mother's maiden names...

[Peter Gutmann]

"Perry E. Metzger" <perry at piermont.com> writes:

>Why is it, then, that banks are not taking digital photographs of customers
>when they open their accounts so that the manager's computer can pop up a
>picture for him, which the bank has had in possession the entire time and
>which I could not have forged?

I don't know about photos specifically, but I know that signature imprints are
often still moved around by laborious manual means because the background
infrastructure to handle images doesn't exist.  Most banks are still using
3270-style interfaces, even if they have a screen-scraped GUI front-end.
There simply isn't any provision for handling anything other than basic text
records - the data-centre back-ends are text-record based (and in some cases
the text is EBCDIC), the communications channels send and receive text records
(often at a few kbps over leased lines, X.25, or PSTN dialup), and the branch
software processes text records.

So using images (of any kind) isn't just a case of making an executive
decision to do so, it would involve a massive, end-to-end infrastructure
upgrade to implement.

Peter.

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