From: Mike McNally <m5@vail.tivoli.com>
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 1996 02:16:53 +0800
To: jamesd@echeque.com
Subject: Re: (Fwd) British Study Claims That Photo Credit Cards Don't   Work
In-Reply-To: <199604090654.XAA16860@dns2.noc.best.net>
Message-ID: <316A5EB3.29AF@vail.tivoli.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


jamesd@echeque.com wrote:
> > If I don't shave over the
> > weekend will my computer know who I am Monday morning?
> 
> Shaving probably will not be a problem, but holding your head at a slightly
> different angle, or having slightly different lighting, or combing your
> hair differently will screw up the system totally, unless the system has
> radically improved since the last time  I read up on it.

There are supposedly some new techniques that look at the infrared 
signature of your face (like, I guess, distribution & position of 
hot & cold spots), and that's less likely to be fooled by facial 
hair and other superficial disguises.  It's probably a fairly simple
technology, and could be applied to the credit card ID problem.

Note that the mag strip encoding, which is clearly not very secure, 
could be replaced by one of the newer optical coding systems.  Those
would probably be somewhat harder to fake (you'd need to manufacture
cards, and probably couldn't simple "re-record" over a stolen one.)

An interesting question, to me, is what is the actual pattern of criminal
activity involving stolen/fake credit cards?  Is it a matter of huge
criminal syndicates creating fake cards, or is it mostly crimes of
opportunity where stolen cards are boldly presented by the thief (or
by someone the thief sold the card to)?

______c_____________________________________________________________________
Mike M Nally * Tiv^H^H^H IBM * Austin TX    * pain is inevitable  
       m5@tivoli.com * m101@io.com          *
      <URL:http://www.io.com/~m101>         * suffering is optional