Dear Reader:
As I was lazily fixing a bowl of grits yesterday morning…I turned the television on to the CBS Sunday Morning Show and I found myself putting my bowl down to concentrate harder on the first story of the morning.
It was about passwords on our computers. I definitely, like most Americans, have a love/hate relationship with mine. If I just had one…I think I could handle it…but every thing under the sun, these days, requires a password and my feeble brain simply can’t remember them…the only success I have is with programs that have encoded my password so I don’t have to type it in each time to get to whatever I need from that website.
As I watched the segment on the Sunday Morning Show on passwords and new ideas for the future…I was amazed again at man’s ability to create such innovations. It just makes me sad that we seem to be able to come up with solutions that make sense in technology but still can’t find a way to love and accept each other as equal connections to our Creator. Something is wrong with this picture.
Apparently, according to the show’s sources, Bill Gates predicted that personal passwords would be obsolete in less than twenty years and computer wizards today already are seeing his prediction coming true.
(There was one thing about using our old password system that made me smile. It was the fact that most people have a personal story behind their selection of letters/words and numbers. Many are sentimental…and LOVE is used more than any other word within a password…leaving HATE far behind in the dust. Let’s hear it for love!) Mine are very sentimental too…gratefulness for life with all kinds of upbeat nouns and special marks.
After the program I took my cold bowl of grits and munched absent-mindedly while researching the topic I had just watched. It was even more amazing! The President of Bionym (Andrews D’Souza) presides over a technology company that has designed the Nymi…a wearable bracelet-like device that is able to make our prior millions of passwords floating around obsolete. Here is how it works.
Your Heart May Soon Be Your Only Password
The Nymi is a wearable device that measures your heartbeat and uses it as a unique biometric to identify you. You put it on once a day, touch it with your opposite hand for a few seconds, it measures your heartbeats, it confirms that you – the rightful owner are wearing it, and then it’s able to communicate that identity to whatever system or service you use.
So, what we’re hoping is that it means the end of things like passwords and pin numbers. But it could even replace things like car keys, house keys, credit cards, and boarding passes. These are all different proxies for identity. We think that a wearable device that’s paired with your biometric can be a much easier, more secure form of user identification.
Some companies have gone to finger print images as an ID prerogative but since we have a tendency to leave our finger prints on everything we touch, it would not be too hard to track down our finger prints by someone wanting to crack our code.
But heart-beats are different as we see explained in this excerpt.
Everybody’s got a unique heartbeat. It’s based on the size and shape of your heart and the orientation of your valves, your physiology. It doesn’t change unless you have a major cardiac event like a heart attack. Your heart can beat faster but electrically your beats look the same. So, whether it beats faster or slower, it doesn’t really matter. It’s really about the shape of the waves, and what that signal looks like when it comes off your heart.
So until tomorrow…Don’t you see the irony in man’s on-going search for security in an insecure world? It always goes back to the heart. If we let the heart lead us through life, then we are secure that we are leading the type of life God wants.
“Today is my favorite day” Winnie the Pooh
*This weekend the heart ruled with Rutledge and Lachlan…as Aunt Kaitlyn and Uncle Tommy entertained them all day Saturday (in the great outdoors which is every little boy’s playground of choice) while Walsh and Mollie set up for an oyster roast they threw. Then yesterday afternoon/evening I kept the boys for awhile while Walsh and Mollie got out on their delayed Valentines date…lots of hearts in charge! Thanks Tommy and Kaitlyn for all the loving help!
Walsh had put up a “Swurfer” swing which is fabulous…had to try it out…not brave enough to stand in it yet…but soon. The new fire pit for the oyster roast was in the perfect setting.
