Wired Magazine and Music

An article from Wired magazine on how passwords are not enough and how the only security in the future will be in having your phone and computer identify you by your actions and biometrics and possibly your DNA. Awhile back I read an article about how IBM was creating a way that a machine the size of a cigarette pack with a pencil type thing attached could lightly scratch you and identify you by your DNA. I wonder what sort of mark it might leave.

Wired - Kill the Password: Why a String of Characters Can’t Protect Us Anymore

Here is the three paragraphs that you really need to know from the article, they come at the end.

The other thing that’s clear about our future password system is which trade-off—convenience or privacy—we’ll need to make. It’s true that a multifactor system will involve some minor sacrifices in convenience as we jump through various hoops to access our accounts. But it will involve far more significant sacrifices in privacy. The security system will need to draw upon your location and habits, perhaps even your patterns of speech or your very DNA.

We need to make that trade-off, and eventually we will. The only way forward is real identity verification: to allow our movements and metrics to be tracked in all sorts of ways and to have those movements and metrics tied to our actual identity. We are not going to retreat from the cloud—to bring our photos and email back onto our hard drives. We live there now. So we need a system that makes use of what the cloud already knows: who we are and who we talk to, where we go and what we do there, what we own and what we look like, what we say and how we sound, and maybe even what we think.

That shift will involve significant investment and inconvenience, and it will likely make privacy advocates deeply wary. It sounds creepy. But the alternative is chaos and theft and yet more pleas from “friends” in London who have just been mugged. Times have changed. We’ve entrusted everything we have to a fundamentally broken system. The first step is to acknowledge that fact. The second is to fix it.

Some of you may have wondered why I often use Wired magazine as a source. It is simple, it has been around a long time and has been a leader in reporting on technology and the internet. Look up it's history on Wikipedia.

Now for some music.

YouTube - Alice Cooper - Crazy Little Child

YouTube - Fleetwood Mac - The Dance-1997-Silver Springs

YouTube - Berlin - Masquerade

And one last song for those who like to watch. YouTube - Alice Cooper - Hey Stoopid.