Tea at Trianon: 2024 & The Inevitable Rise Of Biometrics

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, May 26, 2024

2024 & The Inevitable Rise Of Biometrics

From Zero Hedge:

Apple Pay already lets you pay with a face scan, while Amazon have introduced pay-by-palm in many of their real-world stores. VISA showcased their latest palm biometric payment set-up at an event in Singapore earlier this year. As we covered in a recent This Week, PayPal is pushing out its own biometric payment systems in the name of “preventing fraud”.
As always, this is not just an issue in “the West”. Chinese companies have been leading this race for a while, with AliPay having biometric payment options since 2015. Moscow’s Metro system has been using facial recognition cameras for biometric payments for over a year.
And it’s not just payments, “replacing the password with the person” has already spread to other areas. Hoping to corral support for biometrics from the right, national governments are collecting biometrics to “curb illegal immigration”. You can expect that to spread. The European Union will be implementing a new Biometric Entry-Exit System (EES) as soon as October of this year.
Biometric signing is on the rise too. Laptops tablets and smartphones already come with face-reading and fingerprint scanning technology to confirm your identity. Social media companies have been collecting biometric data “for security and identification purposes” for years.
Google Play launched a new biometric accessibility feature only a couple of weeks ago. It’s all just so convenient, isn’t it? So much faster than e-mailing security codes and solving increasingly impossible captchas (both of which have unaccountably got harder and more complicated recently, and will doubtless continue to do so).
That’s how they get you: Convenience. They won’t ever remove the “old-fashioned” ways of accessing your accounts, but it will get increasingly slow and difficult to use while biometrics get faster and easier. (Read more.)