computer parts

In an old school gaming party to end all parties, Google's new deep Q-network (DQN) algorithm is likely to mop the floor with you at Breakout or Space Invaders, but maybe take a licking at Centipede. Provided with only the same inputs as a human player and no previous real-world knowledge, DQN uses reinforcement learning to learn new games, and in some cases, develop new strategies. Its designers argue that this kind of general learning algorithm can crossover into discovery making in other fields.
The only inputs that the team from Google DeepMind, London, gave the DQN agent were the raw screen pixels, the set of available actions and game score, before letting it loose on 49 Atari 2600 games to see how it fared. These included well known favorites like Breakout, Pong, Space Invaders and Q'bert, side-scrolling shooters, such as River Raid, sports sims like Boxing and Tennis, and 3D car racer Enduro.
The researchers say that DQN performed at more than 75 percent of the level of a professional games tester for over half the games, and that in 43 cases surpassed any existing linear algorithm for learning that game. It performed best in Breakout, Video Pinball, Star Gunner and Crazy Climber, while DQN's worst games included the likes of Asteroids, Gravitar, Montezuma's Revenge, and Private Eye – but really, who was ever good at Gravitar?
A key feature of the DQN's algorithm is what the research team likens to humans revisiting and learning during rest periods, like sleep. In "experience replay" DQN reviewed stored games during its training phase. The researchers say this function was critical to DQN's success, with the algorithm's performance dropping significantly when it was disabled.
DQN is distinctly different from previous notable game playing agents, such as IBM's Deep Blue, as this new algorithm represents machine learning from a blank slate, with no prior definitions, rules, or models. Its creators say such algorithms could help make sense of complex large-scale data and be used in a wide variety of fields, including climate science, physics, medicine and genomics and potentially even providing insights into how humans learn.
Of course, it could also help Google to create new products and improve on existing ones, like taking an "OK Google" request much more complex than a query about the weather, and developing actionable results.
Google's blog entry, linked below, contains a video originally published in Nature and depicts the yawningly-slow first 100 games of DQN failing to even return the ball in Breakout, to learning how to tunnel through to the top of the bricks.
The research was published this week in Nature

Windows 8 was a nightmare for many consumers from day one, and largely still is. Microsoft took a risk by releasing Windows 8 hoping to lead the touch-based device market into the future. However, it was met with resistance from most users, even after the release of three major updates for the OS. Here's a look at the annoyances of Windows 8 that are gone and won't be missed in Windows 10.

When Windows 8 was first launched, the biggest complaint was the lack of a Start menu. Instead, it had a Start screen with a bunch of app tiles on it. The first Windows 8.1 update brought back a Start button, but no menu. The Start screen in Windows 10 is completely gone and is replaced by a new Start menu, which can be toggled full-screen and back. It does have elements of the Modern UI, but you can customize it how you like, and even get rid of Modern-style apps if you want.

Corner-based navigation

Corner-based navigation makes sense on a touch device, but not a traditional computer. It's irritating to have touch features like the recent apps bar (shown above) pop up because your mouse pointer is in the corner of the screen. This feature is gone in Windows 10, while a new feature called Virtual Desktops is there if you need an easy way to access other apps. And long time Windows users will be glad to know that Alt + Tab still works.

Charms bar

The Charms bar is gone, never to be seen again. While Microsoft did tout this as one of the prominent new features in Windows 8, it was hidden and designed for touch-based devices. It was rarely used by desktop users, and due to Corner-based navigation, it poped up at inconvenient times and gets in the way.
It's been replaced by a notification pane that Microsoft calls Action Center. It provides you with notifications from apps, recent emails, and system notifications, while also allowing you to quickly pull up common actions like Wi-Fi, display settings, and Tablet mode. If you're on a touch device, swipe in from the right to bring it up. If not, click its icon located on the taskbar next to the clock.

Full screen modern apps

By default in Windows 8, certain files are associated with Modern apps that launch full screen with no way to resize them. But now all Modern apps are resizable, and float on the desktop, which alleviates the headache of fighting between the two environments.

Two different versions of Internet Explorer

Having a Modern and desktop version of Internet Explorer is extremely confusing, and often times you don't know which version is going to pop up. The idea of two different versions of IE has been killed off. It's worth noting, though, that Microsoft is bringing in a new browser, code-named Spartan. We haven't seen much of it yet, and we're not sure exactly how it will integrate with the classic version of IE. But it should be better than the dual personality mess of IE in Windows 8.

