In Popular Culture
- The 2002 film Minority Report features extensive use of casual Iris/Retina scanning techniques for both personal Identification and Point Of Sale transaction purposes. The main character changes his official Identity by having his eyes transplanted, and later accesses a security system using one of the removed eyes.
- The movie Gattaca portrays a society in which there are two classes of people: those genetically engineered to be superior (termed "Valid") and the inferior natural humans ("Invalid"). People considered "Valid" have greater privileges, and access to areas restricted to such persons is controlled by automated biometric scanners similar in appearance to fingerprint scanners, but which prick the finger and sample DNA from the resulting blood droplet
- The Disney, Pixar 2004 film The Incredibles shows a scene where Mr Incredible visits Edna Mode at the mansion, a fashion designer for superhero costumes. Edna Mode enters the lab by identifying herself, she then takes off her glasses and having her eyes scanned and using her voice in order to get into the lab.
- The television program MythBusters attempted to break into a commercial security door equipped with fingerprint authentication as well as a personal laptop so equipped. While the laptop's system proved more difficult to bypass, the advanced commercial security door with "live" sensing was fooled with a printed scan of a fingerprint after it had been licked, as well as by a photocopy of a fingerprint.
- In Demolition Man the character Simon Phoenix cuts out a living victim's eye in order to open a locked door which is fitted with iris scanning. A similar plot element was used in Angels & Demons (2009) when an assassin gains access to a top secret CERN facility using a physicist's eye. However, both of these examples are misleading to the audience since the methods depicted for enucleation (removal of an eye) from a corpse would not be a viable way to defeat such a system.
Read more about this topic: Biometrics
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
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“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)