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TechWeb Comdex Review TechWeb Comdex Review Fingerprint Biometrics: The Second Generation QVoice: A Small Product Made The Big Splash Loudspeakers and hurling freebies aside, one of the most impressive fingerprint biometrics products may have been one of the quietest. Leasing display space as a partner of Biometrics producer SecuGen, of Milpitas, Calif., a independent developer QVoice presented an authentication package that very readily integrates into many existing user environments without extensive programming. WhoIsIt's ActiveX control is capable of intercepting logon dialogs from Windows and other programs that utilize the Windows API -- such as Access and FoxPro, or even custom applications -- and replacing them with biometric logons that utilize facial images, voice imprints, fingerprint analysis or any combination of the three. Once installed, WhoIsIt simply recognizes the Windows request for a standard logon, intercepts it and does its own thing instead. Without any network interaction involved, WhoIsIt brings up a local encrypted file called a Lockbox that contains the identification information required by all programs on the system that require passwords. This information includes the passwords themselves. When the user properly identifies himself or herself to the WhoIsIt dialog, the control extracts from the "Lockbox / biometric wallet" associated with the person the user claims to be. If the analysis data matches what's in the wallet, WhoIsIt transparently transmits to the program the password it requires. The QVoice logon screen can be set up with a plain and unobtrusive look or it can be "skinned," if you will, in the fashion of QVoice principal Norman Hughes' favorite TV show (ascertainable from the skin's name, "QVTrek"). This more dramatic appearance -- complete with seductive female voice and blaring klaxon -- looks and feels more the way an outside observer would expect something called a "biometric application" to look. Hughes told us Paramount Pictures actually consulted with him about the proper appearance of a biometric logon in a movie, rather than the other way around. More impressive to this observer than WhoIsIt's adherence to sci-fi standards was the ease with which a Web site developer can drop a biometric logon screen into an existing Web site or Visual Basic application by means of a few lines of ActiveX code. "The last thing companies want to do," says Hughes, "is pull an application apart." QVoice's use of ActiveX contrasts with the choice its competitors have made to provide sophisticated SDKs, which requires programmers to redesign and recompile entire applications and also locks out any chance of deploying biometric logon with off-the-shelf applications such as Microsoft Access. |
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