In the end

With Windows 8, Microsoft gambled with the idea that the touch-only computing age was set to dominate, and it left many of its users upset and frustrated. We showed you some tips on how to keep the Modern UI out of your way, but people shouldn't have to go to such lengths to make their computer work the way they want. The good news is that if you're using Windows 7, making the transition to Windows 10 will be much easier.
Windows 8 is a clunky operating system that wasn't received well by the public, but we've been using the Windows 10 tech preview for a while now, and can assure you it's no Windows 8, and it's nice to see the most annoying aspects of it have been killed off.

There was probably a time when an institution like the Connaught Hotel in London, a venue marinated for generations in establishment values, would have commissioned an artist to fill a prominent space in its hotel.
Yet when brand consultancy The Partners was asked to rebrand the premises, they used the work of illustrator Kristjana S Williams to visually anchor the project. The large-scale illustration featuring images of the Connaught's history was played out in other touchpoints in the hotel – from the in-room menu to complementary bags and 150 other pieces of collateral.
However, what makes Williams' work so telling as an emerging trend is not simply the growing appreciation of such clients for their illustrative versatility. It's the fact that the centerpiece of the project was originally a 3D handmade collage. The continually evolving process of making the work emphasises the hotel's heritage, which on this evidence is one of the Connaught Hotel's subliminal pitches to its clients.

If there is an underlying direction in illustration, it's that the practice is getting more physical, more craft-like and more 3D, while also becoming more immaterial in exploring the creative opportunities of movement in digital channels on the internet and on tablets.
You could call it Divergence Culture – an extension of Henry Jenkins' idea of Convergence Culture, or the flow of content across media platforms and the migratory behaviour of audiences.
Technologies are continually converging, and so clients' marketing has had to converge differing communication channels and platforms. But consumers are increasingly interested in unique forms of content across their media, not just different media-appropriate iterations.
As Handsome Frank co-founder Jon Cockley notes, social media followers don't want to see re-hashed content, they want bespoke content that's purposely made for a smaller screen. The past 12 months, for example, have seen some cracking work where traditional illustration has got subtly mobile.
The cover of Computer Arts 231 is a case in point: it was originally illustrated by Jack Hudson, then tweaked for mobility by animator Joe Sparkes. This mobility is neither animation nor illustration – the context for movement is not the frame or border of the screen, but the image itself.

At this year's VaroomLab conference in Bournemouth (a network of colleges researching illustration with Varoom), illustrator Roderick Mills, who is also course leader at Brighton, showed a 2012 interactive from The New York Times by Jon Huang, multimedia editor at the paper. It was a piece about the popularity of Farmville and Angry Birds-type games.
The lead image had a small white triangle in a black surround, reminiscent of the triangle at the centre of classic arcade game Asteroids. But what made this slightly anarchic was that you could move the triangle down and across the column of text and fire stuff at a column of game characters on the left-hand column.
It's where the art director uses movement to break down the 'fourth wall', the imaginary barrier between audience and screen. The New York Times, whose nickname is the Gray Lady because of the amount of copy it features compared to graphics or images, had suddenly been taken down by a graphic as the triangle swooped down the copy, shooting the fruit, angry birds and farm animals.
This year The New York Times did a slightly more conventional illustration/animation by the ever-innovative Christoph Niemann, for an online version of their feature on the Brazil World Cup.'My Travels With The Curse of the Maracana' (again developed with Jon Huang) features a mix of illustration and animation on photographic backgrounds – if nothing else, it's worth watching for the kick-about between Niemann and the statue of Christ the Redeemer.

The mix of illustration, animation and photography makes you consider the hold football has on Brazilian life. It's a great example of illustration going for a walk across different media. Niemann draws over photographs, it feels live and delivers a narrative journalistic experience.
One missed opportunity for the marketing department to have a play on social media was with the most uncanny illustration I saw this year.
While chairing the judging of the Association of Illustrators Awards, barely visible on the table surrounded by colourful, contemporary editorial work vying for attention, was an old black-and-white image of what looked like a dragon flying in the foreground with an old castle or stately home in the background.

