Passé words

PASSWORDS are the bane of a life enveloped by information technology. And they are proliferating wildly as more and more devices and online services demand them. But passwords are easily lost, forgotten and stolen. Though cheerful reports of the password’s imminent demise have been made before (perhaps most famously in 2004 by Bill Gates when he was the boss of Microsoft), all have turned out to be premature. However, new ways are emerging to remove, or at least reduce, the reliance on tapping out awkward combinations of numbers, letters and symbols.