Perry E. Metzger wrote: > Ah, I see what you mean. > > Sadly, I don't think there is much to be done about that, but I think > that (personally) I'd only end up with two of the things. If they can > be made credit card sized, I don't see this as worse than what I have > to carry now.
there are a couple of issues. in some ways .... if institutional-centric physical tokens were to be succesful ... you would start to see one in lieu of ever pin, password, &/or shared secret ... for every possible type of relationship requiring authentication. there was an issue in the early e-commerce days http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3 a lot of the funding for the early commerce server work was targeted at a "mall" type environment/experience ... where a large outsourcer would provide electronic "mall" space for retail stores. The apparent assumption was that the physical distance metaphor addressed by shopping malls, would be carried over into the internet. however, the basic characteristic of the internet & the world-wide-web already was obliterated physical distance concepts. the issue then was why would a metaphor designed to address physical distance limitations, carry over into an environment where physical distance was a meaningless concept. the issue with many of the existing issued cards and tokens are that they are institutional-centric, one per institution. this could approach the DRM/copy-protect approach of the mid-80s ... where applications were being shipped with unique floppy disks that were required to be mounted anytime the application was executed. an operation with one or two such applications wouldn't be so bad ... but can you imagine that being succesful today? .... where you might have hundreds of such floppy disks and requirement to have a dozen such floppy disks concurrently mounted in a single floppy drive ... and possibly having to select and exchange floopy disks (from a pile of hundreds) several times a minute. i contend that the physical store checkout and payment model ... where you are physically performing checkout and can likely do only one such at a time .... has analogies to the shopping mall physical metaphor model ... and it starts to hit limitations when you translate that into internet electronic metaphor with the possibility of multiple things going on concurrently --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
