Further Adventures in Technology

I spent most of my Saturday morning grading essays for an online class I teach, because that’s the kind of wild man I am these days. It’s one of those classes where the only real contact I have with students is grading their essays – everything else is front-loaded into the class site and they proceed at their own pace through the class, turning in essays as they go.

I’m not sure how I became a tech guy as far as classes go. It seems to have just happened gradually over time. I am the proverbial frog boiling in a digital soup.

I’m not much of a technological person. Computers are just black boxes where the internet is stored as far as I know, and don’t even get me started on the mysteries of what most of the “apps” on my phone are doing there. As far as I can tell their main purpose is to extract my email and sell it to spammers, which they do quite well. I am still getting spam advertisements in Hungarian from this summer, for example, because I had to put one of these apps on my phone in order to ride the trams in Budapest. Every so often I will copy the text of one of them and paste it into Google Translate to see whether it is congratulating me on my recent purchase of a bridge over the Danube or something similar, but so far it’s mostly been increasingly desperate attempts to get me to renew my tram pass. And you know, next time I am in Budapest I definitely will! But not now.

Most of my current confusion regarding technology these days seems to center around the various security measures that devices are implementing in order to make sure that only Russian intelligence officers have access to my accounts because they’re probably better at remembering my passwords than I am, after all.

Why the Kremlin would want to follow me on Instagram is kind of an open question, particularly since I have never actually posted anything there, but I have faith that answers will appear in due time.

Both my desktop computer at home (yes, kids, I still have one of those, now get off my lawn) and my phone have biometric security systems in place. My computer came with a keyboard that has a button on it where you put your fingertip (you do get to choose which finger) and it reads your fingerprint and logs you in. My phone relies on its camera for that, scanning my face to determine if it’s really me or not.

I wasn’t all that thrilled about either of these things, but they seem to work most of the time and that’s fine. It is a nuisance having to pick up my phone and stare directly into it in order to log into anything rather than just leaving it on my desk and tapping out a password, but as problems go these days it’s relatively minor after all.

The thing that I don’t get is that every so often both of these devices require me to enter my password in order for these biometric security systems to keep working.

Why?

I’m not sure how a random selection of characters (including at least one capital letter, one number, one “special” character, one Marvel character, three characters from the last movie I saw prior to setting this password, and the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem) is more secure than my fingerprint or my face. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t I have to use the biometrics to keep the password working?

There are probably technical reasons why they make me do it this way and I am sure that if someone were to explain them to me I would stare blankly at them and eventually say “That’s nice” in a vague sort of way until they gave up, so I’ll probably just live with the mystery of it.

In the meantime, I kind of enjoy giving my computer the finger.