The battle between the US administration and Huawei has been going on for a while but many in the world only started to feel concerned when Google, under pressure of the US government, announced they would stop supporting Huawei handsets. Last week, as reports Wired, the US Department of Commerce added Huawei to a list of companies considered a threat to US national security, meaning it would need permission to acquire US technology. Soon chipmakers like Intel and Broadcom reportedly stopped selling to Huawei, and Google pulled the company's licenses for key mobile applications like Gmail and the Google Play app store. However, this is just the last episode in a couple years of fights betwee
Facial recognition is increasingly adopted for a variety of purposes: unlocking one’s phone, access control, time and attendance, targeted marketing, banking, public security, etc. While there is no doubt facial recognition provides convenience to a number of applications, it is increasingly used for law enforcement, triggering the risk of a mass population registration. At the same time, it raises concerns from the human rights activists and more generally from all the privacy-conscious; critics of facial recognition technology argue that it is not 100% reliable and that it infringes on people’s privacy and liberty. With a recent vote, the city of San Francisco has become the first in the
Not so often do we see a new technology go fast from the status of novelty to field tests and then to generalization. A year ago, the idea of introducing a fingerprint sensor in a smart card was only seen as a technology feat, or an invention looking for its problem. Now, major payment card issuers are already launching pilots as demonstrated in the UK by NatWest and RBS experiment with 200 cardholders, who received a debit card integrating a fingerprint sensor. With this card, they can use their fingerprint instead of their PIN to authenticate contactless transactions over GBP 30 (EUR 34.90). The cards are based on Gemalto biometric payment technology. Previous trials had occurred in Cyprus
