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?"

How long till open source.... Read...

[Fallen Kell]

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).

Re:I'm so happy!

[beaststwo]

Another point: Since the smart card will obviously be able to absolutely identify my as myself, and since obviously nobody else could impersonate me, I'll always be myself.

What a relief! I'm always concerned about whether or not I'm myself on any given day.

Re:So now instead of torturing me...

[Trurl's Machine]

... 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.

Re:hard and soft

[darth_linux]

Bill's right, though. He knows if you use M$ products you don't need passwords. You'll still get 0wn3d.

Passwords proclaim the end of Bill Gates

[cwebb1977]

Dyslexia finally made sense to me...

First spam, now this!

[AndroidCat]

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...)

LOL

[JediTrainer]

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?

Re:So now instead of torturing me...

[Xpilot]

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 :)

Re:So now instead of torturing me...

[afd8856]

Yeah, but imagine the login screen :)

Re:Passwords proclaim the end of Bill Gates

[turgid]

Dyslexia finally made sense to me...

Well, it seems to me that Windows NT and derivatives have security through apathy. After all, who wants to type in "administrator"?

The question still remains...

[merc]

How does this protect us from Microsoft?

Re:So now instead of torturing me...

[Brandan]

"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.

I for one, do not welcome our .NET overlords

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah,

Thanks, but no thanks...

MS has enough power already without
giving them all the passwords in the world...

Re:end of passwords - not

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's what the ATM machine tells me to enter.

Re:So now instead of torturing me...

[GreyPoopon]

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 :)

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."

Re:So now instead of torturing me...

[wertarbyte]

But how will women log in?

Make the variable signed.

Re:tyranny of the monopoly majority

[Doc Ruby]

They'll be 2-way RFIDs that harness our nervous systems in a massively parallel biocomputer that calculates the interest on Gates' fortune.

End of passwords....640K...windows 0wnz u...

[carlmenezes]

yeah, he's made a lot of proclamations.

Extremely irritating when i tried it...

[carlmenezes]

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.

Re:So now instead of torturing me...

[Red Alastor]

And instead of remembering what my password is, I will have to remember where I left my smart card.

Re:So now instead of torturing me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they do... as many as they want.

Re:Um... no?

[JavaLord]

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?

Re:hard and soft

[JavaLord]

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?

Re:hard and soft

[Badfysh]

or find that paper where you've written them all down

NEVER stick your password post-it on the monitor! It goes under the keyboard...

Re:From the high visionary

[doon]

I remeber this one when that book was on my bookshelf at IBM Research.

"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system,
and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over
10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for
everyone involved with PCs."
-- Bill Gates, from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates)

Re:Passwords proclaim the end of Bill Gates

[pchan-]

if this is like Dos is Dead [nyud.net], which is what they were advertising when windown 95 came out, then i guess passwords are not going anywhere for a while.

Re:Um... no?

[nyekulturniy]

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?

An open-source alternative...

[tillerman35]

There should be a biometric unit that uses the pattern of veins on the underside of your tongue to uniquely identify individuals.

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.