If this is already possible, then having NSA register your keystrokes on the PC keyboard through your phone like we saw that research a few months is probably not too far fetched.
Then it should really make sense why they are purchasing a company that does login better.
Side question: What is long and convoluted about Google's account management? It's one account with a single login which works across all Google products. Seems pretty straightforward to me. It only gets a bit more complicated if you try to disable parts of your account, but that's not the normal use case.
When you're trying to use Google Apps for business, for one, and you go to email.MyURL.com and get redirected to a standard Google login screen where you now have to click a button to not sign in as your personal account, then come back and sign in as a business account, plus also add the "@MyURL.com" at the end (didn't used to have to do this), and you're doing that with multiple different accounts, it gets pretty tricky pretty in a hurry.
An extremely common use case is to have several google accounts, typically when using various Google Apps domains.
Instead of understanding that I'm the same person with access to all of the accounts, it makes me log into each one separately. For most products you can be logged into each one simultaneously, but the first one you log into is the "default". Analytics, for example, doesn't even support multi-login, so if that "default" account is not the one you want, you have to log out of ALL of them. WAT
Awesome! Saw the team pitch at AngelHack, one of the more technical teams I have seen amongst all of the "Me Too" consumer social startups. Congratulations!
I am more curious about if the phone has to be always listening and what happens if there is noise in the environment.
Also what if the attacker manages to bring a recording device close enough? Is the distance important because of the amplitude or because of the delay due to the speed of sound?
Then there's an error in the linked article, which reads:
"... [it works] by playing an ultrasonic frequency from the mobile device. The system on the computer or any other device analyses the frequency for identification..."
Not necessarily, the desktop computer needs a speaker & the mobile device needs a mic (which is a better arrangement since the smartphone mics are extraordinarily good). This could then be a means to establish a network connection to it by other means.
