Yahoo Wants To Secure Accounts With Your Friends' Pictures

[Guest]

Your exposure on social networks can enable a rather unusual solution for general computing applications.

Yahoo Wants To Secure Accounts With Your Friends' Pictures : Read more

 

[Camikazi]

OMG this is gonna suck for those 3000 friend people.

 

[olaf]

what about those that are Alergic to Facebook , like myself

 

[N.Broekhuijsen]

[citation][nom]olaf[/nom]what about those that are Alergic to Facebook , like myself[/citation]
Good thing we're allergic to Yahoo! as well.

 

[steelbox]

Facebook already uses this, when you connect from several diferent computers or using Tor often, facebook will show you a picture of one of your friends and ask who he is. Has Yahoo taken a training course with Apple?

 

[snowzsan]

You'd still have to enter text...

Not only that, but even on my Facebook friends list I have a few who enter completely fictional names like "Tom 'Sawyer' Phillips" or something equally as mundane. That would make entering their names correctly either extremely difficult or downright impossible.

In other words, this is completely stupid and useless. I'm usually optimistic about cool new things but this... You just can't account for human stupidity.

 

[Inferno1217]

big Brother?

 

[digiex]

This feature is already in Facebook, if you forgot your password and want to reset it, It ask you to identify some of your friends' pictures.

The only downside is that some people in Facebook tags some objects not associated with the person's face.

So if happens that an "apple" comes out as your friend's picture how will you identify that person.

 

[ravewulf]

The problem of having a lot of friends is easily solved by using a user approved list of close friends. Different friends using the same picture can be filtered out by computing how similar their pictures are.

The bigger security problem is how relatively public your friend list is. If it isn't outright public, friends of friends can probably still see it. Any friends you have in common or your friends themselves would be able to get by this with relative ease. In the extreme case you and your friends could be relatively well known to the public. The security is essentially 0 if your friends are famous. This is even true in a small community. Tom's Hardware staff for example. If they are all friends and their profiles are public it is much more of a security risk than benefit.

 

[pharoahhalfdead]

If I don't even give factual information about myself, what makes them think I'm gonna drop a dime on my friends? lol

 

[pharoahhalfdead]

If I don't even give factual information about myself, what makes them think I'm gonna drop a dime on my friends? lol. I'm not as naive as they look.

 

[Guest]

i smell patent lawsuit or denial

facebook vs yahoo

 

[eddieroolz]

Brilliant, though this approach may be a security risk in itself.

 

[majudhu]

what if the guy on the picture is hijack....

 

[husker]

Close friends could know your other friends. How is this secure?

 

[Burodsx]

So Facebook uses something like this to unlock your account, and it sucks. People post pictures of all kinds of crap. "Who is in this photo" *it's a picture of a cartoon...*

 

[LukeCWM]

I read about something like this more than ten years ago in a fiction book. A company used it for secure door locks: you're shown pictures of 9 people, one of which you use frequently, but the people are wearing different outfits in different settings. You choose the one you recognize and can open the door. The theory is that it is very hard for people to reliably distinguish one person for another when they don't know the people, and things like outfits and hair color and ethnicity are out of the equation.