
Fingerprints could be stolen from V sign selfies (2017) - montalbano
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2017/01/fingerprints-could-be-stolen-from-v-sign-selfies/
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dhmiller
I've said it many times before. Biometrics should be used as usernames and not
as passwords. You should be able to change a password.

~~~
travisjungroth
You could use a gut biome sample for a password. It changes slowly over time,
so you’ve got rolling built in. And you can do a reset with antibiotics.

~~~
DerpyBaby123
Is this sarcasm?

I have accounts I haven't logged into for years, but still need access to.
Losing access over time is not a good feature. And a 'reset' with antibiotics
doesn't make sense for a bunch of reasons.

Also, password diversity is a good thing. I don't want $COMPANY_A's data
breach to expose my password to $COMPANY_B

~~~
travisjungroth
> Is this sarcasm?

Yes

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blaincate
Hitchhikers guide to galaxy : (I remembered something along this lines)

[https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92738/what-is-
the-...](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/92738/what-is-the-name-of-
the-id-card-in-mostly-harmless)

    
    
        [Ford] slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.
    
        It wasn’t insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface.
    
        It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn’t even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
    
        Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

~~~
djrogers
Please don't use code blocks for quoting large chunks of text - makes it
impossoble to read.

~~~
ihuman
Is there a better way to blockquote? HN doesn't have anything like Markdown's
'>' for quotes/blockquotes.

~~~
csande17
> Is there a better way to blockquote?

Personally, I just stick the > in front even though HN doesn't apply special
formatting to it. Most people are familiar with that convention, either from
Markdown or from stuff like emails.

~~~
jefftk
you can also do "asterisk greater-than text asterisk"

 _> like this_

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debatem1
I actually did this for a previous employer to demonstrate that we shouldn't
switch to fingerprint auth-- took a photo of the big boss holding a clear
glass, which nicely highlights your fingerprint.

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koolba
This reminds me of the one from a few years back about copying house keys from
photos.

~~~
JohnFen
I played with this when I got my first 3D printer about 5 years ago -- I took
a photo of my house key and replicated it in about a half hour. The photo was
(intentionally) not a great one.

It was at that time that I started keeping all of my keys in a sleeve. Do I
now need to start wearing gloves?

~~~
chillwaves
Locks are trivial to pick. Typically easier than recreating keys through a
photo. This does not dimish their value.

~~~
JohnFen
Not all locks are trivial to pick, but the common consumer ones are (speaking
from experience -- I've been a recreational lockpicker for years).

But recreating through a photo counts as a low-skill attack. Not as low-skill
as raking a lock or using bump keys, but it does make low-skill attacks viable
on moderately-or-better secure locks.

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sebst
Combine that with physical keys copied from photos, audio surveillance by
recording vibrations with a standard Web cam, movement detection through WiFi
signals, first steps towards mind reading, and other creepy tech
breakthroughs, it is certainly an interesting time to be alive.

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ryacko
I try to resize photos using a raster graphics editor. Strips exif, reduces
fingerprinting based on camera lens dust (most reporting was based on this
Facebook patent though: [http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=H...](http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-
Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-
adv.html&r=1&p=1&f=G&l=50&d=PG01&S1=%2820160114.PD.+AND+%28Facebook.AS.+OR+Facebook.AANM.%29%29&OS=PD/1/14/2016+and+%28AN/Facebook+or+AANM/Facebook%29&RS=%28PD/)
)

Give as much data as one is comfortable with, when viewing the image in a 1:1
ratio.

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everlastingfan
It's not "stolen", it's "copied". Biometric identifiers are a conceptually
ass-backwards thing.

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walshemj
I am not getting this the V sign is normally given with the back of the hand
facing forward ie "F&^K you"

~~~
kelnos
Heh, must be a cultural difference. The V sign they're talking about here is
most common in East Asia I guess, though I see it often enough in the US. It's
not a vulgar thing, and the usual position is with the palm facing the camera.

The same thing was often used as the "peace sign" in the mid/late 1900s,
though these days it's not as mainstream as it used to be.

Its roots go back farther than that, and I think your interpretation (with the
palm facing one's body) is older than the more modern interpretation.

~~~
walshemj
Well there some argument that the inverted V (V for victory) was used in ww2
by Churchill avoid the negative connotations but in fact was trolling the
Nazis.

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epicwhaleburger
V... sign...

~~~
rhacker
I guess the peace sign wasn't as universal like we thought...

~~~
Izkata
It's also used for "victory". I'd argue in millennials and younger, this is
probably the more familiar use because of Pokemon.

~~~
user-
> I'd argue in millennials and younger, this is probably the more familiar use
> because of Pokemon.

Sorry but this is not the case at all. Most millenials know it as a peace
sign, none of them would think of pokemon.

