A new system for cigarette vending machines in Japan called Fujitaka's Child Check System uses face recognition technology to prevent underage smoking. A camera embedded on the vending machine apparently takes a picture of one's face and compares it to 100,000 faces stored in its memory, using skin lines and tone to determine whether one's of age or not. I have no idea how the machine could correctly identify underage smokers (legal age of smoking in Japan is 20) all of the time. I mean, what if someone's just physically precocious? Will a few wrinkles qualify a 16-year-old kid with bad skin into using the vending machine?

How about those of the opposite situation? I've seen too many Japanese pop idols looking like they came right out of middle school when they're actually middle-aged men and women. According to source, they could just register their faces with the vending machine owners to prevent being mistaken for a minor in the future or just insert their driving license for verification. Uh, hello? If the system could check driver's licenses, what's the point of having face recognition in the first place? I highly doubt if the Fujitaka Child Check System could even marginally decrease instances of underage smoking. This is definitely more pointless than the taspo RFID age verification system; at least taspo will be using a well-defined preset instead of a highly dubitable hit-or-miss procedure.