Yesterday my company paid a visit to another company in the area that we’ve been collaborating with for some time. It was sort of an informal get together.
They’re a technology and research company, and they’re working on some pretty cool biometric stuff right now. For example, they have an iris reader that has an algorithm that measures the way an eyeball, retina, and iris typically move, so you couldn’t just hold up a picture of an iris, or tear out someone’s eyeball and use that.
They also have a fingerprint scanner and geometric hand scanner that measures blood pressure and pulse rate in order to ensure you’re not using someone else’s stolen appendage.
They even have a program that scans your face while you’re at the computer so if you get up from your computer it immediately locks the computer until the camera can see your face again. They even spent 10 grand to get a mock-up made of one of the designer’s faces in silicone. This thing was freaky. It looked just like him. However, when he held it up in front of the scanner, it wouldn’t recognize him. Though he admitted that even if a mask, or full 3D model didn’t work, a decapitated head probably would.
They were really obsessed with people not being able to chop you up and use your body parts to do stuff all over town.
The only thing that was scary was the Big Brother nature of all of it. They could sell their technology to a bank, and a bank could collect an image of your iris for their new “secure” ATM, and they’d do it in exchange for a football phone. So now you’ve got your football phone, but you’ve voluntarily participated in the creation of a registry system that could be purchased by, um, let’s say, the government. And the government can use it however they want to since you voluntarily participated. They could cross reference your iris scan with the smack you talked on your blog in November 2004 and list you as a potential flight threat. All because you wanted that football phone you selfish bastard.
At the end of the day we had chicken wings and cake, though. So it’s all good.
