Veri Scary ‘fingerprint’ player
p2pnet.net News:- Inspired, quite possibly, by RIAA boss Mitch Bainwol’s interesting enthusiasm in peddling Audible Magic’s dubious p2p ‘filter’ around vongress, two more companies want the music industry enforcer to market their player – which takes virtual fingerprints before it can be used.
Biometrics is the science (?) of identifying people via unique body features.
Back in mid-January America’s VeriTouch biometrics company announced Sweden’s Thinking Materials had, “on assignment from VeriTouch,” delivered the first working prototype of iVue, a “revolutionary, patented hand held audio/video player capable of biometrically encrypting and decrypting digital media content’.
More to the point, “The authorized user authenticates via a fingerprint and can then use iVue to listen to music and watch DVD-quality videos, including wireless content delivery and connectivity to existing peripheral A/V equipment,” VeriTouch says on its web site.
The iVue “eliminates piracy and prevents illegal copies to be made of music, videos, and video games delivered wirelessly or on mini-DVD disk”.
Apparently, engineers and industrial designers from Thinking Materials created the device based with two major goals in mind:
- iVue should look really good and should be easy to modify with a modular design in order to follow fashion trends.
- It should also be easy for consumers to use and simple to understand.
“These days, the key to a successful product is the right combination of looks and function.
[Will Apple sue VeriTouch on the grounds iVue is too close to iPod in the same way Microsoft sued Lindows owner Michael Robertson? Come to that, what about VeriSign? : ) - Ed]
The RIAA’s scrupulous honesty and fairness are the stuff of legend. But even give that, why would anyone buy, let alone actually use, a player that’s going to demand their ID before it’ll function?
Well, VeriTouch says its product “has the world’s first 1.5 megapixel 32X digital zoom camera onboard”.
Of course, it also has “wireless on-demand (WOD) downloading and security to eliminate piracy and illegal file-sharing”.
Now, says the The Register’s Andrew Orlowski here, “This week Veritouch announced that it had demonstrated the device to the RIAA and MPAA.”
In 1999 the company launched a biometric terminal able to scan all ten-fingers and meant for “Law Enforcement, Government and Military Facilities Physical and Network Security Operations, and Corporate Network and Physical Facilities Security”.
And, “Since Veritouch already supplies security authentication systems up to Homeland Defense standards (in partnership with an Israeli defense contractor), we do forsee exciting synergies ahead, should budget cuts force the War on Terror and the War on Piracy to be consolidated into just the one unwinnable ‘war’,” adds Orlowski.
PS – It would also make an ideal Broadcast Flag system.
Fingerprints
But it’ll probably turn out that iVue is about as effective as Audible Magic’s CopySense.
PCWorld’s Andrew Brandt says here that with $10 in materials and less than an hour to complete his work, a Japanese researcher molded fake fingerprints that could “overwhelmingly deceive biometric thumb scanners.”
It was just one of several failures in biometric technology related by Rick Smith, who has worked in federal research programs on information security and cyberdefense, including a project for the National Security Agency, reported at the BlackHat Briefings conference, says the story.
Smith, “addressed a rapt audience of security business professionals, white-hat hackers, and government spy agency representatives gathered for the week-long conference” and “described several ways the most common types of biometric identification devices – iris scanners, face and voice recognition systems, and thumbprint readers – could be fooled.”
June 6th, 2004 at 4:49 pm
heres where their prioirities lay….
acts of terrorism devestate the lives of thousands of people around the globe….lax airport security is blamed, airport security is still lax….new threats come of using aircraft as weapons…lax airport security and weak security in general still exists….all of a sudden biometeric security appears, but not where it would do the general population the most good, but where it might serve to further line the pockets of foreign MNC’s.
Yah, society is messed up, the almighty dollar not only trumps democracy but also common sense.
June 7th, 2004 at 2:54 pm
You forget, in your suggestion that the war on terror and the war on P2P also could be rolled in with the war-on-some-drugs.
They’ve already got a good thing going with the prohibitionists funding their every move, now they can go pirate hunting too.
Perhaps MP3’s will be designated a “stimulant” and banned by the DEA.
January 10th, 2006 at 9:12 am
bah……..it will stop newbs but it wont stop hackers. It wont stop piracy but it will reduce it. The audio and video hare decrypted and presented in a decrypted format. With the music….you can rerip them using a cdrw\dvdrw……how do you think the whole real player\itunes\msn music library is available on free p2p. DRM videos may be tricky. If all else fails…you can build capture interfaces……for audio all you need is is a phono cable, audio card with audio in(for the headphones) and a simple mp3 encoder. The video, if it is regular ntsc, can be captured with an older dv device which doesnt care for macrovision(if they use that in the output)…..for hd…..there is technology to come but I doubt if anyone will be downloading HD videos.
Its only a measure to reduce piracy to the highly skilled.