bloxlox

The only thread I've found on the possibility of replacing Lock Screens with what we propose appears on Quora, and exclusively relating to Android devices. I reach out to the two most promising correspondents, one resident in India (at least originally so) and another who goes by the tag 'Assistant'. Only after posing the question regards the feasibility of this Lock Screen substitution ~ which I view as the Holy Grail ~ do I realise that I've been writing to a bot. For a guy raised in the 1960s, this was like having asked a department-store mannekin for directions to the rest-room... ... or waking to discover you'd made love to an inflatable. (Ed. Colin has never knowingly made love to an inflatable)

What has been missing from our progress to date has been a means to leverage the increased size and resolution of smartphone and tablet touch-screens to implement a more secure means of access altogether. The original vision called for the substitution of passcode key-pads on smartphones, and I don't see why that should remain beyond our grasp. Accordingly the above means (featuring a selection from among US presidents rather than your own cohort) would encode the sequence 1-8-9-4-5-4-5-9 by substituting for the first nine keys on a smartphone's start-up screen. The advantage of moon-shot projects is that they have a focal point. If it is looking at all feasible, therefore, then you'll see news of progress towards that end right here. Meanwhile an outline of the quest to replace the conventional screen-lock appears at the URL below. Why publish? Because we need more secure ways of protecting our ID: https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/7143

Well they said we should do things that don't scale (and then scale them), and here's one that doesn't at the kitchen table but would given the appropriate lines of code. We touched on how the concept might be used to educate and amuse, and here's a test of your knowledge of US presidential history. (Don't use it as a part of the citizenship test, or you'll end up with none.) Click on the link below for a fast-track to the relevant part of the website. Proceeding backwards from Joe Biden ~ as I guess many of you may want to come November ~ see if you can identify each of the previous forty-five US presidents in sequence. Pinpoint the wrong image at any stage and you'll be back at the start (tho' the nerds will already have spotted that the browser back-button will avoid a re-sit). Even as quizmaster (and despite compiling the test) I frequently fail it. Anyone getting from start to finish without the assistance of Google should therefore go directly to H...

We didn't make the cut for the upcoming summer school but off the bat I'd like to thank those ~ and they know who they are as the principal used to say ~ who saw the potential in what we're planning to develop. It's been a journey and I've watched so many Michael and Dalton how-to videos that they feel like a part of the family. There are a few takeaways from the experience and for anyone considering making an application, then for what it's worth this is what I came away with. First up, do you really want it to happen? Many lottery winners regret it happened, and backing a start-up from your own point of view is on a par with a marriage... in fact statistically it's likely to require a longer-lived commitment. Most people undervalue the life they are leading, and over-value the alternatives. Second, and with the marriage comparison still in view, is it really the one? Inventors as I know to my cost are promiscuous and the likes of Edison, Tesla and indeed M...

I'm a gambling man, and take a punt on someone who contacted the venture (besides Calvin) from the get-go. When he may have been revising for examinations, instead he was coding apps for Californian start-ups... as a consequence, his identity has had to be block-locked.

Getting into hotel rooms is big business, and I think it should be done with phones which (a) nobody leaves the room without (b) is ultimately more secure and (c) does not require single-use plastics. I haven't heard back from either of the smart front- and office-door lock companies in the UK, which comes as no surprise at all. Unless you've literally something in hand, the majority of companies (and people fro that matter) hope that'll you'll at best die, or at least go away. And I'm doing neither.* Mwah ha ha, mwah ha ha, MWAH HA HA HA HA HA. [Ed. You might want to clear that with the guy upstairs?]

Logging into Blogger, parent Google invites me to replace passwords ~ which it like me consider to be on the way out and barely mourned in their passing ~ with a passkey. I think, without taking the plunge, this means that by logging into a screen-locked Mac, you're through the portal into the delights of Google with nairy a password to be seen. The warning they disclose a little further down the scroll is the age-old problem that, should your device be stolen (chances ever high) and your password into the Mac be observed prior (not unknown either) then Google's playground and all of your accounts therein are a free ride. What Google are betting on ~ and we've seen them admit that the Holy of Holies in the form of their ranked search system may be stormed by GPT-style chats with answers at their finger-tips ~ is that this dovetails well with stronger biometric access by way of Face ID and fingerprints. And, I like to think, our own form of 'Other Face ID'. It may be...

It was the originator of Linux who said that all ventures begin as military applications before evolving into commercial enterprises and eventually becoming entertainment. As we circle potential apps for this technology like carrion crows, I think that it is as much a process of education as any and that the best way to educate is to entertain. Look at the gallery above, and I think you'd agree that even US citizens would be hard pushed to spot the president? Or at least without Googling it? It's far right (though I'm sure he wasn't), middle row in the form of Grover Cleveland. Now what would be fun would be to navigate the whole series of US presidents in this way, with a prize (or at least the satisfaction) at the end. (There is potentially a financial interest at stake, as the New York Times' purchase of UK author's 'Wordle' has demonstrated.) What is immediately apparent however is two things. The first is that I don't want to spend my life trawl...

I read the bio by Surbhi Sarna, which features in the title of this blog-post, who sold her medical start-up to Boston Scientific for a lot of money. That's not the cover, by the way, but more on that later. There are two main takeaways from the read, and the first is to dispel any notion of overnight success. Any enterprise like this has to feel, to borrow a medical term, like a daily pain in the ass. But beyond this lesson is how such enterprise brings out both the best and the worst in people. Beside the regular betrayals of one sort or another, there would be frequent 'ghostings' and any number of people emerging from the woodwork at the mere scent of success. It is this human, all too human side of the story that educates moreso than the literal ins-and-outs of sending video cameras top fallopian tubes... which never really floated my boat. Ghosting is something that I imagine would be relatively unknown among our parents generation, although whether it is more attribu...

