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Bill Gates Proclaims End of Passwords
KrazyK writes "Bill Gates has just proclaimed the end of passwords. There's only one drawback - you have to use .Net (well, what else would you expect?). However, the smart card that is at the centre of it - made by Axalto - is still a great bit of technology. How long before we can get an open-source version of this?"
Well, considering Sun has been using smart cards for user identification for YEARS, when Solaris 10's source is released under an open source license, open source will have the same capability (well, no need for .NET though).
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
What a relief! I'm always concerned about whether or not I'm myself on any given day.
... to get me to confess my password, all they have to do is get my wallet?
Enjoy before you upgrade to biometricks. Then all they have to do is to cut your finger or your eyeballs.
Bill's right, though. He knows if you use M$ products you don't need passwords. You'll still get 0wn3d.
Power to the Penguin!
Dyslexia finally made sense to me...
www.weberseite.at
Is there no limit to Bill's powers of proclaimations of endings? (Okay, he still has a year to go on the spam, but it'll be ending any moment .. now. Now. Now! Any moment...)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
In other words, Bill Gates gives up on security. "You win. You hackers always seem to find a way to break into our OS, well fine. From now on, we're taking the ball back. NO SECURITY FOR YOU!". Or, perhaps "In the interest of customer service and ease of use, we will now automatically grant administrator access to anyone who can turn the machine on. Down with restrictions!"
In all seriousness, is anyone stupid enough to trust any security initiative put forth by Microsoft after the last few years have been so disastrous for them on that front?
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Ha! I'll use something nonobvious...like penis length. Oh wait, then they'd cut of....NOOOOO...
:)
That's brilliant. It doesn't work when cut off
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Yeah, but imagine the login screen :)
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
How does this protect us from Microsoft?
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
"I'll use something nonobvious...like penis length."
I would use that but, you see, I just replied to this message in my inbox and in 90 days guaranteed my penis will increase by 3 - 6 inches and I will be locked out.
Ah,
Thanks, but no thanks...
MS has enough power already without
giving them all the passwords in the world...
But that's what the ATM machine tells me to enter.
That's brilliant. It doesn't work when cut off :)
I could just see the cartoon on this one. The caption would read: "Bill discovers that since the new secretary started, he is no longer able to log in to his account."
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
But how will women log in?
Make the variable signed.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
They'll be 2-way RFIDs that harness our nervous systems in a massively parallel biocomputer that calculates the interest on Gates' fortune.
--
make install -not war
yeah, he's made a lot of proclamations.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
square 1: ...u insert this smart card and then Windows goes "Windows needs to be restarted for your hardware to work properly. Please remove the smartcard and click OK to restart" ..restart...back to square 1.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
And instead of remembering what my password is, I will have to remember where I left my smart card.
Slashdot anagrams to "Sad Sloth"
Of course they do... as many as they want.
You can easily make a gelatine film with fingerprints collected on everyday objects. No fancy equipment required either. When researches tested the technique at a recent show, every fingerprint reading device they were allowed to test, were fooled.
Hmm, so we are going to end up with 13 year olds War-Fingerprinting?
Except, in many cases, "0wn3d" will mean that someone cuts off your thumb. That's a pleasant thought.
So in Saudi Arabia, if you are caught stealing you will lose your password too! Or do they let you keep your hands after they cut them off?
NEVER stick your password post-it on the monitor! It goes under the keyboard...
I was conned by an old man in a cloak. It turns out those *were* the droids I was looking for.
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
If some organization could do this, wouldn't its management be worried the operators would be wasting their time at work looking up women's skirts?
Nyekulturniy... Proudly confusing readers and editors since 1981!
The underside of everyone's tongue is different. I verified this using basic research techniques over a series of weekends while I was in college. After obtaining a more permanent research assistant, I was unable to proceed with further "comparison-" however, I do encourage others to carry on my work in the spirit of cooperative science.
The beauty of this approach is that you could integrate the tongue reader with the computer's mouse. The user would insert his/her into an opening in the underside of the mouse, a laser light would illuminate the pattern of veins, and the resulting image would be captured and compared against the security database. The process is as simple as licking the filling out of a custard donut. In fact, in some companies I have worked for the users are so simple that care would be needed to ensure that they could tell the difference between a custard donut and a tongue reader or problems might occur. Utter panic ensues as user authentication fails at Dunkin' Donuts Wi-Fi access points... Well, you get the idea.
For those users on a low-carb diet, the process can be described as similar to that used for another research project I conducted while in college. One advantage of the tongue-reader biometric system is that computer mice, like research assistants, are much more responsive when properly lubricated. Some other method might be necessary when dealing with portable computers. Perhaps it would be possible to integrate a tongue reader with the touch-pad pointing device. Obviously, this would favor users with the ability to lick their own laptops. But isn't that already the case for much of life?
And in case anyone is wondering, yes this IS a tongue-in-cheek post.