The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. The open-access edition of this text was made possible by a Philip Leverhulme Prize from The Leverhulme Trust.
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Where does a password end and an identity begin? A person might be more than his chosen ten-character combination, but does a bank know that? Or an email provider? What's an 'identity theft' in the digital age if not the unauthorized use of a password? In untangling the histories, cultural contexts and philosophies of the password, Martin Paul Eve explores how 'what we know' became 'who we are', revealing how the modern notion of identity has been shaped by the password.
Ranging from ancient Rome and the 'watchwords' of military encampments, through the three-factor authentication systems of Harry Potter and up to the biometric scanner in the iPhone, Password makes a timely and important contribution to our understanding of the words, phrases and special characters that determine our belonging and, often, our being.
Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Rezensionen / Stimmen
An erudite and interesting amble through the history, philosophy, and psychology of passwords. * Bruce Schneier, Security Technologist and New York Times-Bestselling Author of Data and Goliath The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World * Conjuring our passwords has become a daily act of our computer-saturated existence. By no means sequestered to our digital present, Martin Paul Eve's excellent account of the password covers its long and lively history. Weaving literary references with lucid technical explanations, Eve skillfully traces the evolution of password to probe its fundamental connections to issues of human identity, trust, and ownership. * Gabriella Coleman, Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, McGill University, Canada *
Reihe
Sprache
Verlagsort
Verlagsgruppe
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Produkt-Hinweis
Broschur/Paperback
Klebebindung
Illustrationen
Maße
Höhe: 168 mm
Breite: 123 mm
Dicke: 17 mm
Gewicht
ISBN-13
978-1-5013-1487-2 (9781501314872)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He is the author of Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Autor*in
Birkbeck College, University of London, UK
1. Introduction
2. "Who goes there?": Military, Mortality and Passwords
3. Special Characters: Passwords in Literature and Film
4. P455w0rd5 and the Digital Era
5. Identity
List of Illustrations
Notes
Index
