Motorola shows off tattoo and swallowable password hardware Motorola has shown off an electronic authentication tattoo and an FDA-approved pill that uses the body to transmit passwords, and says it wants to see a new generation of smartphones geared towards such wearable – or edible – technology. The Number of the Beast The Number of the Beast Speaking at the D11 conference, Regina …
So, if I can use the fact that a person isn't using one of these devices to infer they are a thumper and stay the hell (pun intended) away from them....
Damn. Now I am conflicted about this tech.
You know the old joke:
A: It's a shame stupid people don't wear some form of identifier, so you can avoid them.
B: They often do: it's shaped like a little t.
LOL! I like your joke...
But, what happens if you loose your vial of super pills, or your wife accidentally takes a few thinking it's cold medicine? Do you have to wait for a new batch of pills, with the corresponding serial number, to be overnight-delivered or are you locked out of your phone until the pill serial number matches the pre-programmed algorithm expected?
Also, can I keep a bottle of urine in a bottle on my desk, for situations I forget to take my super pills?
The problem with biometrics is that things like fingerprints violate the most basic rules of good passwords:
1. Everyone knows what your password is; and
2. Your password can't be changed.
At least a replaceable electronic stick-on widget allows the password to be changed, though why you'd want to have it stuck to your body rather than, say, carry it in your pocket, I can't imagine.
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Until someone hacks it and then can replicate it so that their "copy' of it can be used to access your mobile.
If you carry it in your pocket by say a wallet, then if they want to smash and grab, they take the phone and the wallet. Or they just knock you out and use the phone close enough to you so it can read it.
The real problem with this technology for ultra sensitive material, is if someone really wants access to it, they will take what they want to get it; an eye, a finger, something inside you, etc.
"The real problem with this technology for ultra sensitive material, is if someone really wants access to it, they will take what they want to get it; an eye, a finger, something inside you, etc."
Depends. What you really want is a biometric that ONLY works when it's used, INTACT, on the original owner. That's why modern finger scanners don't go for the loops and whorls but rather at the blood vessel patterns which are unique even among monozygotic siblings. The best ones measure the FLOW as well as the PATTERN meaning a detached digit is worthless: no flow. As for the rubber hose route, perhaps a sufficiently dutiful keeper would somewhat damage the finger to the extent that it can't be used for reading anymore, though I suspect a panic finger would suffice as well (different finger triggers a wipe).
What you really want is a biometric that ONLY works when it's used, INTACT, on the original owner.
My first thought when I read this was, "What is going to get hacked off when some thug decides your password is worth stealing?" It probably will not work, but try telling that to the man with the knife...
I am not rich or important enough that anybody would target me to steal my phone and copy my fingerprint to defeat the biometrics.
I am much more concerned about random thieves who don't know me picking my pockets or mugging me, in which case a fingerprint should be at least as good as a passcode.
The challenge is to ensure the integrity of the biometric reader; that it can't be duped by a "rubber" finger, or that its output can't be compromised (not dissimilar to SSL).
It's one thing to extract a fingerprint off a glass; it's an entirely different challenge to create a "rubber" finger that will work on a biometric scanner.
And in any case, biometrics aren't just constrained to fingerprints; facial recognition, body measurements, iris scanning (albeit with challenges), etc.
"The average user has to sign-on 39 times a day, and it takes them 2.3 seconds a time to do it each time"
Wow, it's a wonder we get anything else done, what with spending a whole 89.7 seconds logging into things each day. Hopefully someone will come up with a highly profitable way to solve this non-problem, perhaps something that stops working after two weeks so you have to constantly buy a new one?</sarcasm>
Where's the indignant eye-roll icon?
Just try to find a house number with that one. My sister had an address with that number and was forced to change it to 668. It is kinda like the 13th floor which also has "bad karma" associated with it. The solution for 13th floors is to skip it, but apartments, you just change it to 12a (I've seen both!).
I will note that it is amazing what stomach acid will do, it is pretty caustic!
