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Motorola Developing Pill and Tattoo Authentication Methods
redletterdave writes "In trying to solve the 'mechanical mismatch' between humans and electronics — particularly wearables — special projects chief Regina Dugan unveiled two new projects currently in development at Google's Motorola Mobility centered on rethinking authentication methodology, including electronic tattoos and ingestible pills. Of the pill, which Dugan called her 'first superpower,' she described it as an 'inside-out potato battery' that when swallowed, the acids in one's stomach serve as the electrolyte to power an 18-bit ECG-like signal that essentially turns one's body into an authentication token. 'It means my arms are like wires and my hands are like alligator clips [so] when I touch my phone, my computer, my door, I'm authenticated,' Dugan said. 'This is not science fiction.'"
Didn't we have a problem with this in Europe last century?
So I have to check my poop all the time for my auth token?
Eat it again? Renegotiate?
How do you authenticate yourself without the "inside out potato" - not science fiction maybe, but rather far out research - I like it ! :)
So that I've got 36-bits of this securitybits!
Good news! It's a suppository!
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
What goes in, must come out. I'm not sure if I'd like to swallow a pill every day for authentication. Besides, it doesn't seem that secure. What's to stop my friend from taking my pills and authenticating as me? The Tattoo idea may be better, but it better be secure. You can't exactly "Patch" a tattoo with a security fix.
Tattoo authentication...I just see Idiocracy.
Because nothing at all could go wrong with changing your body chemistry to turn you into a battery for the purpose of unlocking a phone....
because we have been trained, by government, to think of business as the Prime Evil of existance.
I think I'm not alone here when I say: WTF?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It also sounds vulnerable to replay attacks. I can have you touch something that secretly records the signal, then play it back to the actual input device. Seems like a password you're always broadcasting from your skin...
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I poop information!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
What kind of shitty future did I wake up in where 'unlocking your cellphone' is a "superpower"?
Tattoos are permanent, technology moves on at an incredible pace. This seems like a bad idea.
'It means my arms are like wires and my hands are like alligator clips [so] when I touch my phone, my computer, my door, I'm authenticated,'
So, whenever you hold a metal hand rail walking down stairs, someone just needs to hook up a sensor to it to grab your authentication signal and relay it to your "secure" devices? This doesn't seem like a particularly more secure biometric than the "old fashioned" iris or fingerprint scans; anyone else can intercept your authentication signal any time you touch any object which they can insert sensors into.
Nope, now they have to route around in your stomach and intestines. Big win there, that will really show them!
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
...Because I'm a potato!
And yet the prevailing political philosophy I see expressed by Slashdot commenters falls somewhere in the anarchist/libertarian area of the political graph, where there's little to no government and virtually unfettered personal (and corporate) behavior. In concept, it's nice to imagine a world where everyone can do anything they want as long as it's not harming anyone else. In practice, we find that "harm" is not always easy to see, and can result from complex sequences of events and interactions that are not individually problematic but nevertheless result in systemic harms.
I am by no means saying that government is the perfect solution to every problem. In fact, there is no perfect solution to most problems. There's only bricolage and compromise. Some things are better managed by government. Some things are better managed by the private sector. Both need to be accountable, though: the business world is accountable to the government, and the government is accountable to the people. When any of those mechanisms fails, the system has failed.
That is to say, I am deeply unhappy with the current state of US politics, since any efforts at accountability for government are stymied by the total lack of accountability in the business world.
But there's no way I'm going to take that and conclude the option is to nearly get rid of the government and just trust the market to work everything out. That way lies insanity, or at least a whole lot of misery.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
I just wonder *how* they intend to *keep* it in the stomach.. Many people know instictively that items that enter the stomach pretty much *leave* the stomach in a fairly short period of time.. Unless they intend this to be a temporary authentication, and make you keep eating these "pills", to keep the effect working, they have a *bit* more work to do, in my opinion... VERY cool idea tho...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Brings a new meaning to "Logging out"
That is to say, I am deeply unhappy with the current state of US politics, since any efforts at accountability for government are stymied by the total lack of accountability in the business world.
It's circular, I think. The only place where there's no accountability in the business world is where there's no penalty for failure (and thus you can piss off your customers fee of consequence for that), because of some government prop: legal monopoly, bailing out failures, whatever.
I think it's obvious that "no government" and "totalitarian government" are bad answers, but I've come to believe that "more government" and "less government" as answers simply miss the point.
The problem is the kind of power we give government over business. Amending the constitution to prevent the government from granting a monopoly to any business for any reason, and from the government bailing out a company for any reason (but how would you word that?). Would make things much better. Not a magic bullet, regulatory capture is going to need a separate answer, but those two changes would be a marked improvement.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If so, then you need to physically kidnap the person.
Or steal their pills...
I did, then I imagined a huge cluster of janitors needed to clean up the resulting mess in the Men's Room.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?