Napster's brief history is one long legal tangle. The Offspring for offering Napster gear. Also, late last month German security agents pressured Napster's mainstream media partner Bertelsmann to keep Napster users from distributing Nazi material. Bertelsmann officials said they were powerless to stop the trades. A spate of companies is angling to dominate the next-generation network security market with devices that measure the physical characteristic of an individual, a field known as biometrics.
Fingerprints are a classic biometric.
One biometric company, Iridian Technologies of Marlton, N.J., will release this month the Authenticam, a 5-inch device that attaches to PCs, laptops and some PDAs. It records an image of a person's iris and matches it to a copy in a database. Fingerprints remain a popular, time-honored biometric because it's simple and inexpensive to process. But iris-matching is considered more accurate in situations that require fast identification of a person among hundreds of thousands of records, says Jackie Fenn, advanced technologies researcher at the Gartner Group. This is especially important for large companies that have thousands of employees simultaneously accessing a network.