Just in case you didn't get the hint from the tablet-tastic Windows 8 Metro UI and those 900,000 Android devices activated each and every day: the world is turning into an increasingly touch-focused place. Touchscreens are nice and all, but we prefer our QWERTY to be a little more… tactile. Enter the appropriately named Tactus Technology: while most of our attention was focused on E3 and Computex last week, Tactus stole the show at the Society for Information Display's (SID) conference in Boston with new technology that can create dynamic physical buttons over a touchscreen display on-demand.

We won’t delve too far into it again – why beat a dead horse? – but research has proven that most people’s passwords suck, plain and simple. Sophisticated geeks may shrug their shoulders and simply laugh at the newbs, but it’s in Microsoft’s interest to build a secure operating system – hence the whole Secure Boot thing. The company’s taking an interesting approach to passwords in the upcoming Windows 8, one that mixes personal pictures and touch/mouse gestures to create a log in experience that Microsoft claims is both faster and more secure than traditional alphanumeric passwords.