phoenix nest

So I was in the midst of checking out new prices on Newegg for the PC I’m building, and low and behold on the front page I see the following advertisement:

That’s when I think to myself… ThinkPad successor! I thought it was odd and soon found out upon clicking the link that it was actually an entirely new line of notebooks. I checked out the specs and they seemed to be reasonably priced, with one really really cool feature…face recognition:

Incredibly cool. I knew that Thinkpads were one of the first (if not the first laptops) to have commercially available fingerprint readers (now even my Vaio SZ comes with one), and now it seems like they are innovating in another way.

But then I realized, “wait a second, isn’t this incredibly insecure?”. What is to stop someone from using a decent print out of your face and logging into your computer. I really want to try this out, but I don’t want to drop 700 bucks or more on a laptop (though the ultra portable 11.1 model looks pretty cool — depending on the price). Anyway, It would be awesome if this could spread on digg, reddit, or somewhere and someone could answer my question. Could somebody who has this try and print out a decent picture of their face, and see if they’re able to log in with it? I can’t imagine this being able to tell the differece between a face and a photo with a 1.3 megapixel camera…

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