Unfortunately it's a bit like smoking, not doing it yourself isn't really enough to protect you, someone in your vicinity doing it is already bad for you.
So when you take *your* phone out, it's camera isn't also scanning every single other person in visual range of its one or perhaps two cameras??
No it isn't. Why would it? More important, how could it without power?
The difference is that I can (and do) disable my camera unless I explicitly need it. I can even disable it permanently if I have to for security reasons without completely crippling my smartphone.
And you're clearly ignorant of how easy it is to fool the fingerprint sensor. Unfortunately I have first hand experience just how easy it really is. A year ago we still made a lot of effort to pull it off, etching PCBs with fingerprints and creating "artificial" fingers... only to learn that Play-Doh and some graphite dust along with a child's toy fingerprint-taking kit would also do.
As for the various "security features" you list: That it needs the passcode after rebooting is worthless, I simply wait to steal (or rob) it from you until after you turned it on. Does anyone actually turn their phone off anymore? I don't. Every time it runs out of power for some odd reason I actually have to ponder what my PIN was because it's been a few weeks by that moment.
I don't know whether iPhones crash more often than my phone does, though. That could be a reason to reboot, of course.
Second, not unlocked for 48 hours... when was that the case the last time? Is there a phone in the western hemisphere that's not used for security research or other development that isn't unlocked at least daily?
As for the 5 attempts: I need 1-2 for the fake finger. Reliably.
I honestly don't get it. And I would really love to understand, I do.
What I can observe is that iPhones lose features that I would actually use and gain features that I can't really identify a sensible use for. In other words, to me they become inferior with every incarnation.
I can only assume that this is not the case in general, because the newer models of iPhones still sell in approximately the same number as the older models did when they came out. There has to be a reason for this. And please refrain from trolling like "because people are dumb", that's rarely the case. There are certainly cases of people who'd buy anything from brand X because... reasons, but after 2-3 models of getting increasingly inferior products, they would stop doing it. So they actually must deem those products satisfactory.
And this is the part I don't get.
Do people really want these features? The unlock-by-fingerprint, unlock-by-face and the other recent additions that I'd call gimmicks at best and security risks at worst? While at the same time not missing the ability to attach headphones, replace the battery (or any part for that matter), use the software of their choice instead of what the vendor deems "appropriate" and so many other things where I simply cannot fathom why one would put up with it.
What the hell is the appeal of this thing? I got used to not fully understanding the motivation humans have, but why they actually consider newer models of iPhones superior to their (in my opinion) more versatile and useful older models completely puzzles me.
Huh? No, I'm not trolling, that's the answer to why it was a success. That and the fact that you could easily buy it online. Give people what they want, demand a reasonable price and make it easy to buy.
If your game is available on Steam, you might see the difference.
I didn't buy a single game in a shop in the past 10 years. Despite buying 2-3 games a month. For none of them I have any kind of medium. The reason why I buy them? It's done with a mouse click.
Not unlike downloading a copy, ya know...
It's not the 10 bucks. I wipe my ass with 10 bucks. It's driving to the goddamn store, looking for a parking spot for half an hour, standing in line to pay the game for another half hour and then drive back home.
Too little too late. Any halfway decent Indie dev is now primarily developing for PC with the consoles being an afterthought at best. And, frankly, for the indie developer the PC is probably also the more attractive platform. It's very easy to hand out demos and it's equally easy to publish with things like Steam. The ecosystem is already established, you can easily market and even sell your game, even while it's still in development.
Most of all, though, you're not dependent on a single point of failure that could at any point in time change the conditions and shut you out again. If Steam suddenly decided that it doesn't want to run indie games anymore, there's plenty more game distributors. Try to continue selling your indie game on XBox if MS decides they don't want to play nice with peasants anymore.
To make me trust you, you have to give me a good reason to do so. Unfortunately the NSA has given all sorts of reason to not thrust them with anything. Not as an American, twice not as a foreigner.
Game programming for PC was a nightmare in the 90s. You spent more time developing, testing and debugging drivers and making your game compatible to the thousands of different possible combinations of hardware some people could come up with.
