Movies I watched today

Movies I watched today: Outland (featuring Sean Connery) - bit of 1980's scifi wonderland- computers with green type and vector graphics combined with shotgun toting on a moon base (on one of Jupiter's moons no less) and a healthy dose of video-phoning.

It all made me think about the durability of sci-fi ideas- why does video calling remain such a common element within sci-fi when it's available now, cheaply (I can buy a £40 phone on pay-as-you-go with video calling now) and no-one shows no interest in it? People (who know better than I do) argue that it's because video phoning is a visually-rich movie toy which makes it good for directors and story tellers. Others argue the other half of the story by saying that in reality it's not convenient to video call- you can't do it on the move and it's not really benefical to show everyone where you are or even who you are.

I'd agree with both arguments- but I'd like to turn them on their head a little bit. Visually rich may be frustrating now- but in the future it could be a security perk. VOIP and IM has opened us up to a whole new level of spoofing and identity fraud- whereas video-calling has brought us a whole new way of verifying the identity of the caller.

It's still next to impossible to generate on-the-fly life like speaking avatars that could fool a human being in conversation so video could easily secure your identity when making a call- if you don't recognise the caller, you can simply ignore them.

Which makes me wonder- why don't we use pictures more in cryphtography and more in general with communication software. Imagine an IM app where you buddy list had to have pictures of the person (and not just a picture or motto) and showed them in a room together for multi chat- it's simple enough to do. Why don't we use a digital photography as hash for all our passwords (as long as we don't share that specific photograph too much!)?

My final year disertation looked at picture sequences being used for passwords, rather than key sequences users would pick "hot-spots" or sequences of pictures from a grid rather than type in input- and it proved be a significantly better way of working- there's a good deal of studies looking at similar stuff (including Microsoft stuff if I remember rightly) so I'm amazed no one's gone commerical with a full product yet - maybe if I'm wrong someone can tell me who does it in reality?

As for the movie- a great bit of sci-fi fluff - nothing too substainal, but far from awful.