YOU KNOW, people don't take enough time to sit outside alone and just think. Listen to the birds. Feel the wind on their faces. Wonder when their spouses are coming home to unlock the door.
Last week, I locked myself out of the house. For four hours I waited, in damp, 90-degree heat that fused my unmentionables to places even more unmentionable. In houses past, this wouldn't have been a problem. I would have shimmied through an unlocked window or figured out some other form of self-burglary. However, our current dwelling is like a residential Ft. Knox, with automatic lights, window and door alarms, motion sensors and 911 on the security system's speed dial. I couldn't get in.
The beauty of Kwikset's SmartScan deadbolt lock -- which reads fingerprints using the emerging technology of biometrics -- is that you can always get in the house, unless you somehow forget your finger.
The principles of biometrics are familiar to any fifth-grader who has watched a James Bond movie. The technology scans and measures a unique biological feature -- fingerprint, palm print, retinal or iris pattern -- and compares it with a sample on file using fancy mathematics. If the scan and the record on file match, voila -- you have access to the evil genius' computer core, or whatever.
Fingerprint scanning is now commonplace; you can buy a fingerprint-lock USB device for your computer for less than $50.
The technology was fairly hackable in the past. The guys on the Discovery Channel show "MythBusters" unlocked a device using the Xerox of a fingerprint, and some enterprising Japanese hacker replicated a finger using Gummi bears.
But now, fingerprint scanning is a pretty robust and reliable form of security. The Kwikset lock, for instance, looks below the surface of the skin using radio frequency scanning, picking up landmarks of your subdermal print. That means that your finger doesn't have to be perfectly clean or dry for the lock to work. As the father of year-old twins, I find my fingers are rarely clean or dry.
Also, the lock will not operate if the finger in question has been separated from its owner. This addresses my first concern about this technology -- that a routine burglary might escalate into a digit-removing nightmare and one of the unlikeliest sentences ever uttered: "Give me the finger!"
"If you don't have a live person, it's not going to work," Kwikset spokesman Eric Lundquist said. I only hope this fact is well known in the home-invasion industry.
