Human style is a very subtle concept. Each of us has a characteristic ‘house style’ which shows up in everything we do. Even a Morse code operator, who can merely switch a circuit between two states, develops a personal ‘fist’ that can be recognized by other operators. Machines which could recognize their operator's ‘fist’ would be almost impossible to hijack or misuse. So Daedalus is inventing them.

The personal computer is the obvious first choice for the treatment. DREADCO's prototype has a special neural-net learning program. It accumulates its owner's keyboard ‘fist’, his mouse style and his characteristic pattern of usage. Soon it will recognize him very clearly. A stranger seeking to explore its files will be refused access, even if he has stolen the correct password. He will merely download a stream of abuse, together with threats that the machine will know him next time — which of course it will. Meanwhile, it will still respond to its owner, even from keyboards miles away on the network.

A computer thus truly ‘personalized’ might even get to recognize when its owner was dead tired, or drunk, or in one of his moods again. It might refuse him access to particularly delicate files, or even tell him to go and sleep it off, and shut down.

A machine used by several people, as in a busy office, will take slightly longer to recognize them all. New employees will have to be ‘inducted’ by someone it has already learnt to trust. The slight initial complications will be well repaid by the subsequent improvement in security.

Cars, too, could benefit from being personalized. A car whose neural net accepted inputs from the steering wheel, accelerator, gear shift and all other movables, would soon learn the style of its driver. It would know how widely he opens the door to get in, at what speeds he changes gear, with what angular increments he corrects steering deviations, and so on. A strange hand on the wheel would at once arouse its suspicions. Further alien actions would rapidly confirm them. It would stop dead and, through the stereo speakers, shout that it was being stolen.

Now that nearly all human artefacts have a microprocessor inside them, machine recognition could spread rapidly. The bank auto-teller, the TV, the fridge, even the house front door, all could learn to greet their approved users, while snarling at attempted interlopers. The ‘Haves’ will be even safer from the ‘Have-nots’.