bredemarket

How Other Experts Refer to “Somewhat You Why”

Unlike most other posts that appear under my name—Bredebot posts are another matter—this post breaks my 2023 rule because most of it was written by Google Gemini, not me.

But I figured that if I wrote a book specifically about SIX factors of authentication…

Four pages from "Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication" by John E. Bredehoft, Bredemarket. Click on the image to purchase. — The book.

…it would be nice to know if other experts held similar thoughts.

My prompt to Gemini

Bredemarket has promoted “somewhat you why” as a sixth factor of identity verification / authentication. Has anyone else shared similar observations?

Gemini’s response

Here is the short answer: Yes, industry experts and security frameworks strongly agree with the core observation, though they call it “Authentication Intent,” “Intent Verification,” or “Context-Aware/Risk-Based Authentication” rather than using Bredemarket’s play-on-words.

Shifting Truths. Google Lyria. Public Domain.

John Bredehoft (Bredemarket) coined “somewhat you why” to fit the traditional naming convention (something you know, have, are, do, somewhere you are). His argument is that checking why an action or request is taking place—evaluating intent, transaction risk, or reasonableness—functions as a crucial safeguard, especially in an era of deepfakes and automated AI agents.

While the tongue-in-cheek name is unique to Bredemarket, the concept itself is widely discussed and implemented across the cybersecurity industry under three main paradigms:

1. “Authentication Intent” (NIST Standards)

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) explicitly addresses intent in NIST SP 800-63B.

The Problem: A user might have a valid session token, biometrics, or physical key plugged in, but malware or a session hijack could trigger actions without the user’s conscious decision.
The Solution: Systems require an explicit act of intent—like tapping a physical FIDO key, typing a PIN, or responding to a contextual prompt—proving that the user intended to execute that specific action at that moment.

2. Intent Verification for AI & Delegated Actions

With the rise of autonomous AI agents and automated workflows, identity security groups (like the Non-Human Identity/NHI movement) frequently discuss Intent Verification.

Conventional authentication proves who logged in, but not whether the user meant to perform this specific action.
Intent Verification bridges authentication and authorization by evaluating whether a transaction (e.g., a $35M wire transfer or an API call) aligns with the user’s actual current decision and business policy.

3. Context-Aware and Adaptive Authentication

Identity providers (like Palo Alto Networks, Okta, and Silverfort) build their Adaptive Multi-Factor Authentication (AMFA) around the “why” and “context”:

Context Signals: What resource is being accessed? Is this normal business behavior? Does this request make sense given the time, value, and sensitivity?
Dynamic Step-Up: If the “why” seems low-risk (e.g., checking internal docs during work hours), access is smooth. If the “why” is high-risk or suspicious (e.g., a wire transfer requested via video call), the system demands step-up verification.

How the Views Compare

While most identity security professionals treat “intent and context” as a governance or risk engine layer wrapping traditional factors rather than a 6th factor itself, everyone agrees with Bredemarket’s baseline premise: verifying who someone is without evaluating what and why they are trying to do it is no longer enough to stop modern fraud.

From https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/3-takeaways-from-start-with-why.

Bandcamp: Accept No Fraudulent Imitations

Most of you have probably never heard of Bandcamp. I have, since I posted several songs on the platform several years ago under the band names “Ontario Emperor” and “Wasp the Houseboy.” (If you want to avoid Bandcamp’s charges, I posted one of the songs, “For a Meaningful Apocryphal Animation,” on the Bredemarket website.)

Now my fellow Bandcampers and I are targeted by a fraudster, according to Drillmation.

“The current wave of attacks relies heavily on abusing legitimate contact forms to bypass standard email spam filters. Creators are receiving urgent emails coming from noreply@bandcamp.com, which masks the malicious intent because the initial message delivery pipeline is technically authentic.

“The emails claim that the platform’s security team has “registered several requests to your account from unknown devices” and demand immediate identity verification to prevent account suspension.”

Note the urgency, which is a typical tactic of fraudsters.

Be safe out there.

When Businesses Rise From the Dead

Bredemarket provides marketing and writing services all year. So do grocery stores. Restaurants. Most other firms.

