Thrawn’s gloved hand brushed the Emperor’s cheek.
“I want to know all about the Dark Side.” the Grand Admiral whispered.
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This problem can be easily avoided by using the British variation, with the fingerprints toward the the user.
However, this method comes with its own problems.
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Finger burkas.
Alternately, gloves with someone else’s fingerprints.
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Really depends, and it’s rapidly headed the direction of being a problem, in the same sense as using a social security number as ID. For your i-phone? Sure probably fine, but most of those government employees that had their fingerprints stolen in the OPM breach are “normal non-nerd” people, and it should be getting government officials to rethink how they use biometric identifiers.
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Wow, this changes everything since before this it wasn’t possible to capture people’s fingerprints from water glasses, or door handles, or subway poles or ATM touchpads or…
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Welcome to Trump’s America. 
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Oh yeah, definitely.
My ren fair cape is actually pretty warm and the cowl keeps you pretty dry in a light rain.
I don’t need your approval! But thanks 
It’s his 80s Coldwave phase. Those cheekbones take ages to do.
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The cape didn’t work out so well for Dollar Bill.
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I loath the tendency to construct statements around security in order to shift blame to the user and away from the shit security system.
Someone defrauded a bank because they do pretty much no verification before opening an account? Nope! “Identity theft” happened to you! Biometrics not actually so hot outside of sci-fi? Nope, you just didn’t protect your fingerprints properly!
There are certainly real security mistakes, that real users really make(all the goddamn time); but attempts to foist stuff off on the user tend to be as unhelpful as they are insulting.
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I authenticate with the tip of my nose. Never seen a single warning about that. If I have to cut it off, tough for me.
Also all those girls are utterly adorable. Nobody would even think of doing something bad to any of them.
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That cosplay will never not be totes awesome!
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With this cheap easy hack you don’t even need a camera.
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Yeah. Bullshit test.
15MP camera, assuming a 16:9 aspect ratio is about 5,300 pixels wide by 3,000. A normal camera phone is about 60 degree field of view (https://www.wired.com/2015/05/measuring-field-view-iphone-6-camera/), so the camera- assuming perfect optics- can resolve 60degrees/5300pixels= .0057degrees or 40 minutes of a degree.
According to this website: http://nextbiometrics.com/security/resolution___gray_scale_levels/
“The average human finger ridge width is 0.427 mm and 0.483 mm in female and male adults, respectively. A resolution of 320 dpi will result in 4-5 pixels ridge width and 2-4 pixels valley width - which is enough to reliably detect all minutiae points.”
160dpi resolution (giving it a lot of benefit of a doubt) is about 6 dots per millimeter. At 3 meters that’s 11 minutes.
So, cameras phones will need to get four times the linear pixels or sixteen times the megapixels to even be close to resolving lines a fingerprint wide at 3 meters. They’d have to be twice that to do it reliably with perfect contrast. Or do a 4 to 8x zoom. but that also assumes perfect optics, which you really can’t get. Go ahead, study camera resolution tests (I’ve wasted enough time as it is)
My numbers may be off. Maybe I’m off by a factor of two or ten, but even then, given imprefect optics, I still call bullshit on this.
Addendum: Oh yeah, this isn’t even taking into account diffraction limits which probably dominate the actual size of features a camera phone is able to resolve, especially given the quality of lenses and size sensors you can get/make for a camera phone.
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Spot on, no doubt… but moral panics are not about what’s possible/true, but about fears of what might be possible. I mean, if you think about it now, the satanic panic of the 1980s are entirely absurd (where did all those sacrificed babies come from, for one!), but enough people believed it was a real thing and it got traction on the news (at a time when national news magazines on TV were getting popular), and I think there were even cases of the police being called to investigate one charge or another.
In this case (especially if you know little of photography/cameras), it sounds plausible enough to be a thing to Joe Q. Public (especially with very real fears over privacy concerns over our digital lives), so some get worried about it. I don’t know enough about life in Japan to say whether or not these sorts of moral panics happen there, too (maybe @Israel_B can shed light on that) , but it’s a real social phenomenon here in the states at the very least.
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Well, at least you can assuage individuals’ fears:
Let them print out a test chart like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1951_USAF_resolution_test_chart
Have them take a picture of it at different distances with their own camera, and point out that they need to hit the 300LPI area (or 6 line pairs mer millimeter) before their camera is a threat.
Of course, then people will want the better quality…
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Sure, that works, I think. It’s probably easier than getting them to believe that Satanist aren’t a major problem!
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