It was HEAPS easier to develop for consoles, even though you had to cross-develop. There was exactly one and ONLY one configuration. Yes, it was quite often much more limiting than what you could demand from a PC gamer, but at least you didn't have to work around the various quirks of some hardware configurations.
This simply isn't the case anymore. Hell, we're at the point where with the right development engine you can develop for Windows, Linux and MacOS at the same time without even changing anything in your code. With zero or very low setup fee.
The same time that developing for PC got easier and easier with more and more tools, api and engines becoming available for a low price or even free, developing for consoles became more and more complex and higher and higher up-front fees and more and more insane and ridiculous NDAs and other hoops you had to jump through to be allowed to even develop for them.
The lower cost is only true during the first few months of the console's existence. After a while the advantage shrinks, and as soon as you factor in the higher cost for games it melts away anyway.
Not to mention that a lot of good RTS series got dumbed down for console use. And let's not get into RTS aimbots so console users can actually hit anything with their twiddle sticks.
There are quite a few reasons why PC gaming didn't die 20 years ago when its obituaries were announced the first time. Or 15 years ago when it died again. Or 10 years ago. Or ever since. The reasons are simple.
Consoles had everything stacked in their favors to take over. There's really a LOT of upsides to consoles, all of which have been thrown into the gutter by their makers. Let's think back a few years, shall we? Let's go back to, say, the 1990s. PC gaming was a mess. So many different setups, no standards, drivers you had to invent and reinvent every other game you wrote, and the same shit for the ones wanting to play. Reconfigure this, memory-optimize that, IRQ settings here, DMA configuration there. Consoles were hassle-free gaming. Plug that cartridge into your NES, your Sega Master system, your NeoGeo or whatever you had and you were good to play. Easy. No fidgeting.
And no loading times! Stuff it in, turn it on, play! That was probably the first thing they lost with the advent of the first CD based consoles that made loading times from effin' FLOPPY DISKS look fast!
And the hassle free part was gone soon, too, when consoles started to become more and more fault-prone. Has there been a generation of consoles since PS1 and XBox where you could rely on them actually still working 2 years from purchase? For the sake of the all-holy copy protection, consoles have become a veritable nightmare when it comes to hardware stability.
Next thing they lost was the input advantage/disadvantage battle. Consoles used controllers, PCs used keyboard and mouse. Which of course means that certain games played better on consoles (like plattformers and arcade flight games) while others played better on PCs (like FPS, RTS and other games where point-and-click/shoot is more relevant). Now, PCs did get their console controllers quite soon. Not to mention the nearly inexhaustible supply of other periphery from flight sticks to steering wheels to... you name it. Only very recently console makers realized that yes, there is actually a market for such input devices (with the noteworthy exception of Nintendo, who produced an incredible amount of input devices... sadly they insisted in making some NOBODY in their sane mind would WANT to use instead of producing what people would actually be using). And dropping the ball immediately again by providing only overpriced crap that you can use with THEIR product, ONLY their product and only with THIS version of their product. In other words, my PC steering wheel I bought 10 years and 3 PCs ago still works. Do you honestly expect your PS2 steering wheel to work when PS5 comes?
And I didn't even get into the area where you can actually upgrade your PC while you're stuck with whatever the console maker deems "good enough".
Personally, I think consoles dropped the ball when they insisted that they really need to have a full blown operating system that took away the key advantage these machines had over PCs: Exactly that they did NOT need that overhead and could apply their whole processing power to delivering a gaming experience.
I'm fairly sure there would still be enough time to simply dump them onto the market. You probably won't get 5k a bitcoin, but who cares if you have millions?
Slashdot Mirror
So in other words it's likely to fail anyway in a crowded area?
But that facial recognition is an affront to the Arab world! According to Apple, all the women look the same when wearing those curtains.
I'm not so sure about this. Does the phone notice when you're unconscious?
We have a president for that.
it's stored in a write only security chip
Ponder this for maybe 5 minutes. You might find out yourself why this is bullshit.
Unfortunately it's a bit like smoking, not doing it yourself isn't really enough to protect you, someone in your vicinity doing it is already bad for you.
Mine actually is. My Index finger is resting on the back of my phone when I make a phone call.
