Android and Chrome take their first steps towards a blissfully password-free future

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sear

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Android and Chrome take their first steps towards a blissfully password-free future​


Signing in to accounts sucks. Password resets, two-factor prompts, hackers breaching databases — who needs the aggravation? This is exactly why we've been so excited over the past few months, after Google shared word that a brave new passwordless future was on its way to Android and Chrome. Thanks to cryptographically signed passkeys stored on your phone, you'll be able to securely and easily access your favorite services — and that all gets started today.

The idea of accessing your accounts without explicitly entering your login credentials may sound like something halfway between bizarre and just an outright bad idea, but when you really think about it and look at what Google is implementing, it's not that far off from how we already deal with saved passwords.

Core to this concept is the idea of a "passkey" — a digital record connecting your personal information with a particular service, securely signed via chain of trust, and stored on a device like your phone. And just like other data you keep safe on your phone, you can access it with convenient biometrics like a fingerprint — which is a heck of a lot easier and more secure than typing in a password.

Android is picking up support for passkeys through the Google Password Manager, which will help keep them synced across your hardware — this is all end-to-end encrypted, so even with Google coordinating distribution of your passkeys, it can't access them and use them to get into your accounts.
By Stephen Schenck

Are you ready for this?

Do you trust it?

A passing fad? Or the wave of the future?
 
m #2
To the consternation of system experts, many users have a single password, and use that same password for online banking, membership access at restricted sites, etc.
I read an article about the most common passwords. Included were the first 8 keys on the top row of the keyboard, from left to right.

Biometrics was big in sci-fi, and I gather it made it to consumer-level computing. Didn't make it real big, to my knowledge.

Mr. D #3
What's better?
What's the best?
What do you think about the lead article?
 
I think that a better concept of "digital identity" is on the way. We are still early in that journey. Biometric and physical possession (of a mobile phone) are good early steps.
 
They are already there, it's more of a question whether you are using those features.

But right now it's a chaotic landscape of disparate authentication methods and identity concepts. What we are moving towards is having a coherent, flexible, extensible identify framework.
 
I'm interested about how 1 genius out of a population of 5 Billion (or 8 billion) can transform society. Not everyone has to invent the automobile. But soon, there's gridlock in Grafton.

context:

One of my favorite insights into culture came from anthropologists studying a population of apes (chimps?) on an island.
The anthropologists wanted to study their interactions in social structure, but the island was jungle, and thus the study subjects very hard to keep an eye on.
So to keep the apes out in the open the anthropologists scattered rice on the beach sand. The apes then had to spend tedious hours (out in the open where they could be observed) separating the sand grains from the rice.
It was frustrating to the apes. One missed sand grain could cause dental problems, pain, etc.
So after a while of this one of the female apes in fit of temper took a fist-full of the sandy rice, and flung it in anger into the sea.
Miracle!
When it hit the water, the sand washed off, and sank to the bottom, but the rice floated.
And there it could easily be skimmed off the water's surface, and eaten by the fist-full.
What I find so interesting about this is for a long time, months I gather, they'd been picking sand off the rice one grain at a time with their fingertips.
But with the new technique, the tedium was nearly eliminated.
And the apes even seemed to enjoy the salt flavor.
Perhaps the most interesting of all, while only one of them discovered the technique, within a few days every clan on the island were using the technique.
 
Apple? (Unix)
I don't recall a biometric option with MS Win7 (my immediately previous OS).
But I reluctantly banged over to Win10 about a year ago, I think it's biometric capable, not sure. I have a strip of electrical tape over the notebook camera lens.
 
sear said:
Apple? (Unix)
I don't recall a biometric option with MS Win7 (my immediately previous OS).
But I reluctantly banged over to Win10 about a year ago, I think it's biometric capable, not sure. I have a strip of electrical tape over the notebook camera lens.
Click to expand...
yes, apple.
 
Apple seems to make many consumers happy. Not sure about current status, but I'd read Apple was the wealthiest entity in the solar system.
I tried an Apple desktop computer. That was the end of my association with Apple.
 
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