[zobzu]

According to the article, she did say exactly those words:

"password are dead"

"passwords are done at Google"

"our relationship with passwords are done"

Then they go on about how they're experimenting with hardware tokens and stuff, and how all startup should be solving that for them now.

It looks like PR to me, and it also looks like Google has lost it's soul.

Obviously, passwords are far from dead. It's wishful thinking at this point. The only thing everyone can agree on, is that passwords sucks to remember, input, and manage, and that there are many superior technical solutions.

The main issue is and has always been is that those superior solutions are painful to introduce because they're not standard, everyone wants it's proprietary piece of equipment in there, and they're not seamless solution that customers - users, really - are willing to test til something becomes a defacto standard.

[nyrina]

What are these many superior technical solutions you speak of?

Care to give any examples of such?

[zobzu]

care, nope. if nicely asked.. :P

basically you can have an ECDSA or RSA key pair and store the private key locally, either in a PGP smartcard (which can really be just a USB stick), or more conveniently into a piece of clothing that use some sort of NFC to transmit the data.

again, the yubikey neo does that (using NFC) but with OTPs for example.