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Comment by dzdt | Hacker News Reader

The primary purpose of the fingerprint scanner is to prevent password sharing. Bloomberg terminal access costs about 20,000 per seat per year. Bloomberg cares deeply that every individual who uses the system is paying for an account; shops that use Bloomberg would obviously rather share an account if they can get away with it. The fingerprint scanner makes it really hard to share an account.

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I would hire a "fingerprint guy" who's entire job was to run around the office unlocking terminals. Pay him minimum wage and it's still cheaper than a couple extra terminals

With concurrent access restrictions, this is not likely to get you far.

Bloomberg sales and support is very hands on. If you work at a place that has a lot of terminals, there is usually someone from Bloomberg corporate walking around interacting with people, trying to make sure they are getting value/use from the terminals. If they noticed anything like this happening, you can be sure that the company would receive a nasty lawyer letter since they would be in violation of the user agreement that strictly forbids this.

You might think Bloomberg would be less-than-strict about enforcing this (who wants to sue their customer?) until you realize that “we’ll forgive the breach of contract if you buy accounts for everyone we caught cheating” is a very lucrative sales tool.

IME with a small sample of Bloomberg sales reps, they're glad to look the other way from a little funny business. They want to sheer the sheep, not skin them.

I know you're joking, but just consider who uses these terminals -- these are companies trading millions, billions, or trillions of dollars. Bloomberg terminals are expensive, but not really in the scheme of things. Also, if a company tried to steal licenses this way, there would be a whistle-blower bounty and the company would get caught soon.

How would that work legally? The fingerprint guy is literally logging in to account.

How would people log in from outside the office?

There is a service called "Bloomberg Anywhere" where there is a portable fingerprint reader to log into a browser-based Bloomberg Terminal rather than the dedicated-server version.

The reader does not need to plug into your computer. Instead, it reads data from your monitor optically (flashing) and your fingerprint to give you a one-time code.

Right, I used to work there.

What I mean is, what would a cheating company with a “fingerprint guy“ do when a legitimate user needs to log in remotely? (What if the fingerprint guy got sick, or quit?)

High availability cluster of fingerprint guys, naturally.

Personally, I run 2 clusters of 5 nodes each, in geographically disparate zones.

There are some shared infrastructure dependencies that aren't redundant, but generally speaking the system can survive loss of multiple nodes and/or an entire site.

I'd give the fingerprint guy the B-Unit Android App, which only takes a static QR code as input. Others could send him a screenshot, and get the log-in approved remotely.

I don’t know the exact details, but there are users identified via fingerprint who can connect from anywhere and there are users identified via password who can connect only from an activated terminal. In the first case you pay for the user, in the latter you pay for the (potentially shared) terminal.

I’m thinking about a cool project which is a custom USB fingerprint reader that can remember prints and replay them on-demand without the finger being present.

Why not just a coloured Silicon mould of a finger instead?

I see someone else has been watching Mr. Robot :-D

Without getting into it, that would not work in this case :)

Unfortunately you have to use their custom fingerprint reader.

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