Magazine Photos Fool Age-verification Cameras

gregor-e writes "Japan has scheduled a full-scale rollout of visual age-verification on cigarette vending machines. Unfortunately for them, a Sankei Sports news reporter has determined that this system can be fooled by holding up a magazine photo of an adult."

Cracking at its best

[paratiritis]

Fool the system by giving it false information. The recognition program never gets a chance to work.

BTW it is easy to fix this if the machine asks the people to move. This will work ... for about a week, until they start creating animations of old people that can move on command for EEEs or other such netbooks.

Re:Complex systems, simple workaround

[timothy]

Maybe as an parable, it's good, but the "space pen vs. the humble Russian pencil" has been widely debunked as an urban legend. Still an interesting pen!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen [wikipedia.org]

timothy

this reminds me of a book...

[Tumbleweed]

"Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow. I just finished it, and it's full of stuff like ths. Great book, btw, HIGHLY recommended.

Re:And in related news

[CaptainPatent]

Even better is if the machine was re-designed to detect magazines and other pictures of people and actually did dispense pictures of cigarettes.

The machine could even keep their money, because I doubt a teen is going to report a cigarette machine took it!

The moral of the story

[dreamchaser]

Never send a computer to do a human's work.

In my European country...

[abecede]

... you have to put a debit card into the machine for age verification. (of course you can pay with it too)
Why didn't the Japanese use this simple idea? It may not be perfect, but far more effective than their "solution".

Re:Why not ban them?

[mikesd81]

Yup, we'll get right on that. Right after we implement liquor vending machines [philadelphiaweekly.com].

Re:Age-controlled vending machines have a place

[smellotron]

habitually inhaling toxic smoke ... contrary to any living creature's survival instinct

Whoops, you just made the assumption that survival instincts are based off of long-term cost/benefit ratio. On the contrary, most instincts (fight-or-flight, sexual attraction, whatnot) are based off of estimated short-term benefits. Hence why people continue to smoke...

• it satisfies an immediate craving (if you're already addicted)
• nicotine gives a nice little buzz
• it is perceived to reduce stress

Regardless of its truth and long-term effect, the "inhaling toxic smoke" argument borders on propoganda. It completely ignores one side of the argument.

Re:Impressive

[bigkahunah]

wouldn't simply requiring two photos fix this problem. A frontal view and a profile. How many magazines are going to have mug shots? The two pictures would also be compared against each other to ensure that the backgrounds are congruent.