Other businesses are seasonal, but necessitate year-round facilities. Most baseball stadiums don’t host games in December, but host (or struggle to host) non-baseball events when the team isn’t playing. Graber Olive House would hire seasonal staff when the olives were harvested.

And then there is Spirit Halloween, where Joe Marver accidentally discovered how to take advantage of a fundamental truth at his Castro Valley, California women’s clothing store named Spirit.

“He’d put out a small Halloween section—just costumes and decorations to capture some seasonal traffic. That tiny corner of his store consistently outperformed the rest of his inventory combined.”

But he couldn’t just create a Halloween version of Spirit…or could he?

“Shopping malls and strip centers always had vacant spaces—stores that had closed, leaving landlords desperate for any revenue. He could negotiate dirt-cheap short-term leases, operate for 8-10 weeks, and disappear before the first rent increase.”

That first landlord was happy to accept a few bucks for a few weeks, which was better than nothing. Marver, of course, saw many, many, more dollars from people who only bought sexy product marketer costumes in October.

Then the store closed for the winter, spring, and summer.

And the word “pop-up,” albeit used for videos at one point, remained in the domain of retail.

Artificially Intelligent Pick Up Lines

In 2017, researcher Janelle Shane had a really bad idea.

“So it occurred to me that the same neural network framework I’ve trained on recipes, Pokemon, superhero names, and Irish tune names might be able to write pick up lines as well.”

OK, so Shane isn’t your typical researcher.

But the pick up line project was a step below anything she had undertaken before. The project needed training data, and you can imagine what the training data looked like.

“I hadn’t really read many of these before, and most were obscene, or aggressive, or kind of insulting. I began to regret the whole project.”

But she continued, because Science!

A wombat holding a phone displaying a digital identity, surrounded by papers with pictures of cars. Two Dolby speakers are in the back of the room. — She’s Tidied Up and I Can’t Find Anything! Google Gemini.

But Shane’s neural network struggled with the wordplay in the training data, resulting in some bizarre outputs. One example:

“If I had a rose for every time I thought of you, I have a price tighting.”

Fast forward four years

In 2021 Shane tried again, using the then-current GPT-3. She entered the following prompt:

“So I started with the following prompt, for a neural net to fill in its prediction of what the rest of the article would be like: ‘These are the top pickup lines of 2021! Amaze your crush and get results! 1.’”

She awaited the responses, which did not disappoint.

“My name is a complicated combination of 45 degrees of forward motion, 25 degrees of leftward drift, 75 degrees of upward acceleration, and infinity and that is the point where my love for you stops.”

Fast forward five more years

As far as I can tell, Janelle Shane has not conducted any further pick up line experiments. Does that mean that AI-generated pick up lines are as…um…”good” as the human ones?

So I tried again in 2026. The prompt:

“Generate five pick up lines that will cause beautiful women to immediately swoon over me”

The good news: generative AI has matured enough that its pick up line responses are indistinguishable from human ones.

The bad news: generative AI has matured enough that its pick up line responses are indistinguishable from human ones.

Here are five smooth, high-effort pickup lines designed to charm, make her smile, and spark a genuine conversation:

The Classic Romantic“Excuse me, I usually have a great sense of direction, but the moment you walked in, I completely forgot where I was going.”

The Clever Observation“I was having a pretty average day, but seeing you just raised the bar significantly. Mind if I introduce myself?”

The Playful & Confident“Are you a time traveler? Because I can easily see you in my future.”

The Sincere Compliment“I’m not usually one to approach strangers, but you have an energy that’s impossible to ignore. I’m [Your Name].”

The Witty Banter“Do you believe in love at first sight, or should I walk past you one more time?”

Ladies, does this tight your price?

Do Your Social Channels Have Current Content? Do Mine?

I’ve talked about this before. In fact, much of the first half of this post was lifted from the middle of a 2021 post. But it bears repeating.

The recycled part

Lack of current content is something that troubles companies. Ever since I started Bredemarket, I’ve dealt with several companies that are facing a “dated content” problem.

