Doctors Bypass Biometric Scanners With Fake Fingers

jfruh writes "At a Brazilian hospital, doctors were required to check in with a fingerprint scanner to show that they've showed up for work. Naturally, they developed a system to bypass this requirement, creating fake fingers so that they could cover for one another when they took unauthorized time off. Another good example of how supposedly foolproof security tech can in fact be fooled pretty easily."

Re:Retina Scanners...

[ctime]

Iris scanners have lower false positive rejection rates and are more accurate than Retina scanners, which do exist. Retinas can become damaged and change with time, unlike the human iris which does not under normal circumstances change during lifetimes.

Iris scanners considered the best biometric authentication, they are also typically the most expensive (look up the LG scanner pricing).

http://www.lgiris.com/ps/products/previousmodels/irisaccess2200.htm [lgiris.com]

http://web2.utc.edu/~Li-Yang/cpsc4600/6-Iris-DNA/IRIS-Retina.ppt [utc.edu] has some good info on the differences.

Re:An important reminder...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are doctors who have $150k cars and $1.5M houses. But there are not very many of them, and the money they make treating patients isn't what paid for those things - they either have family money or are earning it from other businesses.

Medicine is a well-paid and interesting job, but in terms of lifetime earnings you're better off being a banker (and I mean a regular banker, not just the high end Wall Street finance guys). My wife and I are both doctors. We do take about two nice trips a year, but we don't have children, our house cost under $200k, our cars are 4 and 12 years old, and we eat dinner at home five or six nights a week. We have no worries about paying the bills, but we're a lot less well off than plenty of people our age because we spent our twenties working for peanuts. We'll pass many of them in earnings sometime in our fifties, which is nice but is enough of a tradeoff that I wouldn't encourage anyone to go to med school unless they just have a burning desire to be a doctor. That said, I'm sure glad I didn't go get a Ph.D. in chemistry, like I thought I wanted to do in high school.