Cyberscope.(includes multiple articles)(Brief Article)

SECURITY

How Do I Know You're You?

The need to find better ways of ensuring that people are who they say they are is a hot topic these days among not only government agencies but private businessess as well. "Companies are really trying to move forward with the development of new security technologies," says George Sheppard, a security expert at Pivot International, an engineering firm in Lenexa, Kansas. This sea change is giving a big boost to a host of biometric gadgets that sense different unique physical characteristics: blood vessels in the eye, body heat, fingerprints, the geometry of faces and hands. Biometrics would virtually eliminate forgery, and it entails little aggravation--thermal imagers, for instance, can detect heat signatures of passersby.

Companies would most like to check such biological signatures against computer databases. Currently, however, this isn't possible on a large scale. An airline, for instance, wouldn't be able to screen all its passengers by taking account of their biometrics because the resulting information-processing load would choke even the biggest computers. Rather than using a database, a better solution might be to put data into a smart card and issue it to the customer as a form of identification. You might not even need to take it out of your wallet; the card could send, via radio link, your biometric description to a nearby device, which would compare it to what the camera behind the counter was picking up. Even when advances make it possible to use big databases, smart cards, which smack less of Big Brother, may be preferable.

THE WEB

Divine Online

For those times when you need the help of a Hindu deity, a new Web site (saranam.com) arranges the appropriate prayer services, or pujas, to be performed by proxy ...