It looks like those crazed individuals who somehow managed to escape from the nation's video game addict rehab center won't be sneaking into major football events to stir up trouble anymore, as Amsterdam Arena has launched a trial program to scan the fingerprints of football fans before letting them enter as they try to better "exclude known troublemakers" from making it to the stands. While European soccer football matches are known to elicit tremendous passion from both parties, oftentimes resulting in violent behavior, the biometric scanners will hopefully curb the conflicts as it better enforces bans to precious offenders. Reportedly, the system will initially be at home games of Ajax, Feyenoord and Vitesse, and if it seems to go over well (read: enraged fans chill out), it could be rolled out in a few more locales later this year.

[Via BBC, thanks Stewart D.]

If you're looking for an alternative to the Pretec i-Disk Touch USB flash drive or to the smartSTIK-MD, and find yourself in the Land of the Rising Sun, you may want to check out the new Elecom CR-FP2 biometric flash drive. From what we can tell, it's a pretty standard half gig drive that will encrypt your data such that it can only be unlocked by way of a fingerprint scan. It can be yours for ¥8,820 ($76) sometime later this month -- just make sure you don't get in a fight with some Yakuza and lose a finger or two before then.

[Via PC Watch]

While fingerprint scanners on laptops are becoming all the rave lately, from what we can tell most of them don't encrypt and decrypt data with the swipe of a finger. Today, Lenovo announced that all new models in the ThinkPad 60 series will include Ultimaco's SafeGuard Easy 4.30, software which enables the option of biometric hard drive encryption that meets the FIPS 140-2 certification -- what the Feds require for government-purchased encryption products. On the Core 2 Duo side, models T60, T60p, R60, R60e, X60, Z61t, Z61p and Z61e are getting the bumped processor treatment, while the same laptops, plus the X60s, (but not including the Z61e) are also to be offered with 802.11n. Lenovo told us that all of these new features are due out later this month, but we don't yet know how much of a premium they'll fetch; we'll keep you posted as soon as the intel comes in.

[Via The Associated Press]

There's an old adage in the security community that any lock can be picked. Well in this modern age of digital doorlocks with fingerprint scanners, you can't exactly pick them with a bump key, nail file or other such assorted tools, now can you? Luckliy for budding criminals, the smart cats on "Mythbusters" discovered that one of these "never been broken" digital fingerprint scanner locks (they didn't cite the manufacturer) -- which also comes with thermal sensors (to detect if there's a real human behind that print) -- can in fact be quite easily duped. So how'd they do it? By copying the master fingerprint onto a piece of latex and attaching it to his thumb, Adam Savage was able to open the lock without a problem. Savage and his team then duplicated the feat by making another copy with ballistics gel. And to top it all off, they did it a third time (check the video link below) with a just a photocopy of the master fingerprint and a little saliva. Perhaps our own Marc Weber Tobias should have a word with the makers of these schlocky locks.