BIGLOBE Okudake Ninsho

» see support.biglobe.ne.jp/settei/okudake as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On Monday 27 February 2006, NEC's internet provider announced a login you performed by putting something down. The name was literal: okudake ninsho, authentication by placing. You rested an Osaifu-Keitai handset or a BIGLOBE-branded FeliCa credit card on a USB reader beside your keyboard, and the members page opened without a password.

Japan was the only country where this was a sensible product to build, because Japan was the only country where the reader and the token were already in the house. The contactless chip had been in phones since 2004 and in convenience stores before that, and Sony's PaSoRi desk reader was a cheap accessory people genuinely owned. BIGLOBE removed even that excuse by posting a free PaSoRi to every customer who took out the card, and ran a prize draw of two thousand yen in electronic money to five hundred of them between late February and mid-May.

What it unlocked was smaller than the ceremony suggested. The service covered My BIGLOBE, the page where you looked at your own account details and changed them, and the press release said coverage would widen in stages. There is no evidence in eight years of archived help pages that it ever did.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually checked ~

There was no certificate on the chip and no applet to download. The thing the reader looked at was your Edy balance identity, the electronic money account registered on the card or the handset, and BIGLOBE's own help pages dropped the marketing name and called the mechanism BIGLOBE Edy authentication. A phone had to have completed Edy registration before it could be used to log in at all.

That has a consequence the help text spells out in a slightly embarrassed sentence: no other Edy worked. An Edy sitting on a Suica did not count, and neither did one on somebody else's card. A universal payment standard was being used as a proprietary key.

~ four computers ~

You could pair at most four machines, and a password was still demanded on a computer the service had not seen before, or when the logins started arriving more often than a person would produce. So the password never actually went away. It receded into the position modern systems keep it in, as the thing you fall back on, which is a reasonable design that BIGLOBE arrived at by 2006 and then attached to one web page.

The requirements list is where the era shows. It ran on Windows through Internet Explorer, nothing later than version 7, and it needed an ActiveX control installed to reach the reader at all. The frictionless gesture of putting your phone on the desk was available only through the most tightly bolted-down browser stack of its decade.

~ the card goes first ~

Half of it died early. The BIGLOBE FeliCa credit card was discontinued on 31 January 2010, which left handsets as the only way in, and a banner saying so stayed on the setup pages until the end. The full notice went up on 20 January 2014: new registrations and setting changes stopped on Sunday 2 February, the service itself ended on Sunday 2 March, and the clauses covering it were struck from the member agreement the following day. No reason was offered and nothing replaced it, so everybody went back to typing.

The timing around that notice is the part worth noting. Three days after it was posted, BIGLOBE published a statement about press reports concerning the company. Seven days after that came the announcement that its shareholder was changing and NEC was letting go. A small authentication experiment was being tidied off the books in the fortnight before the parent sold the business.

Logging in by presenting a physical object is ordinary now, under the name security key, and it arrived about eight years later for a reason BIGLOBE never mentions. Its version existed so that you would not have to type. The modern one exists so that what you type cannot be stolen from you.

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