Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Electronic Tattoos and Passwords You Can Swallow: Google’s Regina Dugan Is a Badass

Former DARPA head Regina Dugan now leads special projects for the Google-owned Motorola, and she claims to be very excited about wearable computers.

By that she doesn’t necessarily mean something so pedestrianly futuristic as Google Glass or a smartwatch. Dugan means electronic tattoos and pills.

“We got to do a lot of epic shit when I was at DARPA,” Dugan said onstage at D11. But the stuff she is working on at Motorola is pretty cool (and totally creepy!) too:

  • An electronic tattoo that can be used to authenticate a user instead of some flimsy password. It’s made by a company called MC10 that Motorola is partnering with, and Dugan is wearing it on her own arm.
  • Another option in a similar vein: Vitamin authentication. Dugan shows a pill that can be ingested and then battery-powered with stomach acid to produce an 18-bit internal signal. After that, the swallower’s whole body becomes a password.

“This isn’t stuff that is going to ship anytime soon. But it is a sign of the new boldness inside Motorola,” explained Dugan’s boss, Motorola head Dennis Woodside. And Dugan and Woodside claimed that all this is entirely optional; Google is not going to be force-feeding us pills.

“If you want to ensure failure in your innovation, try removing the risks,” Dugan said. “Boredom is the enemy of innovation.”

Full D11 Conference Coverage

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik