Cartography-paradigm used to "map-the-web"

Via the (great!) weekly newspaper "Die Zeit" I found an interesting map of important internet sites: Websites grouped by topics and drawn like Tokyo's subway map - by informationarchitects.jp.

Using the subway-map paradigm from cartography to categorize and relate internet organizations and websites was new to me - and took away a few hours of my time (which I spent surfing previously unknown sites...). They grouped around 300 sites along the major "lines".

Great stuff - well worth a peek. Downloadable in a variety of formats - even clickable :-)

The Ultimate Authentication Device - but currently without market

That's what I was looking for the last years: A tiny, sleek, affordable, secure and really cool device for authentication: Forget about this plethora of different passwords and login-names. Just press the green-glowing button of the Yubikey - an imho revolutionary device invented and produced by Swedish company Yubico: It plugs into any USB port and behaves like a regular USB-keyboard. With the exception that it has only one single (mystically illuminated) key - and emitts a highly secure one-time-password every time this key is pressed.

Good to know: Their sdk (development kit) is open source, their business model is selling the hardware (starting from 35 US$ for a single USB-key, going down to approx 10 US$ for larger quantities).

I could really solve all login and authentication problems - would there be enough acceptance around the great players. Steve Gibson had a great coverage in his security-now podcast - but my favorite sites still don't use neither OpenID nor YubiKey...

But hey - wait: Most revolutions took a few month to really take off...