It looked like something found in an old shoebox, stored away in someone's loft from the 1950s. Its visual language – the engraving, the sculpted visual information of the subject matter – was so unfamiliar and so not-at-home in the second decade of the 20th Century.
It turned out to be an image by illustrator Andrew Davidson for an adult edition of the Harry Potter series. In a recent interview, Davidson explained that he wanted the illustration to look like the books were taken from the library at Hogwarts – my original instinct that these were 'found' images wasn't too far wrong.
It's partly down to illustration's warmth as a medium, and how we are socialised as children through children's books. We all remember the magic of drawing when we were kids, inventing characters and worlds, which means there are opportunities for design and marketing to be playful in merging fiction and reality in campaigns and communications.
Take for example Mireille Fauchon's images for The Prisoner of Zenda, designed by the consistently innovative John Morgan Studio for Four Corners Press. The studio created objects and artefacts that weren't actually in the book, but looked like part of the universe of late 19th century Ruritania. Illustration has a visual charm – is a charm in that magical sense – that enables it to be playful with consumers.

Confident brands take advantage of illustration's licence to play – such as the mural Tristan Eaton created for Versace around the opening of their new flagship store in Honolulu, where he got to play with the company logo.
Most of all, the magic of drawing still has an immense cultural aura around it, and that's why brands have been increasingly engaging in live drawing events whether in shop window displays or more remarkably, Lindsey Spinks' project for Novartis pharmaceuticals.
Novartis is known for commissioning high-end editorial photographers such as James Nachtwey, Mary Ellen Mark and Stephanie Sinclair for their annual reports. Spinks did a live drawing for the company on a large-scale Moleskin notebook, illustrating the stories of patients whose lives had changed for the better after being given medication produced by the company.
This impressive project highlights the craft of illustration as a signifier of 'authenticity' – in some ways a burden for such a playful art form. In The Dove Real Beauty Sketches, the drawings became the instrument of the authentic image, more real, more telling than a photo for the viewer.
The popularity of illustration among commissioners over the last decade has been driven by the digital age. While our contact via the internet with companies and people often feels remote, illustration signals something familiar, emotionally warm, and most of all tangible. For brands, it's a signifier of provenance, made-by-hand and trustworthy.
This driver is accelerating and illustration is becoming divergent – both more digital and more animated. It's becoming less like the illustration we are familiar with, as art directors and designers explore the boundaries of various editorial and advertising contexts. At the same time it's becoming more three-dimensional and more about delivering a tangible experience through its physicality.

Just look at the Year of the Bus Sculpture Trail in London, featuring work from 40 illustrators and artists such as Rod Hunt, Edward Carvalho-Monaghan and Fiona Stewart. Or the 30-metre-long illustration in London's Eurostar ticket hall designed by Christopher Jenner, narrating the journey from London to Paris. The image isn't wallpaper, it's not even collage, it's photo-etched on stainless steel.
Then there's Joe Wilson and Helen Friel's pop-up cocktail book for The Savoy Hotel, which embodies the idea of illustration as an experience. Joseph Pine II and James H Gilmore's The Experience Economy was published in 1998 and has been the subject of much debate, but in an ever more digital age it has increased resonance.

Even digital tools like smartphones make us scroll, swipe and pinch, echoing the original Latin meaning of digital – referring to the 'digits' on our hands. When guests at the Savoy choose their cocktail they experience it through the magic of Wilson and Friel's pop-up book. But we've always known that illustration can open doors to other worlds. At its best, it has always been a medium of wonder.
We live in a post-advertising age, the age of the attention economy, the age of 'content marketing' – all phrases that touch on the fact that consumers constantly filter out unwanted noise. We need to return to illustration's roots as a source of magical interaction with the world.
Noma Bar's style for example is coolly graphic, but what he delivers is the experience of working out a visual puzzle, and the pleasure and amazement in figuring it out.
One of the smartest and funniest books I read this year was Chris Haughton's Shh! We Have A Plan, a children's story that doubles up as a book about mindless leadership and doing the same thing over and over again as a recipe for failure. We need to move on and think differently about illustration as more than simply the visual support.
Whether it's the tactile craft of collage, where we put together the fragmented storytelling of the illustrator, or the enchantment we experience in great narrative image-making, or the unexpected movement of a detail in an image online, in 2015 illustrators and art directors have a big opportunity to get more playful, to transport us somewhere magical. This will happen when clients understand that illustration is no longer the support act, it's the headliner.

