Whoa! That power glitch just fried my graphic card. I have a new one, but... what now?
Also, I need my info from my "smart phone." I don't think it has a graphics card, per se.
It's a nice thought: identifying the hardware, but not a substitute for identifying ME.

I wonder what they been puffin? just kidding ;)
I had the exact same thought as piperTom, what happens with all my encrypted data if my GPU burns. I rather remember a password than depend on hardware not malfunctioning.
But one place I could see this being useful would be securing VPN connections for enterprise solutions. Where the security department at a company want to make sure that the connection comes from a specific computer.

Great: They've stolen your laptop... your GPU-encrypted data is easily readable. What about spoofing your hardware data? Or intercept the function that does the calculations? Spoofing the PUFFING. There is always a way to break something like this, e.g. on virtualization level. Also: What is the main point of this? Authenticating hardware to the web page or application, rather than authenticating user. The only real (and kinda "safe") use is to differ if given computer is/can be logged to your account... still you can't throw out all the cookies and user/session information. @piperTom: smart phones have GPUs.

Wow, it's also another way of breaching your on-line privacy and anonymity.
No matter how many proxys your connection goes through or if you've booted with a live Linux CD, your computer is indelibly marked.
All the authorities need is a separate web site like Google or Yahoo or Facebook that can identify you under your real identity, then link it back to your anonymous browsing..

On second thoughts it's hard to see how this could work without having a program on your local computer to do the testing, either placed deliberately as some kind of ID app, or as malware.
In that case a clever user could disable it when required, but that doesn't help the rest of the poor low-tech slobs that make up most of the online population.

So this is like the funky home-brew version of TPM? For all its faults, at least TPM is overt in what it's doing and has dedicated hardware to do it correctly, and doesn't rely on luck and random variation.

It's stupid. Enough said.

Such a phenomenal waste of money! Give it to someone who can actually make some useful technology. In a world of multidevice users and cloud devices, going back to the single computer era is no way to go forward!

Yeah, this idea is about as dumb as inventing an edible adhesive tape to hold your sandwich together. Who gets paid to come up with "ideas" like this, and more importantly, who is paying them??
Randy

I expect it would be used as a secondary authentication. If your login is correct and the machine code matches, all good. If your login is correct but the machine code does not match, maybe you login was stolen, time to answer a security question.
Sounds good, makes sense.