Stomach acid is acidic, not caustic. Caustic means it's a base, not an acid!
In any case, couldn't the religious nuts just get the tattoo on their LEFT hand? or anywhere other than their right hand or forehead? The bible passage mentions only two places the mark of the beast could be placed, so they should be fine with authentattoos elsewhere....
Actually, in scientific terms, they make the distinction for the sake of precision. An acid reaction is termed corrosive while a base reaction is termed caustic. Either way, the reaction happening to your body is bad. That's why lye is now more properly known as caustic soda.
Really if I had house number 666 I would mock it up Lovecraftian-style with lots of anomalous ivy and unhealthy fatty plants in the garden, then fire violet strobe lights in the basement and play bizarre freak noises at random intervals
Also, fill the trashcan with gristle.
> nasty neighbors of the Israelites
Seeing how the Israelites were themselves plenty nasty going into genocide and stuff, that region down there was really bad country. If there were a god, he should have unleashed spell 35, "meteor strike" for a fortified future of humanity.
Both acids and bases are corrosive.
(Hence why you get the COSH corrosive symbol on both).
http://www.onsafelines.com/coshh-symbol-corrosive.html
Corrosive
Chemicals that may destroy living tissue on contact
In sane parts of the world people call lye or caustic soda - sodium hydroxide.
Doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as caustic soda (which is still scientifically correct). There's also the use of the word "caustic" to indicate it's not something to treat lightly, which you don't get from the chemical designation (it's like asking someone not familiar with chemistry to distinguish between sodium hydroxide, sodium chloride, and sodium bicarbonate). It's also specific enough to distinguish it from its cousin caustic potash (potassium hydroxide) where both used to be lumped into the term lye.
As for the COSH indicator, it's not as bound to scientific terminology. They went with the KISS principle in the name of safety.
"The bible passage mentions only two places the mark of the beast could be placed, so they should be fine with authentattoos elsewhere...."
Not necessarily... Leviticus 19:28 is quite clear on the matter...
19:1 And the Lord spake unto Moses saying...
19:28 Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the Lord.
Also, Leviticus 19:27 rather amusingly states:
19:27 Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.
It seems the Lord abhors rounded corners - sorry about that, Apple.
Surely that just means no cuttings in your flesh because of a dead person! OR print because of the same reason... Not ban doing those two things all together, just one reason for it...
The bible, a very ambiguous book, translated into English many years ago and we try to derive meaning from a translation using a language that is no longer the same as we speak today...
Interestingly the Leviticus quotes are thought be related to particularly nasty neighbors of the Israelites. I can't remember their name but they had tattoos, were into self scaring, had goatees and worshiped a very old and nasty version of what would become Pan. Moses was basically cautioning them not to dress like gangsters or it would lead to trouble (which is still good advice).
Those quotes are also thought to be responsible for early depictions of Beelzebub/Satan having a goatee.
Those scriptures were much older than Revelations though and at that time (Pre-Christ) there was no Heaven or Redemption to be had anyway so you you would only be associated with hooligans, not 'The Beast' if you chose those styles :)
I take a pill and it broadcasts an 18-bit "password". Somehow something connected to my computer picks this up and uses it to authenticate me. Or does it just pass it on to my bank or whoever I want to deal with? Anyway, that is not the issue. I have my nice hot evening vindaloo and the pill passes through to wherever such things go, and the next morning I take another pill. Do I have a bottle of pills with identical passwords or do I have to somehow go through some reauthentication process to change my broadcast ID on every site I might want to use that day?
I think I'd rather spend 89.7 seconds a day typing passwords.
So, if you're going to be pooing out the pills on a regular basis, or occasionally throwing them up if that vindaloo was a bit dodgy, that means you're going to need to carry a bottle of pills around with you.
Does that mean your password is only as secure as your coat pocket or you desk drawer?
Why stick-on tattoos and pills? It seems an authenticator rfid card, or one built into a ring or bracelet would work just as well.
