identity

You know those “emergency” email addresses you can use to get into your email and other accounts in case you're locked out? Make sure they're up-to-date. 

AI assistants continue to reinforce sexist stereotypes, but queering these devices could help reimagine their relationship to gender altogether.

Pakistan's national database encodes social expectations—like that every citizen has two married parents—and raises important questions about digital IDs.

You no longer need an ungainly string of characters to access your Windows PC or Xbox.

You no longer need a long string of characters to access Windows and Office 365.

Everyone hates the old ways of authentication. But while change is closer than ever, it comes with its own drawbacks. 

The company will launch a public preview of its identification platform this spring—and has already tested it at the UK's National Health Service.

Kenton Varda gets dozens of messages a day from Spanish-speakers around the world, all thanks to a Gmail address he registered 16 years ago.

First deny the problem, then say the solution is too expensive? The playbook here is all too familiar.

Why did my IMDb page say I made an appearance on Brooklyn Nine-Nine?

Opinion: Digital identification systems are meant to aid the marginalized. Actually, they're ripe for abuse.

Services increasingly rely on your phone number to know who you are—and that's increasingly a problem.

The Social Security number system is broken. And while fixing it will take a lot of work, there are ways to keep your identity more secure.

Most web companies want to attract as many users as possible. But they don't want scammers, spammers, and bots using their web applications. Companies use everything from email verification to IP address bans to increasingly complicated CAPTCHAs to keep problem users out of their systems. Starting today, web developers have a new option: the PhoneID Score, a new reputation tracking service from mobile security company TeleSign.

When it comes to Mr. Potato Head, his identity is something amorphous and hard to define. Wired Science blogger Samuel Arbesman ponders how, in the absence of his body -- or his body parts -- Mr. Potato Head is still Mr. Potato Head.

Mozilla thinks it's high time you stopped creating a new username and password for every site you want to use. To do that the company has launched a second beta of its Persona identity project. Now all you need to use Mozilla Persona is a Yahoo email account.

Last week the web lost coder and activist Aaron Swartz, but his website lives on. For now. Developer Dave Winer wants to make sure that Aaron’s site lives on forever. Winer believes that one way to do that is to “retire” the URL so that the content will last as long as the web does. Sadly, there’s currently no way to do that.

Twitter creator and Square CEO Jack Dorsey resurrects the old linguistic debate about one of the most pervasive words in software development -- the "user." There's no question the word "user" has largely negative origins, often being used to describing someone who wasn't creating anything, just "using" resources on the network. Unfortunately no one, including now Dorsey, has ever offered a compelling alternative.

Mozilla's Persona identity project has graduated from "experimental" to a beta release. Persona is a distributed login system that eliminates passwords and simplifies the task of managing online identities -- think OpenID without the hassle of OpenID. While it is still a beta, Mozilla says Persona is "ready to use for authentication."

In a 2000 paper that Google Scholar shows cited 1,683 times and counting, Nobel Laureate and Berkeley economist George Akerlof writes that in married couples, “When men do all the outside work, they contribute on average about 10 percent of housework. But as their share of outside work falls, their share of housework rises to […]

The Persona project is Mozilla's latest effort to move identity management from the web to the browser. The Firefox of the future may not only remember your passwords, but handle the entire login process for you.

In the initial Google+ sign-up process, questionable profile names were flagged by Google's algorithmic recognition system, and users were prompted to try again. The same system will still recognize alternate names, but will begin to allow specific exceptions like nicknames, maiden names and names with alternative spelling.

When Google launched Search plus Your World on Tuesday, we expected the Google+-aided personalized search engine to draw serious criticism on many fronts: privacy, security, antitrust concerns, the fate of Facebook and Google+, whether G+ results would steal traffic from news sites, and even whether it would strengthen the “filter bubble” or (by giving users […]

The real power of Christopher "moot" Poole's message about reclaiming identity is that it's not just about fighting what doesn't work; it's about building and supporting what does.