It was the most
ferocious battle ever witnessed between man and machine - and it was over a
password.
The Oscar night was over, but Hollywood was cloaked in
gloom. Not because Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t win, but because the silver
screen’s biggest money-spinning fantasy ever – of machines taking over the
earth – had now become reality, thanks to technology.
The mobile-friendly grill had been invented and was touted
as the best thing since reality cooking shows. The grill was an expert cook
itself, and virtually took over the cooking process, to the point of
instructing humans as to how to go about it. Then came mattresses to sleep on,
equipped with artificial intelligence and sensors. They could track the various
body functions of the sleeper and send a report to his mobile or computer. They
were also smart enough to adjust themselves, to facilitate better sleep or
offer a body massage. Even the toothbrush became smart and could be controlled through
an app via Bluetooth (no word play here). It could measure various parameters
inside one’s mouth, from the average duration brushed, to the teeth that were desperately
gnawing for attention.
The smart devices then launched a massive recruitment drive
- by hacking every other gadget in sight, including smart TVs and
refrigerators. The ultimate objective was to rule over mankind. "This will
be our brush with destiny," said the toothbrush excitedly. "All we
need to do is steal their passwords, and we will have total control over them.
The human race cannot survive without checking its mail or Facebook account,
even for an hour."
Soon databases of leading service providers were hacked. Adobe
lost around 150 million user passwords, Twitter had over 55,000 passwords
leaked online and LinkedIn lost almost 6.5 million passwords to the hackers. One
of the most shocking revelations that came out during this hackathon was man’s choice
of passwords. "Can you imagine 123456 being the most commonly used
password?" asked the mattress. "What about passwords like qwerty,
111111 and 'iloveyou'?" asked the TV. "Just when one thought they had
evolved from having 'password' as their password... And they call me the idiot
box."
Meanwhile, man planned to combat this threat innovatively,
using geographical passwords. The password would incorporate key information
about the physical location of a user, like altitudes, latitudes and
longitudes, and mix them up with random characters. This posed two serious
problems. Now, not only were their passwords being stolen, but their location
was also being given away. And two, they had to disclose their password when reporting
it stolen, and since most men lied about where they were to their wife or
girlfriend - sometimes both - they ended up revealing their real location,
which led to a host of other problems.
The next innovation was a password revolution called Gotcha,
which converted a password into a series of inkblots of varied colours. A
descriptive term would be assigned by the user to each of these inkblots and
the next time he logged in, he would have to match each inkblot with the right word
for successful entry. However, when users began to call helpline to complain that
the cursor was leaking and that their computer screens were getting smudged with
ink, man had to look for an alternate way to beat the bots. Finally, he decided
to unleash his ultimate weapon - the body odour password. This required sensors
with biometric capabilities that would correctly identify a user's body odour
and give him access to the system. For a brief while, the devices were stumped.
Earlier, they couldn’t go anywhere near the users because of their body odour –
now, they couldn’t go anywhere near their devices either, because they were
clueless as to what the password was.
The smart machines then did a smart thing - they appointed a
consultant, an old computer that had been retired from a leading FMCG company. The
experienced machine gave them a whiff of an idea to neutralise all types of
body odour and thus nullify all odour passwords. And that was how the deodorant
came into being.
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