THE MONGOLIAN IDIOT

The Superficial Idiot—A Type

entire mental situation. The two cases cited here illustrate the recognition of a definite type through the presentation of a single symptom. Alexander was just three years old when he was brought to the Psychological Clinic of the University of Pennsylvania because of his peculiar behavior and inability to speak. While the mother was giving the usual data in regard to his birth, babyhood, etc....

Idiot-Proofing Authentication

We develop a mechanism by which a server can guarantee that client passwords contain a certain amount of (actually random) entropy while not actually knowing these passwords. We define and implement a protocol between a client and server used during password generation. Importantly, while we greatly modify the process of generating a password, the actual day-to-day use of this password is mostl...

Beyond Idiot Savants: Recommendations and Common Sense

The current generation of recommendation systems exhibits little if any common sense. While adept at finding patterns in purchase data, such systems are plateauing well below the goal of having intelligence agents be analogous to human concierges.

IDIoT: Securing the Internet of Things like it's 1994

Over 20 billion Internet of Things devices are set to come online by 2020. Protecting such a large number of underpowered, UI-less, network-connected devices will require a new security paradigm. We argue that solutions dependent on vendor cooperation such as secure coding and platform changes are unlikely to provide adequate defenses for the majority of devices. Similarly, regulation approache...

'A tale told by an idiot'.