Fingers

My last week of work is slightly scary. The fact that I have no job after this week has finally hit me. If ayone out there in cyberspace knows someone who wants to hire a talented young writer somewher in the UK starting fromt he new year, I'm all ears. I'm house trained and everything.

A prison in Scotland has been critisised because the biometric locks they were using failed and inmates were able to circumvent the system. A representative of the Scottish prison service said:

"The degree of sensitivity had been reduced below the required threshold and it wasn't as discriminate as it should have been."

So in other words it was giving false positives, like nearly all fingerprint readers do. This is because fingerprint readers aren't really very good at recognising people and they are always set allow access if there is some doubt rather than deny it.

The SPS rep also said:

"The system only allows access to certain parts of the prison, it only controls access within wings. Keys are used to access the whole prison."

So they don't have as much faith in this system as they do in traditional keys. If this doesn't demonstrate the folly of putting our faith in biometric readers, I don't know what does. Click.