Circa 2000 fingerprint reader — one of the earliest commercially available units, released long before they became commonplace on phones, etc.

A bit of a gimmick as far as most were concerned at the time — who would ever need to unlock their computer with their fingerprint when a password would work just as well?

Intriguingly, I’ve never used it; as soon as I (ha) got my hands on it, I thought to myself that, just maybe, I didn’t want my fingerprint stored on a hackable computer — so, I kept it as a curiosity but never got it out of the box.

Digital signatures trouble me as well — once they’ve been lifted from the database, it’s child’s play to impersonate you digitally with your actual signature simply by passing the hashed value to the system, indicating that, yes, it really was you holding the digital pen.

Moreover, given that my own signature is never exactly the same each time I write it, there has to be leeway in the recognition process to allow for discrepancies … meaning the security of the process is uncertain and less than 100% — whilst that may also be the case with human validation based on comparison to the signature on the back of a bank card, at least a human being sees me perform the action in real time and can verify that it isn’t simply the best of many attempts by someone/something else.

I’m not even keen on public encryption keys: there’s one of mine out there that I’ll almost certainly never be able to revoke because the medium on which it was backed up has since been destroyed — so, I’ll never be able to revoke it, meaning that someone gaining access to it in the wild could create a file of some kind, encrypt and sign it with my key … and I’d have a hard time proving it wasn’t me.

All these technological solutions are lovely in theory but, in practice, a lot of them are potentially more trouble than they’re worth and, like nuclear power stations, whilst the chance of a disaster striking may not be terribly high at any given moment in time, when it does strike, the (ha) fallout is much more devastating than it would have been with simpler (or even no) such ‘solutions’.

In the same way that I don’t take up opportunities to make a fortune playing ‘Russian roulette’, I don’t live near nuclear power plants by choice, not because I expect any of them to explode/leak but because I don’t consider whatever advantages there might be to living there to outweigh the negative if they do, and don’t take work that would require me to do so — sure I miss out on a few lucrative opportunities, perhaps, but it’s worth it to me for the peace of mind.

So, I have it, but it’s still sitting, shrink-wrapped, in its box … and probably wouldn’t work with today’s versions of most OSes either 😉