A legitimate alternative to passwords?

| Tech Sanity Check: has a commemtary about yet another Multi-factor Authentication scheme.

vidoop has this interesting scheme for multi-factor. The interesting twist in this case is that the scheme has the potential to be based more on how you think than a known fact. You might select a sequence of pictures containing boats, airplanes, and cars. The theme could be transportation, the colour blue or aluminium.

They aren't there yet - it seems their current scheme relies on you thinking they way they do. But it does strike me as an improvement over static images.

Shared Items

If this works out right, you should now see a shared items feed near the top of this page. What are shared items? Well many sites produce a summary of their content in a form that can easily be syndicated - that is consumed by other sites, or applications. Often referred to as a 'feed' or an 'RSS feed'. RSS is a particular protocol used to implement this feature. ATOM is another such protocol, although they often get lumped together and called RSS.

So what can you do with it? There are many ways by which you can consume these feeds. Internet Explorer 7 has such a feature built in. So does my.yahoo. My favourite mechanism is Google Reader.

If you know somebody who reads a lot of internet content, you may wish you could 'read over their shoulder' every time they say 'Hmm. That's interesting!' Well that is exactly what Google reader shared items let us do. If I find something if interest, I can mark it 'shared', and it will then show up on my shared items feed. If you'd rather just look at a web page of the same items, you can do that instead.

There is one thing I would like to be able to do, that 'shared items' doesn't allow. And that is to make a comment on an item I share. Well maybe we don't need that. That's what this blog is for!

Have great day.