Tag: Password

If you are a cat owner, this won’t surprise you. When you aren’t home, your cat does all kinds of stuff you wouldn’t approve of. Apparently, logging onto your laptop so they can surf the web for dirty cat pics is just one of them.

A lot of people I know mix up their passwords because they have so many accounts online. Sometimes, it gets difficult to keep track of all the passwords you’ve created and used over the years. Aiming to provide an alternative to passwords is eyeLock’s Myris iris scanner.

There are programs and services that can store your passwords for various websites and type them in for you. But if you set a login password for your computer, you better remember that or you’re screwed.

If you can’t remember your passwords no matter how hard you try, then you might find the concept of Biostamps interesting. It’s Motorola’s idea of an alternative to the traditional password or pin code by doing away with them completely.

It’s better to be safe than be sorry when it comes to choosing a password. The problem isn’t whether you can come up with a challenging enough password, though. Rather, it’s whether or not you’ll be able to remember it, given you probably already have a number of other accounts and passwords to remember, and the more complex the password becomes, the more difficult it becomes to recall. 

Passwords are one of the weakest links of online security. Or rather, people who have weak passwords are the weakest links. I personally know of a couple of people who use dead simple passwords because they’re afraid that if they use more secure but more complex ones that they’ll just forget those and end up locking themselves out of their own accounts.

We’ve featured a Bluetooth-based program that automatically locks Windows PCs when the user walks away. Here’s another approach to automatically locking a computer. While the Bluetooth-based program relied on proximity, Didier Stevens’ program LockIfNotHot works in conjunction with an IR thermometer to detect changes in the surrounding temperature.

Currently in beta, Phoenix Freeze is a program that allows users to use thie Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones as “keys” to their computers. After pairing your computer with your phone, Phoenix Freeze will automatically lock the computer as you go away from the computer, and it will unlock the computer as you go nearer.