With the card, pull out and swipe, with the jewellery, a scanner built into the keyboard or touchscreen would read it automatically.
Of course, in any event, you'd still need a logon request prompt to pop up, otherwise what's to keep some dodgy site from requesting an auto logon just to harvest passwords?
(And even then there'd still be the problem of the "click it to make it go away" lack of mentality.)
I was appalled at the bootnote. Very bigoted and has no place in the article.
A lot of people like their privacy and do not wish to wear anything that will identify them.
You want to call us nuts fine, but we are the intellectual decedents of the people who required that the Bill of Rights be added to the U.S. Constitution before it was ratified.
AC because the IRS is targeting people like me. If you have missed that in the news you are spending too much time on sites like this.
You are also the biological descendants of apes. Thought I would throw that out there.
We also know you are a Jehovah's Witness who is going against the very principals the Constitution upholds by adhering to a pre-nation philosophy which refuses to recognize the rule of law in a democratic republic and a Tea Party nutter.
AC because Jehovah's Witnesses are always looking for everyone/anyone and Tea Party people should read more history. I would prefer being found by the IRS.
"You are also the biological descendants of apes."
I know a lot of people who are convinced that the theory is a fact. You'll probably go and lecture me about how it's an accepted theory as good as fact and that everyone who disagrees is really stupid - or something to that tune.
However, some of us who care about what information we act upon, would keep that in the arena of speculation so as to not bring about unexpected results. Family trees, for example, are very useful information to act upon.
There is a reason you guys stayed on the island. Though, I now fear you have let your minds become lethargic and corrupted by the "good life", and would probably not give more than a whimper when some police state it takes away.
(disclaimer: I live in neither the new or old world.)
Obviously you miss the point, but I don't know how you organize your thoughts. So I can't act on that. (See what I did there?)
Yesterday I started to read some shitty piece on Wired where the author states that unless you are surprised by it, it's not information. Now you are telling me that, "you can only control the information you act on." What the hell is that supposed to mean? My mind holds information that I do not control. In fact, I think most of the information in my mind I do not control. I think perhaps passwords are one of the only bit of information that I have control over. I would say that you can only control information that you synthesize.
Making good use of information can be a bit tricky, but it can be done. One thing I notice that helps is if you actually have information to act on. Acting on imagination could be called art. I'm not sure.
Does this mean that if my kids ate my 'security pills' they could access my things? I wouldn't be so worried about them discovering my plans to institute a global monarchy or my files on their friends parents as I would be something silly happening and embarrassing me or my company. I know that sounds petty but children do get curious, and angry.
What about my dogs? If they ate the whole bottle full would they be interfacing with everything in my house? Like a pack of Lawnmower Men?
As these things get hacked and/or people want more range will the pills just get bigger and bigger?
It causes all, both small and great, both contract and pay as you go user, both free and fanboi, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead using the very fashionable over the nose attachment, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the 'droid device, that is, the name of our all encompassing data overlords or the number of one of the OEM's. This calls for wisdom: let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the tax payment, for it is the number of a Irish man or possibly a fish, but quiet possibly that of a large case of Guinness, and this number is not know to anyone, even more so if you be one of those at the HMRC.
How are check digits the number "6"? In what encoding? If they are check digits, how come they are constants?
Maybe you should just read up on Barcodes.
Awaiting references to Greek Monasteries, The Schengen Treaty and the Dresden Agreement of 1931.
As this kind of bullshit production stresses me out something fierce, I will help you even more by vectoring you to the description of the specific UPC barcode. In that code:
- Start, Middle and End Markers are two black bars separated by a white bar, each 1 module wide ("BWB") , they are not check digits.
- Clearly these don't match the UPC encoding of "6" for the left-hand side ("WBWBBBB") nor of the "6" of the right-hand side ("BWBWWWW"). Yes there are two 6. Choose one. Or not.
Well, the right-hand coding could be interpreted as being somewhat like the markers if one squints enough and one hasn't taken the lithium pills, I will grant you that.
