(On a side note, the state of biotechnology and life science knowledge on HN is utterly deplorable, repeating buzz words does not reality make.)
In the context...
The law has to operate within a practical compromise and err heavily on the side of reducing false convictions.
That is an article I was reading today. I don't know what is wrong with America.
This is antithetical to the concept of serving one’s time. Guilty people deserve to go free once their debt to society has been fulfilled.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
Does a law system let some guilty people got free to avoid incarcerating the innocent, or does it incarcerate the innocent to avoid letting some guilty people go free?
My opinion is to lean towards letting the guilty go to avoid incarcerating the innocent, but other people in other places can lean the other direction.
For all of those outraged by the media storm, it is free advertising to those actually interested in the service. All of the pearl clutchers feigning shock and outrage over shady service mean nothing to the company providing the service, as these were never going to be their customers in the first place.
Didn't a woman in France already have a face transplant?
I'd like to see Mission: Impossible type transplants, or even masks like the ones they use, for that matter.
Of course that's not really surprising when you look at the kind of Halloween masks you can get if you are willing to pay [2]. I imagine if you could special order them to perfectly fit your head they would be very convincing to the casual observer and to software.
> Using several close-range photos in order to capture every angle, Krissler used a commercially available software called VeriFinger to create an image of the minister's fingerprint.
It's already trivial - $500 consumer grade resin printers have sufficient resolution, and creating the model from photographs is super easy.
Same for facial recognition - you can do Mission Impossible style masks, and the most significant investment is in time spent learning makeup and wig work.
Biometrics are not secure, just like a vast majority of locks. All it takes is tools, knowledge, and motive to bypass them.
The tests also have varying accuracy rates, but people misunderstand what it means. If the test is 99.99% accurate, that doesn't mean that there is a 99.99% chance that the defendant is the perpetrator. It means that in a region with ten million people, you've whittled your suspect list down to a thousand people. If you pick one of them at random there is only a tenth of a percent chance it was them.
This especially problematic when dealing with "DNA databases" because then with a large database you have a high probability of finding a false positive match and the true perpetrator might not even be in the database.
But even then, people use percentages as if everyone's DNA was independent. Which it isn't. Blood relatives have similar DNA.
The one thing DNA is really good for is excluding people. If you have the rapist's DNA and you accurately test it against the suspect's DNA and it doesn't match, it's not them.
I wonder if you could use CRISPR or “lab-grown meat” techniques to do the same with DNA evidence…might be something that would get you a contract with the CIA/NSA.