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-generator The 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 ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
