Microsoft
Microsoft’s co-founder Bill Gates was much in news and was being mocked for stating that “two years from now, spam will be solved” (in 2004). The statement was made to a select group of World Economic Forum participants and Gates tried to win their trust with the statement.
It was reported that Microsoft has been having a poor reputation when it comes to the security and reliability of its products at the time. The company further claimed to save the user from spam messages which we received in bulk, every day. Perhaps, Gates's proclamations made him a laughing stock in the market, but it all stopped eventually. It might have taken more than the committed years to upgrade the system but the quantity of spam messages which reaches our mailbox has gone down over time.
The spam ‘problem’ which was stated by Gates in 2004 was a huge amount of emails from different sources which use to land in our inboxes day. These emails are indeed used to cover up massive space in our inboxes. This problem has now been taken care of, by the company and is being resolved to an extent.
It is to notice that email addresses in today’s time are witnessing very little spam, thanks to the anti-spam technology, which is quite effective.
Just like earlier, this time at Davos, Gates would be announcing that “two years from now, passwords will be solved”.
The password problem is another concern which has been affecting people for a long time now. Even there are studies which state that in today’s time, an average person has to remember around 100 passwords for the various systems- multiple apps (which need login), the websites which we use every day, multiple email accounts and more.
Certainly, it is impossible to remember so many passwords as a normal human. And at times, many users prefer to use the same people on multiple sites, which indeed makes it less secure. There are measures to be taken by the organisations but it certainly doesn't solve the biggest problem - the existence of the password.
To solve this concern, Fido (Fast Identity Online) alliance entered, which aims to “help reduce the world’s over-reliance on passwords”. Since 2013, Fido has been working to develop authentication protocols, making the login process easier and more secure.
Fido’s much-appreciated developments were about setting the standard to allow users to register and sign in to the OS, websites and applications without any need for a password.
But how?
Today, our smartphones have become a key for our authentication by unlocking the handset by using either a pin number or a biometric login. Certainly, this will be enough to authenticate you. No password is required.
This year on May 5, on world password day, Apple, Microsoft and Google announced their plans to implement Fido-compliant which is a passwordless sign-in process. The plan is to apply the concept across all of their smart devices- mobile, desktop, laptops and other browser platforms. It is claimed that the new update will be in use by May 2023 (next year).
Apple, Microsoft and Google are the tech giants of the world which control the majority of OS and browsers that we use every day.