Hey, who'd have thought, different people have different habits!
You know, technology is today advanced enough that they can actually make holes into covers where such a sensor would be located.
Apple, too, might innovate it in a year or two.
So when you take *your* phone out, it's camera isn't also scanning every single other person in visual range of its one or perhaps two cameras??
No it isn't. Why would it? More important, how could it without power?
The difference is that I can (and do) disable my camera unless I explicitly need it. I can even disable it permanently if I have to for security reasons without completely crippling my smartphone.
...provided it ain't too cold to take your gloves off...
And you're clearly ignorant of how easy it is to fool the fingerprint sensor. Unfortunately I have first hand experience just how easy it really is. A year ago we still made a lot of effort to pull it off, etching PCBs with fingerprints and creating "artificial" fingers... only to learn that Play-Doh and some graphite dust along with a child's toy fingerprint-taking kit would also do.
As for the various "security features" you list: That it needs the passcode after rebooting is worthless, I simply wait to steal (or rob) it from you until after you turned it on. Does anyone actually turn their phone off anymore? I don't. Every time it runs out of power for some odd reason I actually have to ponder what my PIN was because it's been a few weeks by that moment.
I don't know whether iPhones crash more often than my phone does, though. That could be a reason to reboot, of course.
Second, not unlocked for 48 hours... when was that the case the last time? Is there a phone in the western hemisphere that's not used for security research or other development that isn't unlocked at least daily?
As for the 5 attempts: I need 1-2 for the fake finger. Reliably.
Just point me to a sensible smart phone without cameras. You have any idea how hard it is to find one?
I honestly don't get it. And I would really love to understand, I do.
What I can observe is that iPhones lose features that I would actually use and gain features that I can't really identify a sensible use for. In other words, to me they become inferior with every incarnation.
I can only assume that this is not the case in general, because the newer models of iPhones still sell in approximately the same number as the older models did when they came out. There has to be a reason for this. And please refrain from trolling like "because people are dumb", that's rarely the case. There are certainly cases of people who'd buy anything from brand X because ... reasons, but after 2-3 models of getting increasingly inferior products, they would stop doing it. So they actually must deem those products satisfactory.
And this is the part I don't get.
Do people really want these features? The unlock-by-fingerprint, unlock-by-face and the other recent additions that I'd call gimmicks at best and security risks at worst? While at the same time not missing the ability to attach headphones, replace the battery (or any part for that matter), use the software of their choice instead of what the vendor deems "appropriate" and so many other things where I simply cannot fathom why one would put up with it.
What the hell is the appeal of this thing? I got used to not fully understanding the motivation humans have, but why they actually consider newer models of iPhones superior to their (in my opinion) more versatile and useful older models completely puzzles me.
Cool story, bro.
Huh? No, I'm not trolling, that's the answer to why it was a success. That and the fact that you could easily buy it online. Give people what they want, demand a reasonable price and make it easy to buy.
If your game is available on Steam, you might see the difference.
I didn't buy a single game in a shop in the past 10 years. Despite buying 2-3 games a month. For none of them I have any kind of medium. The reason why I buy them? It's done with a mouse click.
Not unlike downloading a copy, ya know...
It's not the 10 bucks. I wipe my ass with 10 bucks. It's driving to the goddamn store, looking for a parking spot for half an hour, standing in line to pay the game for another half hour and then drive back home.
That's what matters.
Put your games for sale on line and we talk.
The only ones really benefiting (for actual reasons, non-controlfreak-ish ones) from a vape-ban is the tobacco industry.
Too little too late. Any halfway decent Indie dev is now primarily developing for PC with the consoles being an afterthought at best. And, frankly, for the indie developer the PC is probably also the more attractive platform. It's very easy to hand out demos and it's equally easy to publish with things like Steam. The ecosystem is already established, you can easily market and even sell your game, even while it's still in development.
Most of all, though, you're not dependent on a single point of failure that could at any point in time change the conditions and shut you out again. If Steam suddenly decided that it doesn't want to run indie games anymore, there's plenty more game distributors. Try to continue selling your indie game on XBox if MS decides they don't want to play nice with peasants anymore.