Hope this helps.
If we suppose that "Apocalypse" is the result of a first century Christian receiving an authentic vision of the future, he may have missed the specific meaning of the start and end stripes, which do look the same as the encoding of 6 (the other 6 is just colours reversed). On the other hand, they didn't have these numbers then, so God would have had to explain that, too. I think they used letters for numbers (Roman and Greek) and in each case the number 60 or 600 wouldn't include a 6, it was a different symbol for 10s or 100s.
Wikipedia says: "In most New Testament manuscripts, the number is rendered as 666, but the variant 616 is found in critical editions of the Greek text, such as the Novum Testamentum Graece. Catherine Cory has identified the number as having symbolic correlation to the Emperor Nero, whose Greek name transliterated into Hebrew has the numeric value of 666, whereas his Latin name written into Hebrew is 616." So apparently the number represents writing down "THAT TWAT THE EMPEROR NERO" without writing that down explicitly and getting into even more trouble.
So should people's individual religious feelings be disrespected.... well, no... except when your religion tells you to kill unbelievers or disrespecters on sight, I suppose. I think Scotsmen and Sikhs carry a knife at all times for this purpose. Or something like that.
Which type of bar code did Satan adopt? Code 25 interleaved/non interleaved 2 of 5, Code 39, Code 93, Code 128(x), EAN 2, EAN 5, or GS1-128? I would think he'd go with a more robust and inconspicuous standard like DataGlyphs but maybe he was a early adopter and is locked in. There are other options as well but they tend to cause supply chain disruptions due to scanner incompatibilities in the downstream logistics chain.
Normally barcode standard selection is a major decision but I suppose with the fairly high rate of Human inventory turnover it wouldn't be unmanageable to implement a different standard system wide as long as you could leave existing scanner and printer infrastructure in place.
As pointed out by Johnny (David Thewlis) in Naked:
"What can such a specific prophecy mean? What is the mark? Well the mark, Brian, is the barcode, the ubiquitous barcode that you'll find on every bog roll and packet of johnnies and every poxy pork pie, and every f*ckin' barcode is divided into two parts by three markers, and those three markers are always represented by the number 6."
All looks very convenient but with your stomach screaming out its secrets all day long and your misspelled sanskrit or celtic symbol happy to oblige at the touch of a gadget beware of jostling crowds and suspicious people wanting to shake you by the hand.
Mind you I suppose that the idea would be to enhance the security with the addition of a simple second factor such as an easy to remember password.
Are they just a glorified RFID tag that uses the whole body as an antenna?
It sounds as though that's all they are, in which case there is a nice (if somewhat yukky) attack channel in reusing "spent" pills; that, and the fact that the user would need to keep taking more pills as old ones pass through the body -- so there would not be one single unique token per user -- makes them considerably less useful than a swipe-card.
If, on the other hand, their behaviour is influenced in some predictable way by the actual body that they inhabit, so that their use by the wrong person would be detectable, they might represent an interesting new way to perform biometrics ... but I suspect that's still in the realms of Science Fiction?
Alien. Just because!
The "average user has to sign-on 39 times a day" but the pills are only "FDA-approved and CE-stamped for people to take up to 30 of these pills a day", so you still have to remember 9 passwords (on average)?
I hesitate to point out the possibilities of pill recovery from the sewage system. Hackers used to go dumpster diving...
The JW's avoidance of blood is based in part on verses from Acts which purports to be a historical account of early Christianity, in other words it probably should be taken literally if you are a christian.
The mark of the wild beast though is from Revelation, which does use more than its fair share of symbolic language. <troll_alert>PS. The various 'beasts' are all symbols of political entitiies, so may be we should be worried if governments start mandating these things.</troll_alert>
And for pity's sake stop using the King James version in your biblical quotes. It's using 400+ year old English and was translated from Latin (not from Hebrew or Greek). It makes great poetry, but it's time to move on people.
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