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Too Much on the Brain
User names, passwords--and hope on the way
By ERIC ELLIS
September 21, 1999
Web posted at 9 a.m. Hong Kong time, 9 p.m. EDT
The Net is supposed to simplify our lives, right? Not mine, I'm afraid.
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Sure, it's great that news junkies like me can stay abreast of the situation in the Middle East by scrolling through Ha'aretz (haaretzdaily.com) or that I can pay my Singapore phone bill from Sydney--but of the cost of suffering from information overload and a frazzled brain trying to remember all the user names, passwords and PINs I need to log on to sites.
Passwords drive me mad, and the problem is only getting worse with the proliferation of sites.
I blame NASDAQ and day-traders. The moment the market applied a massive value to each Internet visitor to "community sites" was the moment that passwords multiplied. To deliver specific consumer information to hungry e-commerce companies requires acquiescence from the user. We blithely tap in our details into the field and end up with a username AND a password, so webmasters can turn us into statistics. Big numbers please bankers and investors but not our own memories, which suddenly have to contend with an overload of passwords.
It would be fine if one password and username suited all sites, then ericellis and tigger (my cat's name) would get me online everywhere. That's not much different from remembering phone numbers (and goodness knows we have enough of them). But fraud and the Net's imperfect technology and standards mean that some passwords are alpha (tigger), some are numeric (844437, tigger as spelled on a key pad) and some are alpha-numeric (tigger123). And then there are some that require less than five letters (tigg), or numbers (8444) and some that don't (tigg8444). And if another ericellis got there first then its ericellis1, and so on.
It's all confusing, and it forces forgetful people like me to list the info on a special file that I consult if the password and username for, say, my Internet bank account slips my memory--precisely the thing banks tell us not to do.
At last count, I had 16 password-user name pairs. Bad luck for me if that file, which of course requires a user name and password to enter it, falls onto the wrong eyes, or when (rather than if) my machine crashes. And that excludes my credit card, passport, immigration card, social security, frequent flyer and taxfile numbers. The penalty for being unable to remember after, say, three tries, is harsh--you're out and you have to be re-activated ... with another password. Aarrrggghhh!!
But help may be at hand. A British start-up company, ID Arts (ID-Arts.com), has devised an ingenious system that exploits mankind's ability to remember faces. Enter the passface.
The science is called cognometrics. I-D Arts throws up a matrix of nine faces of regular folks and the user selects one of them, committing it to memory. The process is repeated three times.
At that point, you've selected your passface. And tests show it's easy to remember your selections. For any site that uses the system, you'd just have to click on your four faces, and you're in. Says Paul Barrett, ID-Arts managing director: "The human brain has a special component whose sole function is to recognize faces."
ID-Arts is now marketing the system to computer companies and webmasters to apply on their sites. A number of international banks are claiming success testing passfaces on their intranets. And there's interest among some Internet service providers as well. No secret why: half their technical-support inquiries now come from people who have forgotten their passwords.
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