal Issues 0
November 22, 2015

New Contest Crowdsources the Fight Against Cancer

Interested in crowdsourcing? Interested in fighting cancer? Here ya go. “The Challenge tackles three key questions about the sub-clonality of cancer: how many subclones are within any given tumour, how did these subclones grow and evolve, and which genetic mutations are present in each subclones? Using a method to simulate DNA sequencing data that closely mimics data from real human tumours, which was initially developed as part of a previous DREAM challenge, the team has created a set of 50 tumours with distinctive life-histories and evolutions. Contestants will create tools in the cloud using Google Compute Engine that will be run in Galaxy, a widely-used open-source platform for performing biomedical research. Contestants will also use Docker images to setup the environment for their tool to run in, allowing the tools to easily be ported to other systems. Further, the use of Docker images and the tools’ compatibility with Galaxy ensures […]

Around the Search & Social Media World 0
August 10, 2015

HTC Stored Fingerprint Images in Unencrypted Image File

Is there anything worse to store in plain text than passwords? Like, say fingerprint images? “Researchers from FireEye have found that data that could be used to clone a user’s fingerprint was stored as an unencrypted “world readable” image file on HTC smartphones. Four security researchers discovered that the image file, which is clear replica of a user’s fingerprint, could be stolen by rogue apps or hackers.”

Security & Legal Issues 0

The ResearchBuzz Firehose is regular RB content presented as individual posts.
For digest-type posts a couple of times a day, please visit ResearchBuzz.

Want to know how to best use the Firehose for content discovery?
Check out this handy article.

Get RB Firehose Via EMail

Enter your email address to subscribe to ResearchBuzz Firehose and get a firehose of new posts straight to your email.

Join 2,017 other subscribers

Recent Posts

Popular Posts

Latest ResearchBuzz Gizmos

Vibe-Check Current Events by Category: NewsDrizzle
Explore Bing, Bing News, and WordPress Searches as Word Clouds: CloudSERP Explorer
Find TV Stations By City/State and Google Search Them: Marion’s Monocle v2
Software VerSearch
Find Lifespan Overlap With Chronos Crossfinder

Brought to you by Calishat.