First Day of the Quarter (Aka time for billings): Good.
Still in the middle of midterms: Bad
Birthday was last week: Good
Work has been busy: Bad
Weather is getting better: Good
Snowed yesterday: Bad
One website almost finished ahead of schedule: Good
One website extremely late: Bad
One new sausage brand at the grocery store (La fresca): Delicious
One fancy root beer brand disappeared (Hansen’s): Terrible.
A few more weeks and everything will open up. In the mean time, I’ve got more going on than I can manage. Or rather, just barely what I can manage. It’s such a change from last week – having some time to take the occasionally nap and play games with friends spoiled me. Now it’s back to the grind for another month or so.
Lacking enough time to write, I’m left trying to come up with ideas to follow up with later. That’s not quite the same thing, but it has a certain productivity to it. Right now I’m trying to figure out a pseudo-viable methodology for using public key encryption in place of social security numbers. I had the idea that in the future some process of establishing identity would be needed beyond an easily lost or stolen 9 digit number. Plenty of stories have gone off of something like embedded ID tags, or DNA identification or something like that. I’m working under the assumption that civil rights remain a concern going into the future. Considering that we don’t even have a national ID card in America, it seems generally plausible that we’d find most technological forms of identification frightening.
Along those lines, I started to consider other digital methods of identification. One of the more common methods is certification – when there are locks in the bottom corner of websites that’s usually what’s going on. The short version is that a certificate authority gives the website a certificate with a key that gets matched up with the authority. That way when a person visits a website they 1. expect to see the certificate and 2. can match the code on the certificate with the third party to establish that the website is indeed legit. It’s not a foolproof system ad I’ve skipped over most of the specifics, but it is a process of establishing identity beyond the simple 1-1 matching of an ID number.
In regards to most person to person encryption, the general format is a public/private key system. Wikipedia can explain this better than I can. In regards to social security numbers, I imagine a world where individuals have both a public key that they can freely give out and a private key which absolutely must be kept 100% secret. When dealing with banks and similar establishments, they can use the public key to encrypt they information which then gets opened with the private key. If the individual in question can reveal correctly the contents of the message than the bank can be fairly assured that the individual on the other end is the person they are looking for (or that they have the private key at least.) Again the process relies on remember and shared numbers, but it would decrease the amount that a person has to publicly reveal the number that’s actually important. A setup like this should allow individuals to only share their public key substantially decreasing the risk footprint of identity theft and similar fraud.
Once I can figure out the more viable specifics of a system like this, I can try to construct the infrastructure necessary to maintain it and then extrapolate that across the world I’m trying to write. It’s a convoluted process, but made easier by the low barrier to entry. I don’t actually have to make anything legitimate, just something plausible. The specifics are too complex for me anyhow. The only real task is figuring out how in the hell the DMV would be able to work with a system like that. Yep, I spend my free time daydreaming about improvements to the DMV. Yes, I am insane.
And that’s all I’ve got to say this week. My piece of the internet is the gameplay trailer for LA Noire. This is the net game I’m looking forward to outside of Arkham Asylum 2. That, however, is a sequel. This is new altogether. Exciting stuff!