Among the raft of new consumer audio products that Samson Technologies took to CES last month was a desktop speaker system for computers, laptops and tablets. The company says that the Meteor M2 stereo speakers promise studio quality sound that breaks barriers in desktop audio at volumes that go "well beyond its compact size." We got our hands on a review system and have spent much of this month putting those claims to the test.
The die cast metal enclosure of the Meteor M2 speakers has buckets of retro elegance. It's something like having a pair of old Shure or Stromberg-Carlson type microphones on either side of your laptop screen, but they throw out audio instead of capturing it. Each speaker unit houses a full range driver with a 1-inch voice coil and a passive radiator at the rear for an overall reported frequency response of 80 Hz to 20 kHz.
The actual diameter of the speaker itself is given as 2.5 inches on the online product page and 2.25 inches in the printed manual, we found the latter to be accurate. The system is touted as offering custom digital signal processing, though no further information has been provided (other than it's been optimized for fatigue-free listening).
There are three soft-touch buttons on the side of the right speaker. The uppermost powers the speakers on after being pressed for about a second. A blue LED under the brand name signifies that the M2 system is ready to for action, while the two underneath raise or lower the volume. From the back of the left passive speaker sprouts an integrated 6 ft (180 cm) long cable that ends in an RCA plug, which is connected to the appropriate port of the right active speaker at the rear.
The Meteor M2 system comes with a proprietary power adapter, which also plugs into the back of the right speaker, and the source sound provider is connected to the right speaker with a 3 ft (97 cm) male-to-male, gold-plated 3.5 mm audio jack, which is far too short to be useful in our opinion.
After about 15 minutes of inactivity, the blue LED goes out and the speakers go into sleep mode. They wake up again when source audio is detected. When awoken from sleep or switched off completely, the speakers power back at the last volume level set.
Each speaker unit measures 5.8 x 2.8 x 3.7 in (146 x 72 x 95 mm), has non-slip rubber foot and tilts back at an angle. The left speaker weighs 1.9 lb (865 g), the right comes in a bit lighter at 1.87 lb (850 g).

Sonic boom from a Meteor blast

The speakers of my portable Samsung workhorse are pretty decent, if a bit lacking in low end presence, but I generally use quality headphones helped out by a headphone amp when listening to the digital music library, watching vids or engaging in a spot of mixing, polishing and producing with Cubase. The M2 speakers offered pretty decent all-round performance when listening to high-res digital audio files via flat EQ media players on a laptop, desktop PC and dedicated music player, AAC files on an iPad mini, iPod and MP3s on an Android tablet.
Multimedia desktop speakers of similar proportions can leave the listener rather wanting when it comes to low end thump, but the M2s offered pleasantly full and rich bass. The output was also accompanied by a reassuringly strong throb running through the office desk.
Elsewhere, a strong frequency showing resulted in bright brass, clear vocals, popping percussion, lively acoustic instrumentation and rocking electric guitars. Samson does seem to have given the mid range a little more emphasis than the much more neutral headphones we'd normally be listening to, but not annoyingly so.
If we had to find fault with the sound signature then it would be at the higher end of frequency range. Cymbals, for example, had just a little too much presence for our taste, especially those in heavy rock and metal tracks, though it was a crisp tsssss rather than a sibilant tshhhh. We also found the stereo image to be rather cramped, even when the speakers were placed as far from each other as the audio cable allowed.
That said, the M2s are articulate and clear at "normal" listening levels across numerous genres and are surprisingly loud for their size. But if pushed, they did start to distort at room-filling volumes.
Watching movies proved a much more engaging experience than simply listening through device speakers, though obviously not as much as through headphones.
And the slightly forward mid and high range reproduction meant that using the M2s as small studio monitors for working in a Digital Audio Workstation was somewhat less accurate than using more neutral audio throwers, but a vast improvement on the built-in speakers of the laptop running the music production software.

The bottom line

The Meteor M2 speakers are claimed to offer the kind of listening normally reserved for larger speakers that are accompanied by a subwoofer. Realistically though, the M2s are not going to replace a powerful 2.1 channel system like Harman Kardon's similarly-priced SoundSticks III or a larger two speaker setup like the (very expensive) KEF X-Series. Then there's the question of convenience. Being tied to mains power and cables does appear somewhat old hat these days when compared to the portable wireless convenience offered by manufacturers like Cambridge Audio and FoxL.
However, Samson's desktop speakers did offer a much improved listening experience when compared to the built-in speakers present in the Samsung laptop, the Asus all-in-one computer and various tablets, smartphones and music players tested during this review. The speakers proved surprisingly loud and performed well across a number of different genres. That the M2s also look good is just the sugar coating on a well-rounded cake, though that very much depends on personal taste.
The Samson Meteor M2 multimedia stereo speaker system is available now for a recommended retail price of US$149.99.