To make me trust you, you have to give me a good reason to do so. Unfortunately the NSA has given all sorts of reason to not thrust them with anything. Not as an American, twice not as a foreigner.
Game programming for PC was a nightmare in the 90s. You spent more time developing, testing and debugging drivers and making your game compatible to the thousands of different possible combinations of hardware some people could come up with.
It was HEAPS easier to develop for consoles, even though you had to cross-develop. There was exactly one and ONLY one configuration. Yes, it was quite often much more limiting than what you could demand from a PC gamer, but at least you didn't have to work around the various quirks of some hardware configurations.
This simply isn't the case anymore. Hell, we're at the point where with the right development engine you can develop for Windows, Linux and MacOS at the same time without even changing anything in your code. With zero or very low setup fee.
The same time that developing for PC got easier and easier with more and more tools, api and engines becoming available for a low price or even free, developing for consoles became more and more complex and higher and higher up-front fees and more and more insane and ridiculous NDAs and other hoops you had to jump through to be allowed to even develop for them.
The lower cost is only true during the first few months of the console's existence. After a while the advantage shrinks, and as soon as you factor in the higher cost for games it melts away anyway.
Not to mention that a lot of good RTS series got dumbed down for console use. And let's not get into RTS aimbots so console users can actually hit anything with their twiddle sticks.
There are quite a few reasons why PC gaming didn't die 20 years ago when its obituaries were announced the first time. Or 15 years ago when it died again. Or 10 years ago. Or ever since. The reasons are simple.
Consoles had everything stacked in their favors to take over. There's really a LOT of upsides to consoles, all of which have been thrown into the gutter by their makers. Let's think back a few years, shall we? Let's go back to, say, the 1990s. PC gaming was a mess. So many different setups, no standards, drivers you had to invent and reinvent every other game you wrote, and the same shit for the ones wanting to play. Reconfigure this, memory-optimize that, IRQ settings here, DMA configuration there. Consoles were hassle-free gaming. Plug that cartridge into your NES, your Sega Master system, your NeoGeo or whatever you had and you were good to play. Easy. No fidgeting.
And no loading times! Stuff it in, turn it on, play! That was probably the first thing they lost with the advent of the first CD based consoles that made loading times from effin' FLOPPY DISKS look fast!
And the hassle free part was gone soon, too, when consoles started to become more and more fault-prone. Has there been a generation of consoles since PS1 and XBox where you could rely on them actually still working 2 years from purchase? For the sake of the all-holy copy protection, consoles have become a veritable nightmare when it comes to hardware stability.
Next thing they lost was the input advantage/disadvantage battle. Consoles used controllers, PCs used keyboard and mouse. Which of course means that certain games played better on consoles (like plattformers and arcade flight games) while others played better on PCs (like FPS, RTS and other games where point-and-click/shoot is more relevant). Now, PCs did get their console controllers quite soon. Not to mention the nearly inexhaustible supply of other periphery from flight sticks to steering wheels to ... you name it. Only very recently console makers realized that yes, there is actually a market for such input devices (with the noteworthy exception of Nintendo, who produced an incredible amount of input devices... sadly they insisted in making some NOBODY in their sane mind would WANT to use instead of producing what people would actually be using). And dropping the ball immediately again by providing only overpriced crap that you can use with THEIR product, ONLY their product and only with THIS version of their product. In other words, my PC steering wheel I bought 10 years and 3 PCs ago still works. Do you honestly expect your PS2 steering wheel to work when PS5 comes?
And I didn't even get into the area where you can actually upgrade your PC while you're stuck with whatever the console maker deems "good enough".
Personally, I think consoles dropped the ball when they insisted that they really need to have a full blown operating system that took away the key advantage these machines had over PCs: Exactly that they did NOT need that overhead and could apply their whole processing power to delivering a gaming experience.
I think you might just have identified whose money is behind the anti-vape push...
P is total punishment. And still P is irrelevant if C is close to zero.
For reference, see filesharing.
I'm fairly sure there would still be enough time to simply dump them onto the market. You probably won't get 5k a bitcoin, but who cares if you have millions?