Ultrasaur Blog

Keeping track of exciting new threats to your digital records.

Archive for the ‘fingerprinting’ Category

Fingerprints fade from cancer treatment

Friday, May 29th, 2009

We often assume that everyone will have fingerprints (as in the literal prints made from people’s fingers), bu from Reuters

A Singapore cancer patient was held for four hours by immigration officials in the United States when they could not detect his fingerprints — which had apparently disappeared because of a drug he was taking.

Although 4 hours is not exactly an impressive delay from an American airport and capecitabine is not a common drug, it raises interesting issues. Namely that when a simple process works in 99% of cases, we really aren’t prepared for that 1% of outliers. In this case, I’m curious what the Americans With Disabilities Act says about treatment of finger/hand/arm amputees in fingerprinting situations.

100 million case hinges on finding the demo

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Shorter version:

Waste Management sued SAP, for $100 million since the product didn’t live up to the demo. Nobody claims to have a copy of the demo that the case rests on.

My question is, why should Waste Management believe that SAP would necessarily produce the original demo?

I agree that it “would be wise to preserve a copy of product demonstrations as they form new license agreements with vendors” but having given and received demos, I don’t think I’ve ever seen that happen.

Proof of a financial transaction

Wednesday, May 6th, 2009

Apparently many bank card transactions are also fingerprinted:

The idea with the transaction certificate (TC) is that the card signs off on the correct completion of the protocol, having received the response from the bank and accepted it. The resulting TC is supposed to be a sort of “proof of transaction”