Conventional keyed locks as often as not being substituted by key-pads, some with biometrics. Although in view of the fact we've all a key-pad in our pocket that includes biometrics too, it seems only a matter of time before the smartphone substitutes for a facility like this as it has for cameras and all else. The issue then becomes the reliability of keyed passcodes themselves. And the difference between pictures of people or objects that only you'd be expected to recognise becomes philosophical. For numbers are broadly universal, a language everyone speaks and as such eminently communicable. Whereas memories or personal cyphers are wholly individual, and altogether less able to be passed along. Which potentially makes them a better key-pad than numbers, or that matter letters, that are as easy as... ABC?  

I decide to reach out to the physical world as we continue to contemplate options in the virtual. And it's a story that dates back to 1799, and this company supplying trade across the Atlantic less than twenty-five years after the founding of the USA. In fact they claim to have invented the modern-day safe as we know it, Jim, as soon as 1850. Nonetheless I'm here to see if ~ as we look to replace passwords and passcodes ~ we can do much the same with physical locks? These are everywhere around us, but frequently overlooked as say the water is by fish. Though with much of our world (and especially its better-looking parts) becoming one great Airbnb rental, a move to replace locks requiring keys with those using passcodes continues apace. In fact they've gone beyond it too, at a price, by providing hotel-room safes with locks that can be opened by a credit card. So don't lose that wallet, or much else will be following. I've stayed in many hotels around the world and ...

Our first app, which we anticipate rolling out sooner rather than later this month, will feature a pin-pad recognition of faces that results in an authentication token in this case in the form of a QR code. This is more common than you might think and getting commoner, although the single case most of you will be familiar with will be at airline check-in, where a barcode will as often as not substitute for a printed boarding pass. Authentication of who we are can be resolved by three methods: something we ARE like a fingerprint, something we KNOW like a familiar face or PIN code and something we HAVE like a token or ID card. Increasingly and perhaps sadly, more than one such means will be necessary and this is why our app will be applicable to a variety of transactional scenarios. The token in the photo for instance shows the Swiss/German TAN code (Transaction Authentication Number) used for banking applications. From what I can see, having logged on to online banking the user is p...

The link in the previous post is not working as it should, nor is this typeface. I’m in a Costa coffee, screaming at myself to get this fixed. To our customers I can only apologise, confess that it spoiled the taste of my sausage roll and promise that the issue will be rectified within twenty-four hours. (Where did that title come from, you ask? Well Pierce Brosnan famously played Bond and an Irish friend told me that his younger brother, back in their home village, was known as double ‘O’ six-and-a-half.)

If Peter Thiel is to believed ~ and he's a very believable guy ~ then every worthwhile idea has to be a solution to some problem. Much of my past experience being with various forms of transport, I'm not altogether convinced. Many of the most useful technologies like lasers and microwaves came by happenstance. Meanwhile pioneers of steam locomotives, helicopters and the motor-car did not necessarily view their prototypes as useful so much as entertaining. For example, the popular reaction to the car was that, whilst it looked fun it cost the Earth (it has literally since) and was not needed in view of the fact we all had a horse. Similarly, one of the original manufacturers of the helicopter in the US admitted freely that he'd no idea of quite how people would use it. In fact the first use anyone found for his machines was to disperse the frost from cherry orchards in California. Nonetheless, problems provide for focus and so at the kitchen table this morning on a pad (a pa...

The following Q and A from a popular source answers many of the questions we've put to ourselves recently, and serves as a general introduction to the crew. Sit back, relax and enjoy the ride...   Why do you want to do this startup?  What are your personal goals here, both financial and non-financial? I want one of my many ideas to be an outstanding success and something that my son could (but likely won’t) pursue. Calvin got in touch because secure access floats his boat, and Pete’s up for any adventure. Kenan’s a coder but one who wants to be more his own man. What will our roles and titles be? How will we divide responsibilities? Who will be CEO?  I bags CEO, and Calvin I think mentioned CTO or CIO. Whichever one of these he’s not, Kenan’s the other one. Pete doesn’t mind what people call him. How will we split up equity? We’ve drafted this, and it was around a third each for anyone whose title included a ‘C’ and the remainder with Pete and poss one other. Where...

Let no-one imagine that there's nothing going on here, as currently we (and that's the Royal We, as it's way above my pay-grade) are investigating various build platforms to enable a beta-product to be assembled. Coding is, thankfully, more a drag-and-drop exercise than ever. Our target is a user experience that is more of a joy than having to recall something like  mE+iDlw@ltrl?RA4&0e_  (thank you Norton, we love it) or else copy-and-paste it to a sticky as I do, or let the password manager do the filling in for you in the hope you'll never lose a device and its passcode. Of late I've been investigating the ergonomics of people-carrying drones, involving the consideration of the size of stuff like your ass... not your's personally you understand? Now I'm at the finger-tip level, and in the way our thumbs made Blackberrys a thing, the scope of our tiny touches now controls our lives. I like the tic-tac-toe keypad of nine faces, not least because I came u...

The business is bigger than I ever could have imagined. More importantly it's currently getting bigger... seeing how clay pipes and whalebone corsets were both big once too. These people are based in Toronto and there's many an acronym there that's new to me. BYOD anyone? Bring your own device (to work) apparently. They point out that nearly half of the devices used in workplaces are unknown to IT or security, that 80% of businesses allow personal devices at work and there are twice as many apps used in the workplace as there were five years ago.