Week 5:

Something I learned from an interview with Mark Zuckerberg was that Facebook was not the first thing he experimented with at uni, but did tie much of what went before together. Another is that as they progressed it from one uni to the next, they figured how great it would be if some company came along and globalised it for universal use: without even considering that it might be them.

It seems as I've said before like a digital mountain to climb and (impossible as it may seem) with a goal in view, a plan and continuous feedback it is at least plausible... in the way that to George Mallory, ascending Everest was humanly possible even in the absence of oxygen. But it may involve forays in one direction before back-tracking to essay another.

And this is how my thinking goes. That for a product of minimum viability B2B may be preferred to B2C. For one thing, apps appear to grow as memes and there's no better field of happenstance than the App Store. Plus ideas are a dime a dozen and in that sphere you're probably retailing for a dime. A million dimes do amount to a significant sum, but a dozen, not. You'd probably want to get beyond a beta-product to have any chance of success here, and feedback from customers (download data aside) is not at all easy to qualify.

Then there is the fact that general access to devices (Mobile Device Management) is proprietary and likely a slough of despond when it comes to ever coming out of the other side with a snag-free user experience. And the other big 'e' is education, in so far as nothing that advances human development ever does so by dropping into our laps.

I am reaching out therefore to educational establishments, but also to companies like military suppliers for whom secure access is bread and butter. Not a hippie thing to do I realise, and we won't be calling by with flowers in our hair (mine falling off anyway). Nonetheless in pursuit of the greater good and in the knowledge these people keep us safe in our beds at night, it would make for a good trial.

That said too, post-pandemic we're all accustomed to working from home as well as from the office and that carries its own security risks (one of the biggest failures here in the UK stemming from the theft of five laptops containing critical information).

Thus I'd like to offer a catch-all secure access system that ports across both arenas.

Here's the scenario:

I enter a premises and need not carry a pass, as that would cause complications were it to have been left on the kitchen table (or indeed stolen).

Face ID recognises me as an authorised staff member and following the BLOXLOX logo fading to grey, posts a gallery of nine faces and among them mine.

The reason for doing this is that in many online scams, perpetrators may well know a passcode but have no idea what the people they are impersonating actually look like.

At this stage at random intervals, instead of this greeting gallery you're confronted by a gallery of images containing none that features your own. Selecting any of these as representative of yourself would ring alarm bells at the get-go... a 'gate-guardian'.

Once through the greeting portal, up come four successive galleries of people whom you ought to recognise... your 'familiars'. Selecting one such familiar from a random gallery deliberately containing nobody you know would again trigger suspicion.

Should you genuinely struggle however, touching the screen area beyond the gallery would refresh the gallery, although you would not want to need to do this too often.

These four or six iterations successfully negotiated, you're free to access the premises or else at home, free to navigate toward whichever URL provides for onward progress.

That's the bare bones, and I want to keep it that simple at the outset (and keep it that simple as a user experience going forward).

What I shall do now in the coming days is to put a working example of that up on a website to walk through yourself.

Capturing and storing images for use in this scheme is a whole different ball-game.

Though as we used to say to the Downs guy helping us on the milk-round years ago, Rome wasn't built in a day. *

* Not to be confused with the rounds of employers visiting under-grads at university that was also called the milk round. This was a real one... I've suffered for my art.