Taking inspiration from the way fossilized bones can preserve genetic material for hundreds of thousands of years, researchers at ETH Zurich have developed a "synthetic fossil" by writing digital information on DNA and then encapsulating it in a protective layer of glass.
Most of our digital data is stored with technology that is designed to work in the short term, but which can’t really stand the test of time. Standard hard disk drives won’t last more than a few decades and are subject to damage from high temperatures, moisture, magnetic fields and mechanical failures. Even solid state drives, which perform better and are less susceptible to mechanical issues, will lose their data if they go unpowered for more than a few months.
One interesting solution could be to store digital data using strands of DNA. As far-fetched as this may sound, there are a couple of very good reasons that make this an attractive proposition. Firstly, DNA can store information with a data density so high that it can be hard to fathom: a single living cell can contain millions of nucleobases and each can represent at least one bit of information, for a data density approaching one petabyte (million gigabytes) per cubic millimeter. Add to this the fact that under the right conditions fossils can preserve genetic material for millions of years, and you have the perfect candidate for long-term data storage. This is exactly what Dr. Robert Grass and team at ETH Zurich are trying to achieve.
As you’ll remember from high school biology, DNA is encoded by four nucleobases, meaning that each of them can, in theory, represent up to two bits of information. After limitations dictated by the technical challenges of synthesizing and sequencing nucleotides, and with the addition of redundant bits (which make up 35 percent of total data) to protect against data corruption, the final rate is an impressive 1.2 bits of useful data for each nucleotide.
Dr. Grass and team began their experiment by storing 83 kilobytes of information (Switzerland’s Federal Charter of 1291 and Archimede’s The Methods of Mechanical Theorems) inside 4,991 DNA segments, each 158 nucleotides long. Then, to protect the DNA from degenerating over time, the researchers created a de facto "synthetic fossil" by encapsulating it in 150-nanometer silica spheres, which prevent the genetic material from chemically reacting with the environment. To read the data back, the nanospheres need to be exposed to a fluoride solution which dissolves the silica but leaves the DNA intact.
Digital systems designed to store data for the very long term (from high-density crystals to rugged tungsten discs) usually aim for very high levels of heat resistance. The reason for this is that the generally accepted way to estimate long-term durability and data retention in the lab is to subject the storage medium to high levels of heat. Encapsulating DNA in silica (glass) is specifically meant to provide that level of protection.
In this case, the researchers simulated the degradation of the DNA by exposing it to temperatures between 60 and 70 degrees Celsius (140–160 °F) for up to a month, which replicated the chemical degradation that would have taken place over thousands of years.
Current technology incurs a lot of mistakes while both writing and reading data from DNA, but the redundant bits written alongside the original data showed their use here.
"After storing the DNA for a simulated 10,000 years in the fridge at 4 °C [40 °F], about 80 percent of the sequences contain at least one error and about 8 percent of the sequences are completely lost," Grass told Gizmag. "Still, due to the smart redundancy we have added by the Reed-Solomon coding, we are able to decode the data without final error."
The scientists calculated that if the same data had been stored at even lower temperatures, such as at the -18 °C (0 F) found inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, it would have survived for over a million years.
Although the cost of manipulating DNA makes this currently unpractical for everyday use, advances in DNA sequencing are dropping the cost of reading stored data, and more research is also going into reducing the cost of writing digital information onto genetic material.
"We are currently looking into decreasing the cost of writing information into DNA (currently at scientific level at 500 USD/MB) and into first commercial applications in storing highly valuable information," said Grass. "We’re also gathering more data on the thermal stability to gain a more precise understanding on how DNA decays chemically and how this can be further avoided."
The research is described in the latest issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie.

