scarfman | This week in blogging for Digital Divide class (Reply)

Based on the movie clip from Minority Report [the scene in which the "spider" devices go through an apartment building checking occupants' retinas looking for Tom Cruise], how do you see biometrics affecting your life in the future? What are its pros and cons? Do you see what happens in the clip as realistic for our future?

I think, like anything else that exists, it depends on how it's used. An object or a process isn't evil or wrong in itself, but in how people apply it. The cops in the movie clip ought to have had to present a warrant to the apartment house occupants or to an authority on their behalf before conducting the search, by the standards of the society I live in. That they didn't implies things about the film's society that an American will dislike and, barring that the filmmakers intended it that way (I've seen the film once and don't remember much about it, such as this scene), it wouldn't have taken but a few seconds of screentime to avoid the implication. Are similar developments in our future? Well, it's been a trend now for ten or thirty or a hundred years that technology's advancing quicker than society.

What is the subject of your end of the year project? Will it be a demonstration of software/hardware, an example of a hack, a security audit, or something else?

The discussion of biometrics in the last class meeting, specifically the way we recognize people from their gait, inspired a thought in me. There are certain action scenes from classic movies most people have seen that we could probably identify if we saw unadorned stick figures performing them: the lightsaber battle in Star Wars, Gene Kelly dancing in the rain, etc. I thought I could present some of those to the class somehow and have them guess as a group which movie each sequence came from. What I'm stuck on is how to present it. My first thought was as Flash animations, but I don't have that kind of time between now and the end of the semester. Storyboards? Great big flip books? Any ideas, groupmind?