The problem of passwords has been around for a long time. Its grandparents are such things as the recognition passwords used by the military in the field for centuries, with cousins including learning to recognize the clothing common to the enemy so they can be cornered and captured.
But I digress. Passwords have been a problem for me ever since I started logging into computers: learning them, having someone break them, re-learning them, changing them, and again. Social media and multiple, multiple sites demanding them just made it harder. And, now, Big Tech thinks they’ll be solving the problem:
Apple, Google and Microsoft announced this week they will soon support an approach to authentication that avoids passwords altogether, and instead requires users to merely unlock their smartphones to sign in to websites or online services. Experts say the changes should help defeat many types of phishing attacks and ease the overall password burden on Internet users, but caution that a true passwordless future may still be years away for most websites.
The tech giants are part of an industry-led effort to replace passwords, which are easily forgotten, frequently stolen by malware and phishing schemes, or leaked and sold online in the wake of corporate data breaches.
Apple, Google and Microsoft are some of the more active contributors to a passwordless sign-in standard crafted by the FIDO (“Fast Identity Online”) Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), groups that have been working with hundreds of tech companies over the past decade to develop a new login standard that works the same way across multiple browsers and operating systems. …
“This new approach protects against phishing and sign-in will be radically more secure when compared to passwords and legacy multi-factor technologies such as one-time passcodes sent over SMS,” the alliance wrote on May 5. [KrebsOnSecurity]
Maybe. This is the first I’ve heard of it, so I have no clue as to the technical approach. But fixes that fix everything are frequently disasters.
And, of course, you must have a smartphone to participate.
I wonder if this is an early sign of the Internet apocalypse. Between trying to solve a hard problem by requiring someone own yet more high technology, and the addictive hell hole that social media often becomes, I wonder if we’re nearing the end of the Web Age.
Probably not. There’s always a youngster ready to take the place of a bruised and bloodied oldster.
But I’ve been musing on the thought that the absolutism noted by a number of pundits, from myself to Andrew Sullivan to Erick Erickson to, well, anyone distrustful of ideological zealots, has been accentuated by the leveling of the playing field. This idea is closely allied to the much observed loss of gatekeepers, the editors and others of newspapers and magazines who acted as default censors, operating under the valid excuse of limited resources. Never perfect and sometimes with their own extreme biases, nevertheless they kept the boat of civic discourse on something approaching an even keel, and, if they didn’t, a public outcry or angry publisher could get them fired.
Today? No editors, no censors, and the cursed cry of No compromise! echoes from all political factions, because most of us haven’t the foggiest idea of what it takes to successfully govern a democracy, and most of us think some Divine creature or another is on our side. Hubris, one of the most common human flaws these days.
So I do wonder how many folks are doing what Cliff Stoll did 30 or more years ago, declaring the Internet anti-social and walking away from it. I wonder if he found a way to live with it, or went hard core. I see he contributes to a channel on YouTube, so he must have found a compromise.
But my point is that if the Internet just gets too hard, people will learn to do without it. Is this the breaking point? Or are too many people dependent on it for their income to abandon it?
