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"While biometrics may not be the long term alternative to passwords, they are safer to use. Rather than seeing them as separate methods to identify that you are who you say you are, they should instead be viewed as complementary methods that can be used together to verify an individual."

"A new method to crack open locked iPhones is so promising that US government officials have classified it, the Guardian has learned."

""All passwords are Diceware generated and contain six words," Mira says on her website. "I write the passwords by hand and do not keep a copy of what I have sent to you. The passwords are sent by U.S. Postal Mail, which cannot be opened by the government without a search warrant." She also recommends you alter the pass phrase slightly after she sends it to you."

"Facial recognition, fingerprints and iris scans could soon take a back seat to the newest biometric identification method on the block: body odor. Researchers at Spain's Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, in collaboration with tech firm IIia Sistemas SL, are developing a system that can verify people by their scent signatures."

"The 3-D imaging method used to create the prints yields an enormous depth map while also capturing exact color. The resulting print has a resolution of 50 microns, easily fooling the average observer into thinking it's an original."

"Dye told the Wall Street Journal that hackers increasingly use novel methods and bugs in the software of computers to perform attacks, resulting in about 55% cyberattacks going unnoticed by commercial antivirus software."

"Unskilled manual laborers have felt the pressure of automation for a long time - but, increasingly, they're not alone. The last few years have been a bonanza of advances in artificial intelligence. As our software gets smarter, it can tackle harder problems, which means white-collar and pink-collar workers are at risk as well. Here are eight jobs expected to be automated (partially or entirely) in the coming decades. Call Center Employees call-center Telemarketing used to happen in a crowded call center, with a group of representatives cold-calling hundreds of prospects every day. Of those, maybe a few dozen could be persuaded to buy the product in question. Today, the idea is largely the same, but the methods are far more efficient. Many of today's telemarketers are not human. In some cases, as you've probably experienced, there's nothing but a recording on the other end of the line. It may prompt you to "press '1' for more information," but nothing you say has any impact on the call - and, usually, that's clear to you. But in other cases, you may get a sales call and have no idea that you're actually speaking to a computer. Everything you say gets an appropriate response - the voice may even laugh. How is that possible? Well, in some cases, there is a human being on the other side, and they're just pressing buttons on a keyboard to walk you through a pre-recorded but highly interactive marketing pitch. It's a more practical version of those funny soundboards that used to be all the rage for prank calls. Using soundboard-assisted calling - regardless of what it says about the state of human interaction - has the potential to make individual call center employees far more productive: in some cases, a single worker will run two or even three calls at the same time. In the not too distant future, computers will be able to man the phones by themselves. At the intersection of big data, artificial intelligence, and advanced

"It's highly unlikely investigative or intelligence agencies have much of an interest in protecting the privacy of non-targeted citizens, even in non-terrorist-related surveillance -- not if it means using alternate (read: "less effective") investigative methods or techniques. It has been demonstrated time and time again that law enforcement is more interested in the most direct route to what it seeks, no matter how much collateral damage is generated. "

"$500 method for using a 300dpi scan of a fingerprint (which can be captured from a fingerprint sensor itself) to produce a working replica printed with conductive ink fed through a normal inkjet printer, in a prodcedure that takes less than 15 minutes. "

"Vietnam has introduced a new cybersecurity law, which criminalises criticising the government online and forces internet providers to give authorities' user data when requested, sparking claims of a "totalitarian" crackdown on dissent. The law, which mirrors China's draconian internet rules, came into effect on 1 January and forces internet providers to censor content deemed "toxic" by the ruling communist government. Vietnam's ministry of public security said it will tackle "hostile and reactionary forces", but human rights groups said it was authorities' latest method of silencing free speech."

"Instead password strength meters measure entropy - the amount of time or energy needed to crack a password using brute force methods. The longer and more complex the password, the longer it will take to crack by simply iterating through a list of all possible passwords. According to Stockley, however, brute force is a password cracker's last resort."

"In Neural Photo Editing With Introspective Adversarial Networks, a group of University of Edinburgh engineers and a private research colleague describe a method for using "introspective adversarial networks" to edit images in realtime, which they demonstrate in an open project called "Neural Photo Editor" that "enhances" photos by predicting what should be under your brush."

"People will admit more if they are alone than if others are in the room with them. However, on sensitive topics, every survey method will elicit substantial misreporting. People have no incentive to tell surveys the truth. How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data. Certain online sources get people to admit things they would not admit anywhere else. They serve as a digital truth serum. Think of Google searches. Remember the conditions that make people more honest. Online? Check. Alone? Check. No person administering a survey? Check."

"Neural networks can find telltale patterns in a person's gait that can be used to recognize and identify them with almost perfect accuracy, according to new research published in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. The new system, called SfootBD, is nearly 380 times more accurate than previous methods, and it doesn't require a person to go barefoot in order to work. It's less invasive than other behavioral biometric verification systems, such as retinal scanners or fingerprinting, but its passive nature could make it a bigger privacy concern, since it could be used covertly."

"Computers once performed facial recognition rather imprecisely, by identifying people's facial features and measuring the distances among them - a crude method that did not reliably result in matches. But recently, the technology has improved significantly, because of advances in artificial intelligence. A.I. software can analyze countless photos of people's faces and learn to make impressive predictions about which images are of the same person; the more faces it inspects, the better it gets. Clearview is deploying this approach using billions of photos from the public internet. By testing legal and ethical limits around the collection and use of those images, it has become the front-runner in the field. "

"Rather than being "taught" medical knowledge, the AI was asked to learn using unsupervised deep neural networks, known as autoencoders, without being given any medical knowledge. The researchers developed a method for translating the features found by the AI-only numbers initially-into high-resolution images that can be understood by humans."

"However, the recent study's seemingly high-tech attempt to pick out facial features associated with criminality borrows directly from the 'photographic composite method' developed by the Victorian jack-of-all-trades Francis Galton - which involved overlaying the faces of multiple people in a certain category to find the features indicative of qualities like health, disease, beauty and criminality."

"The Joker malware circumvents the Google Play app vetting process through a combination of code tweaks, execution method variation, and changes to how it downloads the payload allowing it to function, steal information, and trigger the WAP service sign-ups. Google has removed the 16 infected apps from the Play Store and disabled them on devices where they are installed, thought to be in the region of 120,000 devices. "

"As Americans continue to grapple with media distrust, conspiracy theories, bots, trolls, and general panic amid multiple unprecedented crises, Twitter is once again trying a new method of identifying misinformation. A new feature in development at the social media platform, called "Birdwatch," was first reported by reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong (h/t Tech Crunch) in early August. "

"PhotoGuard works by altering select pixels in an image such that they will disrupt an AI's ability to understand what the image is. Those "perturbations," as the research team refers to them, are invisible to the human eye but easily readable by machines. The "encoder" attack method of introducing these artifacts targets the algorithmic model's latent representation of the target image - the complex mathematics that describes the position and color of every pixel in an image - essentially preventing the AI from understanding what it is looking at."