The Ulam lectures always make me pull away from the daily hacks and
tech/science/math and Think About Something. Generally wistfully.
Small in words but big in impact is best of all.
One thought is: How do we converge to a world of no passwords?
A fascinating approach recently has been Fast Words:
http://www.fastword.me/ which even made xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/936/ http://preshing.com/20110811/xkcd-password-generatorThe fastword approach recognizes that phones are a bitch: you keep
having to type in weird character sequences which are hard to do. AND
the spell checkers can be a problem, morphing your typing into
whatever it can figure out.
But still these are all passwords. What'd be better?
Well, none at all. What could replace them? You, for a start.
Bio security, however is scary, people loose eyes and fingers to fake
the system. Maybe your phone's camera could take a picture of you and
that would work?
But what else is you? How about the digital activities you've
performed on your ecology: phone, tv, laptop and so on?
Now that's a LONG password! Maybe you have tiny servers, like Dropbox
for example, that just collects your behavior. And when you claim to
be you to Amazon, it just checks to see if your digital ecology has
behaved how the device you are using, part of the ecology, has
behaved.
So what if you loose your phone? Well, you have so many devices that
the phone is a small part of it. I mean if your TV is included, the
last episode of Lost you've watched is part of the big wad of info
that's you.
Do you have any ideas on how to get rid of passwords? Will we ever be
rid of them? And crypto keys too? They're just as annoying.
-- Owen
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