The Weekly Cypher is specially curated to keep you up-to-date on the latest in cybersecurity, biometrics, and related news and innovations. Here are a few of the headlines you might have missed this week:
Facial Recognition Has Too Many False Alarms | ZDNet
Movies have had us believe that we’re on the cusp of using facial recognition to monitor individual citizens. However, that dystopian vision of the future is unlikely to come to pass anytime soon. According to Chris de Silva, NEC Europe’s head of Global Face Recognition Solutions, “You can do it, you can try to do it, it’s just not going to give you much useful information.” [Read More]
Nearly 70 Percent of Shoppers are Willing to Pay with Fingerprints | ComputerWeekly.com
Many people have gotten used to using Touch ID to pay for apps and Amazon purchases, but recent research from Worldpay shows just how comfortable people have become. Sixty-nine percent of respondents said that they would want to be able to pay with their fingerprints, a remarkable shift considering that back in 2013, only about 34 percent of Americans surveyed said that organizations should be able to use biometrics to authenticate identity. [Read More]
Why Government Cybersecurity Develops Slowly | Federal News Radio
Few people would describe the government as fast-moving, but there are few facets where it moves slower than in cybersecurity. There’s a good reason for this, though. Cybersecurity is mostly handled by the Department of Defense, which operates in seven-to-10 year budget cycles. It can take years to develop a jet, and it isn’t a huge problem. But those long cycles have a negative impact on budget allocation for cybersecurity, and we’ll only need to move faster to mount effective defenses. [Read More]
Student Attendance and Facial Recognition | XinhuaNet
Skipping class can induce paranoia in students, but based on the practices of a school in China, that paranoia might be justified. A professor at the Communication University of China has started using facial recognition to track his 300-odd students by having them come up to a tablet at the beginning of class and taking a picture that’s then matched up to their photo in the school directory. [Read More]
iPhone X’s Face Recognition and Production Woes | Bloomberg
Spectators were skeptical about Apple’s ability to meet the holiday demand for iPhone Xs, and a November 3rd launch date suggested that the company had done the impossible. However, Bloomberg sources revealed that to meet the demand, Apple told suppliers that they didn’t have to make Face ID as accurate as originally planned, thereby speeding up production. [Read More]