Face detection software has slowly crept into mainstream use, from Facebook photo tagging to Android phone unlocking, but new research looks set to move the technology on significantly. Scientists at Yahoo Labs and Stanford University have come up with a new approach that can register faces at any angle, even when partially hidden, making it easier than ever to be detected.
Sachin Farfade and Mohammad Saberian at Yahoo Labs in California, and Li-Jia Li at Stanford University, say their new algorithm is simpler and more accurate than many alternative methods. To understand how it works, we first need to take a quick historical detour to 2001 and the revolutionary breakthrough made by computer scientists Paul Viola and Michael Jones.
Viola and Jones overcame an impasse in face detection technology by ignoring the thornier issue of recognition and concentrating on spotting faces. Their algorithm looks for a light vertical line (the nose) crossed by a dark horizontal line (the eyes) in a "detection cascade." This has proved very effective at recognizing faces from head-on and is incorporated into many of the digital cameras currently on the market.
The technique isn't as good for spotting faces at an angle or those which are partially concealed though, which brings us back to Farfade, Saberian and Li. The team has taken a fundamentally different approach to its predecessors, employing an advanced type of machine learning known as a deep convolutional neural network. Essentially, a huge database of annotated images is used to teach the software what a face looks like.
Farfade and his colleagues have built a database containing 200,000 images of faces and 20 million images without faces. 50,000 different iterations of 128 images each were then used to train the neural network powering their detection engine. The result is a tool that can spot faces at many different angles (even upside down) and identify individual faces in a picture that contains a lot of them.
"We evaluated the proposed method with other deep learning based methods and showed that our method results in faster and more accurate results," say the team members, calling their creation the Deep Dense Face Detector. "We are planning to use better sampling strategies and more sophisticated data augmentation techniques to further improve performance of the proposed method for detecting occluded and rotated faces."
As the technology filters through into consumer and commercial products, it could mean that eventually your Kinect controller and the CCTV system on your local high street are going to be able to spot you more quickly than ever. It can even be used retrospectively to look through old photos and videos, according to the researchers.

DARPA’s new initiative, known as the Communicating with Computers (CwC) program, aims to improve the ability of machines to communicate effectively with their human counterparts. The agency has two initial experiments planned, focusing on the somewhat differing fields of improved conversational skills and better cancer detection.
It’s difficult to miss DARPA’s intent to create more technologically advanced war machines, with initiatives such as the Ground X-Vehicles Technologies program aiming to make smarter, more agile vehicles. However, the agency is also aware of the importance of making machines communicate better with their human overlords, and that’s where the CwC program steps in.
Two-way communication with machines is a significantly more difficult proposition than it might first seem. A simple conversation between two people involves constant assimilation and contextual understanding of information – a process that’s second nature to humans, but represents a huge challenge for machines.
DARPA program manager Paul Cohen commented on this, stating, "Human communication feels so natural that we don’t notice how much mental work it requires. But try to communicate while you’re doing something else – the high account rate among people who text while driving says it all – and you’ll quickly realize how demanding it is."
The goal of the CwC program is to develop computers that think more like people, and are therefore better able to communicate as people do. The team will work to develop a system that’s capable of completing tasks that require effective communication, the first of which will be collaborative story-telling.
For the experiment, the two parties (one human, one machine) will be required to complete subsequent sentences to complete a story. This will require the machines to keep track of the ideas presented by its human counterparts, before creating their own ideas based upon established data – similar to a normal human conversation.
The second initial CwC task approaches the same problem from an altogether different direction, building computer-based models of the molecular processes that cause cells to become cancerous. While machines are better at reading large quantities of data, their ability to autonomously process said information falls short. The project will tackle this, aiming to develop a system that’s better able to judge the biological plausibility of proposed molecular models.
The CwC program is very much in its infancy, with the above being just the first of many experiments aimed squarely at the goal of improving machines’ communication skills.

It's had a good run, but the password's time is up. Remembering a unique unlock code for dozens of websites and apps is no longer very practical or very safe, and many different companies are exploring what comes next. One of those companies is Clef, which has developed a two-step verification system that uses an animated wave on your phone to confirm your identity.
Two-step verification, now available on accounts with Google, Apple, Microsoft, Dropbox and many others, adds an additional security measure on top of a password. But existing methods typically rely on numerical codes and can be time-consuming to configure, which is why Clef thinks its new, streamlined approach has the edge. The technology is currently powering more than 40,000 sites and the company says it's now targeting larger organizations after securing US$1.6 million in investment funding.
From the user end, you simply wave your phone at the screen and you're in (though a PIN or Touch ID confirmation is required initially). It can work over Wi-Fi or cell networks (handy when one is available but not the other) and as a fallback it's possible to scan the phone screen using a laptop camera. There are no codes to remember and there's nothing to type in: The unique wave generated by your phone confirms that you are who you say you are.
"No weak passwords, frustrating tokens, or clunky dongles," promise the founders of Clef, which is based in Oakland, California. There's also the option to securely log out of your accounts with a single tap on your smartphone, should you spot any suspicious activity or suspect that someone else has been able to log into a site or app as you.
Clef is far from the only company looking to revolutionize the login process. In recent months and years we've seen a wearable that uses your heartbeat as a password, an iris-scanning gadget to log you in securely and various alternatives to the mobile phone PIN.
Watch the video below for a walkthrough of how Clef works.