Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

No stunning revelation here, but the facial recognition included with several vendors’ laptops laptop vendors doesn’t work very well. Yes, it can be fooled by a photograph or other digital images. The latest details were revealed at the Black Hat security conference—tagline: Yes, You’re Every Bit As Doomed As You Thought—by a researcher at Bach Khoa Internetwork Security Centre, a Hanoi-based security firm.

To be fair, most vendors have marketed the face-recognition feature as a convenience, and they suggest using more robust security (such as almost anything else) to protect sensitive files. Also, the research said that it sometimes was a bit more complicated than showing an ordinary photo. For example, Toshiba systems forced the researcher “to move the images a bit to fool the technology because it looks for facial movement.” But if any retail IT folk are thinking of using this method as even a first-level security defense, they should probably rethink it.