Jul 01 2008

Age Detecting Vending Machines Hacked With Photos of Old People

Posted by: admin in Online And Tech News

When we covered Japanese age-detecting cigarette vending machines back in may, one Gadget Lab reader, named Monjombo, left this comment: So if I hold up a picture of Sean Connery, I won’t be able to hack this? Well, Monjombo. It…

When we covered Japanese age-detecting cigarette vending machines back in may, one Gadget Lab reader, named Monjombo, left this comment:

So if I hold up a picture of Sean Connery, I won’t be able to hack this?

Well, Monjombo. It turns out that, yes, you could. A reporter for Sankei Sports tried fooling the machines with photographs. One was a 6″ wide “photo of a man who looked to be in his 50s” — probably not Sean Connery, but it worked. So did a 3″ picture of a woman in her 30s.

Fujitaka, the company behind the detection software, admits that pics can sometimes fool its machines, and is working on a fix. According to Pink Tentacle, it will be “a more advanced system that will make sure each face belongs to a real human”.

How it will achieve this is left unsaid, but to stop a flat pic fooling it each time, we’d guess that some sort of movement detector could be used, or perhaps a small needle should shoot out, scooping out a section of the customer’s face and testing it to determine their humanity. As a bonus, it could also test for mouth cancer. Surely any real smoker would happily put up with such humiliation in order to get their fix.

Magazine photos fool age-verification cameras [Pink Tentacle]