Password by Martin Paul Eve

Password by Martin Paul Eve

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.

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 *

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).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781501314872
ISBN 10	1501314874
Title	Password
Author	Martin Paul Eve
Series	Object Lessons
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Year published	2016-07-28
Number of pages	136
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.