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Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

The big thing RMS misses in that article is all the bio-identification that has been happening the last couple years.

Dan is going to get caught because the machine takes a picture of him when he logs in with a password instead of the fingerprint reader, cause you know can't have a PC without a camera pointed at the user..

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On the upside, that's literally the only scenario where hackers typing on computers wearing balaklavas would actually happen.

Damn, we got the fingerless gloves wrong, though. Didn't think about hiding our fingerprints.

Still waiting for a scenario where two persons typing on the same keyboard at the same time as an effective solution will happen. edit: typo

It's more sinister than that. Dan is going to get caught because his typing frequency, style and mouse movements are unique in the whole world. Moreover, he usually works on a computer with unique hardware that can be fingerprinted by some silly W3C standards already. Camera would be a bonus "just to be sure". We will soon need typing/movements randomizers that would add tiny delays/perturbations to our typing/mouse movement to fool some advanced Deep Learning pattern extractor. Using those would place Dan on some "no loan" blacklist though.

For an article written in 1997, it's pretty damn prescient. The article also isn't focused on surveillance. I would argue that modern bio-identification was at least somewhat predicted by 1984 (though Orwell assumed that humans would be doing the identification, not computers).

Not getting caught led Dan to question if the bio-id AI was really that intelligent and helped release thousands of wrongfully convicted people 20 years later!

If only there was a way to condition users to have a picture taken of them every time they unlock their device ...

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