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If you have different passwords on all the sites you use, it's hard to remember which ones belong where, and using the same password everywhere is a security risk. Passcenter.com, a service that securely logs you on to all your sites, doesn't ask for a password at all: Instead, you click on people's faces to enter.
Faces? Yep. The human brain, it turns out, is really good at remembering what people look like. When I created my Passcenter account, the screen started looking like the Hollywood Squares populated by cast members of The Real World. Then I practiced recognizing my faces until I could pick them out of a crowd. Now, when I log in, I select the right Passfaces amid a Benetton ad campaign's worth of mug shots. It's spooky how quickly and consistently I find them.
But like so many cool tech ideas, something got lost in the translation. First of all, downloading faces takes longer than simply entering passwords and clicking Go. And what should be the service's superconvenient bonus - that you can keep all your URLs on its site - turns sour when you realize that Passcenter hasn't got a way to organize your bookmarks, unless alphabetical order is your idea of organized.
The server also seems erratic about accepting logins and new registrations, which hardly makes you wanna entrust it with all your usernames and passwords. Customer support is slow, and its technicians blamed certain browser/OS incompatibilities for my troubles. So I tried to register on several other machines, but never achieved 100 percent reliability.
Still, I'm convinced there's hope for this idea (so is RSA's Jim Bidzos and other investors in the site's creator, ID Arts). For now, Passcenter is fun to play around with; given a more robust Web site and a higher-bandwidth world, it may become part of our everyday lives.
Passcenter:www.passcenter.com. IDArts:info@id-arts.com.
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