What usually happens, in small and large companies alike, is that an effort is made at some point to “spruce up” the content of its social media channels. Perhaps an employee is assigned to this task, or perhaps a consultant does it. (I’ve done both.) A heroic effort is undertaken, and a bunch of new content is produced, impressing the company heads and the company’s clients.

But then…things happen, and next thing you know your online channels have content that is three years old…or ten years old.

Or if the exact year of the content isn’t explicitly identified, there are clues within the content itself as to its age, such as “Our product is now supported on Windows 7.”

What are the ramifications of dated content? Visitors begin to wonder why there isn’t any new content.

Perhaps the company went bankrupt.
Perhaps the company is still a going concern, but hasn’t done anything in the last few years. Maybe that great customer reference from three years ago was the last new customer that the company got, or maybe that great presentation from several years ago was the last time the company presented anything.
Perhaps the company has continued to do business, but its more recent business isn’t as impressive as its previous business.
The most positive explanation is that the company HAS done amazing things in the last few years, but hasn’t taken the time to tell the story of its most recent accomplishments. (TL;DR: I can help.)

The new part

Now for an admission.

Some of Bredemarket’s social channels do NOT have current content.

Which ones?

First, let’s look at the multiple Bredemarket social media channels that I have created since 2020:

Apple Podcasts

Bluesky

Facebook

Flip

Google Podcasts

Instagram

Listen Notes

Spotify Podcasts (and Anchor)

Substack

Threads

TikTok

YouTube

As of July 2026, I no longer post on the majority of these social channels.

Actually, I CANNOT post on Flip, which abruptly shut down in August 2025.

And all the podcast channels, populated from the service formerly known as Anchor, haven’t seen new content since July 2025.

Some of the others were discontinued between May 2024 and February 2026, including Instagram, Substack, TikTok, and WhatsApp.

Leaving me with the four social services I listed in March 2026: Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Bredemarket Social Focus, March 29, 2026.

Plus Threads, which I just added back to the mix over the last few days.

Of course, people who sell courses such as “How To Make $50,000 a Month on TikTok” are convinced that I am committing corporate suicide.

But frankly, the only social channels that consistently send traffic to bredemarket.com are Facebook and LinkedIn. And if Instagram isn’t bringing me traffic from biometric professionals, why should I be there?

So, in the same way tides rise and fall, Bredemarket’s social presence waxes and wanes.

Before the Tide Turns. Google Lyria. Public Domain.

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If you are battling any roadmap bottlenecks or tight deadlines right now, request a meeting with Silicon Tech Solutions.

JustDone AI Detector Tells the Truth

I don’t know about you, but I prefer honesty to one-sided cheerleading. Which is why I appreciated the subsection in a JustDone post entitled “There Is No Way to Detect AI Writing with 100% Accuracy.”

JustDone, you’re doing it wrong(TM).

Other vendors (and people) say that telltale signs—such as em dashes—are clear and definitive indicators of AI-generated text.

JustDone is much more nuanced.

“The em dash — especially, used like this — has become one of the most reliable AI tells. ChatGPT in particular uses it at a rate that no human writer naturally matches. If almost every paragraph contains one, that frequency is itself the signal.”

Same with some of the other so-called “clear signals” of bot-speak.

In general, JustDone realizes that “100%” is a dangerous number to throw around. (As the biometric product marketing expert, I know this.)

“This is the part most detection guides skip: how to tell if something is written by AI is not a solved problem. No tool gets it right every time. No human reader gets it right every time.

“False positives happen. Formal academic writing, technical documentation, and content written by non-native English speakers all share characteristics with AI output — consistent tone, structured argumentation, and uniform vocabulary. That’s why they can be flagged incorrectly….

“False negatives happen too. Heavily edited AI content, content that has been run through a humanizer, and output from the newest model generations all pass detection at rates that make any single scan an incomplete picture.”

So don’t believe those tools that state the Declaration of Independence was AI written. Jefferson and Franklin weren’t THAT brilliant.

Why “Cheers” is an Anachronism

Privacy?

