The Malaysian Election Commission has decided to forego the use of the biometric voter verification system for the country’s upcoming elections, according to an article form The Star.

Malaysian Election Commission Chairman, Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Mohd Yusof, said the commission may still use the biometric system for future elections, but that they will be focusing on how viable the use of indelible ink is in these elections. 

Raptor Identification Systems unveiled two new mobile biometric devices. The two new solutions, called RaptorONE-TM and RaptorPAD-TM, both run on the Android Mobile Operating System with one being powered by a smart phone and the other a tablet.

The central biometric capability of the devices are the built-in Extended Depth of Field iris capture that can capture iris images from five to nine inches away as a part of Raptor’s TalonTM biometric capture interface. 

GAO RFID has released a Wiegand-to-Ethernet RFID controller designed specifically for door access applications.

The network access controller, model 491018, is able to connect to any type of Wiegand reader such as magnetic stripe reader, RFID reader or fingerprint reader. It also offers a master card for adding or deleting access privileges directly from the external reader, thus acting independently without connection to a network or PC. 

A journalist for the Mingpao Daily has managed to spoof a biometric self-service kiosk used for immigration clearance at the Hong Kong-China border, according to a PC Advisor article.

The spoofing was aided by a fingerprint cast kit bought from a Chinese online retailer called Taobao for under the equivalent of $15. 

The biometric program at HMP Isis prison in London requires inmates to authenticate their identities via thumbprint before moving from one area to the next. System errors, however, have been leading to back-ups that leads to all prisoners waiting before they can move on, according to an article from The Telegraph.

A report detailing the problem, which sometimes leaves prisoner movement halted for hours, has noted that if the system doesn’t work for 100% of prisoners otherwise a manual check needs to be performed, which is time consuming and leads to the delays. 

A new app for mobile phones running on the Android operating system has been developed by AppTech that purports to be capable of recognizing a person’s age via the built-in camera on the phones.

The app, called ReconAge, utilizes face recognition technology from biometric developer Cognitec Tecnologia Brazil and data processing technology from data processing specialist BrScan Tecnologia. 

In an effort to increase the security of the current EMV chip and PIN, SmartMetric has created an EMV card enhanced with biometrics.

The SmartMetric Chip & Biometric EMV Card incorporates fingerprints to activate the card. It’s designed to increase the security of standard EMV chip and PIN cards, which SmartMetric claims are still vulnerable to fraud attacks, even though they are safer than a magnetic stripe card.