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Gold/Mining/Energy : MYT - Mytec Technologies -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ron Waller who wrote (1137)	11/21/1998 8:14:00 PM
From: Mel Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1535

Anyone: Seems a lot of companies are getting into this type of thing. FutureTech: More gadgets By Cameron Crotty Sex may sell, but people go gonzo for gadgets. I received a veritable deluge of e-mail in response to last week's column about Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP 300. Many wrote to tell me that they had sent e-mail to Diamond (customerservice@diamondmm.com) asking for a Mac version of the Rio. Others dismissed the Rio as a techno-toy, extolling the benefits of Sony's Mini-Disc format and burning your own CDs with one of the budget desktop devices currently available. Thanks to all the readers who sent in more MP3 links, including this great MPEG page. Thanks also to Tom Negrino who sent what he calls the "ultimate in geek chic." It's an in-dash MP3 player (actually a small PC running Linux) for your car. I have to admit that I'm crazy about gadgets also, so I'm going to submit to the temptation for another week and talk about one more gadget that's making a splash in the PC world. The difference this week is that we should soon see this technology on the Mac. The current conventional wisdom on security is that you can't have enough of it. Fine, until you start adding up the passwords you need for e-mail, POP accounts, Web sites, and all the other bits and pieces of your computing life that need security. How do you remember all those passwords and plug them into the proper places? Or do you just use the same password for everything and hope that nobody ever guesses or grabs it? For that matter, how do you choose a password that's complex enough to thwart snoops yet simple enough to remember? If you believe the experts in biometrics, the answer is as close as your fingertip. Biometrics deals with measurable physical characteristics, particularly those that are unique to each individual. Your closest contact with biometrics is probably on the television screen, when the "Law and Order" detectives catch a criminal by matching a suspect's fingerprints with those found at the scene of a crime. That may be about to change. Digital Persona's U.Are.U is a $99 USB device that scans your fingerprint. You just touch your finger to an oval-shaped scanning area and the device captures a picture of your fingerprint. Then, pattern-recognition software goes to work, analyzing your fingerprint and creating a profile of its distinguishing characteristics. If the scanned profile matches up with one that your computer has on file, you're in. With the included software, you can teach your applications to recognize you at the touch of a digit when they'd ordinarily ask for a password -- you can literally let your finger do the talking. Currently, U.Are.U is a Windows-only device, and the company has no plans for a Mac version. However, Teraglobal, has announced plans for a Mac-compatible USB fingerprint-recognition system that it expects to ship by December, priced for the home user. So, are fingerprint readers techno-toys or useful devices? I'd love the convenience of one-touch access to all my password-protected data, and it would seem that there'd be a lot lower likelihood of someone faking my whorl pattern than guessing (or finding) a password. On the other hand, pattern recognition is a slippery science. Teaching a computer to nail down a fingerprint might be easier than teaching a computer to take voice dictation or recognize my handwriting, but I've had enough bad experiences with the latter two technologies to make me skeptical. Fingerprint recognition may have an unexpected side effect on the general hygiene of computer users, though. You might need to get in the habit of washing your hands before you try to fire up your Mac. Otherwise, how will your machine know it's you if your finger is covered with pizza grease? FutureTech is a weekly column that explores trends and technologies that are just inches away from transforming the way you use your Mac. MacWEEK.com Contributing Editor Cameron Crotty is a tech journalist based in San Francisco, and he welcomes tips, tech, gadgets and feedback at to futuretech@crotty.net.