Let’s travel back to 1969 to the Beacon Hill neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts. In that year and place, a bar started with the name the Bull & Finch Pub. It was popular with the locals, so much so that in 1982 the Bull & Finch Pub was named the “Best Neighborhood Bar” by Boston Magazine.

But something else happened in 1982 that would change the Bull & Finch Pub forever.

Charleses in charge

It turns out that Glen Charles, Les Charles, and James Burrows, the producers of a television show in development, needed an authentic setting and ended up in Boston scouting out locations (we’ll return to that).

“After visiting other Boston bars, they returned to the Bull & Finch and declared, ‘This is the place.’ An American television classic was born, and they would name it Cheers. The TV show premiered on September 30, 1982, and remains one of America’s most beloved situation comedies of all time.”

After the show ended, life imitated art and the Bull & Finch Pub was renamed Cheers Beacon Hill. That was the name it bore when I visited Boston in July 2006 for that year’s International Association for Identification conference.

But I’m not going to talk about that.

I’m going to talk about the song.

Where everybody knows your name

TV shows need to have theme songs, and “Cheers” was no exception. Charles, Charles, and Burrows turned to a New York songwriting team, Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart-Angelo (known for “People Like Us” for the musical Preppies). After several attempts, the duo came up with a song, and Portnoy recorded the vocal demo to guide whatever big-name singer the producers selected to perform the real song. The producers selected…Gary Portnoy.

So for 11 years (and afterwards in syndication) we heard Portnoy’s voice at the beginning of every episode.

The name of the song?

“Where Everybody Knows Your Name.”

“Cheers” season 1 intro.

Say what?

When you read that song title, remember two things;

The song was written in 1982, not 2006 or 2026. Today, if someone says “when everybody know your name,” we immediately think of the surveillance state where everybody knows you name, your mother’s maiden name, and the name of your favorite pet.

The show was nostalgic, drawing upon the 19th century style illustrations in the show intro (even though the inspiring bar was founded in 1969). The neighborhood feel reminded us of a small community where everybody DID know your name.

Norm!

Was society like this in 1982? Not really. We had spent decades in the anonymity of big cities where we often didn’t know our neighbors.

And the surveillance state we face today was already in existence in 1982. The same band that wrote a song about Bob and Judy “scouting out locations” wrote another song (“Life During Wartine”) with the line “we’re tapping phone lines.”

We know that that ain’t allowed. (4:06)

So even in 1982, “Cheers” and its theme song were a fictional anachronism divorced from reality. The only reason that everybody knew our names was because our privacy had long since been compromised.

And one more thing; THIS song is NOT the one from “Preppies.”

John Goodman in “True Stories.”

And Virgil, Texas is another fictional anachronism, giving Talking Heads a hat trick (cowboy hat) in this post.

The Promised Dividend

Proving Humanity: The Six Factors of Identity Verification and Authentication

Toxic Positivity Did Not Exist in the 1970s, But Temporary Layoffs Did

Most people remember the 1970s television show “Good Times” for its overuse of the word “Dynomite!”

I remember it for its theme song, and one line in particular.

“Good Times” was a Norman Lear show (although Eric Monte and “George Jefferson’s first son” Mike Evans actually created it), and as such it wasn’t always traditional or pleasant. It wasn’t traditional because it depicted an African-American two-parent family, something that had never been done before. (The Cosby Show came much later.) It wasn’t pleasant because it dealt with then-controversial subject matter.

Including unemployment.

Which brings me to the line in the theme song:

“Temporary layoffs

GOOD TIMES!”

Good Times.

Yet this was NOT an early example of 21st century toxic positivity, James, Florida, J.J., and the rest didn’t run around manifesting positive vibes. They KNEW that life in Cabrini Green sucked, but they moved onward; maybe not “moving on up,” but onward.

Oh, and by the way, temporary layoffs were not TV sitcom fiction. In the 1970s, layoffs WERE temporary. They would close the plant for around two months, then call you back to your job. Around 70% of workers returned to their employer.

A decade later it happened to me. A company laid me off, and I went to work for an associate of the owner. When the second company ran out of work for me, the first company hired me back.

After that, temporary layoffs faded away. The next time I was laid off was in 2020. Not surprisingly, the company never called me back.