Re: Great new security tech, or fraud?

["Rob, grandpa of Ryan, Trevor, Devon & Hannah" <rMslade () shaw ca>]

From:                   Robert Slade <rmslade () shaw ca>
Date sent:              Wed, 09 Mar 2011 18:27:28 -0800

> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/us/politics/20data.html

In view of this, I found it really interesting to note a very similar case:

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Controversial+device+popular+with+public+pri
vate+employers/4429768/story.html

Computerized Voice Stress Analyzers (CVSAs) have been promoted and sold for a 
least 25 years now.  This despite the fact that, four years ago, the U.S. 
Department of Justice did a study and concluded that "VSA programs show poor 
validity -neither program efficiently determined who was being deceptive about 
recent drug use. The programs were not able to detect deception at a rate any 
better than chance ... The data also suggest poor reliability for both VSA products 
when we compared expert and novice interpretations of the output."

In a sense the CVSA case is much worse, because, since it is a private company 
selling to private companies, there is nobody to say that these people are a) 
wasting money, and b) making poor hiring decisions based on what is essentially a 
coin flip.

======================  (quote inserted randomly by Pegasus Mailer)
rslade () vcn bc ca     slade () victoria tc ca     rslade () computercrime org
It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is
possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should
be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty
silly in 5 years.                      - John Von Neumann (ca. 1949)
victoria.tc.ca/techrev/rms.htm http://www.infosecbc.org/links
http://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/author/p1/
http://twitter.com/rslade
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