Congratulations for using the word "if". TFA does include a video, but it doesn't prove the hack. The demonstrator shows the training of his index finger, then uses his second finger, covered with a bit of what looks like latex to unlock the phone.
Yet you can train the iPhone 5S to use multiple fingers, so we don't know that he hadn't previously trained the phone with this second finger/latex combo previously.
The 5S Touch ID sensor uses capacitative imaging, which means it's taking biometrics from below the skins surface, so it's highly unlikely the claimed procedure would work. But the obvious hoax method I describe probably would.
So we should await confirmation one way or the other.
You have to have the updates if you want the latest features though. Google releases most features as app updates
Not through choice. They have to deliver app features that way as most Androids don't get official OS upgrades, and if they do it's a LONG time after they have been released by Google.
It's a band-aid over a fundamental problem, not a positive feature.
Sure. But it does have lots of new features and improvements. They've obviously made huge and deep changes from XCode 4. Expect they'll speed it up and make it more stable in future releases.
Nonsense. If you are abusive or a troll you'll get posts deleted or you'll get banned, same as any other forum. Requests for and answers giving support won't be deleted though.
I remember 10 years ago Linux took minutes to boot on my PC
In 2003, Linux was taking minutes to boot? What were you doing wrong? Running it on mid 90s hardware?
now Ubuntu starts up in about 30 seconds and looks much better.
On a completely different PC. It certainly wouldn't do so on that 1990s PC you were using in 2003.
Newsflash: Most operating systems are getting faster, not slower.
No they are not. The hardware is.
Now sometimes OSs do get faster ON THE SAME HARDWARE. It depends on your starting point. The early versions of OSX all got faster with each release, because there were a lot of easy wins like caching and hashing opportunities. But the more you optimise for the next release, the harder wins are to find for the version after that.
But in general, new versions of OSs bring new features, that need more memory, and they make the OS a little slower. But that's more then compensated for by the ever increasing speed and memory capacity of the computers that run them.
Try to run the latest version of Android on an old Android phone, and it'll be sluggish, just as doing that on iOS will.
Not necessarily. The experience of sluggishness is mostly to do with how long it takes to react to a UI input. If the animation starts immediately, it may not appear sluggish, even if it takes longer.
If the animation is long enough to slow down the next input, then that too might give the impression of sluggishness. But that is not a given, just because the animations are longer than on iOS6.
One of the significant improvements in the iOS7 is a consistent feeling of place, coming largely from a more consistent zoom-in and zoom-out animations, rather than the more arbitrary animations of iOS7. And given animations have certain speeds that they look best at.
It's a trade off. And one that seems better overall than on iOS6.
Well it rather looks like it was designed to look for external threats. ICBM trails from Russia look very different from internal passenger jet trails. Needle in a haystack problem.
Actually the most interesting part is that the scanner takes a capacitative rather than optical image. Which explains why the lens isn't transparent (to visible light) and why it's not going to be fooled by photos and photocopies of fingerprints.
It also means that even if someone did get access to the image (which seems impossible), it wouldn't match up with optical fingerprints they might have from elsewhere.
What you say is entirely in conflict with the Google developer document I linked to. I don't expect you to change you mind. People on discussion forums seldom do. But I've proved my point.
If you want to go full on paranoid, that everything you are told might be a lie, they might be. But why ask the question here. We might be lying.
If however you're interested in the technology, an image of the fingerprint isn't stored anywhere. The fingerprint scanner creates a hash, and that is stored in a dedicated secure area in the CPU, salted with a UID from the phone. It's not possible to recreate an actual print from the hash, even if the hash were accessible from software, which it's not.
There's certainly not an image file of your finger print stored on your phone that spyware could upload.
If you're interesting enough for intelligence agencies to want your fingerprint, they'll come and get one off a glass or door handle you've just touched.
Thanks for that. I'd missed the introduction of those.
I can see that some people might want this for tablets. They are more likely to be shared in a family than a phone. I know you mentioned tablets earlier, but I've just been talking about phones.
Smart parents know the difference between their valuable communications tool, and a kids toy. They might give their last phone to their kids to play with, but they are fools if they give them their current one.
They get a phone call, a text or an email, and they have to wrench the phone from the kid playing a game on it? Ridiculous.
For sure there is a place for parental controls, to stop kids spending money or undesirable things ON THEIR OWN PHONES, where costs have to be paid for by a parent.
But what if there was a multi-user phone, logged in as someone else, and a message comes in for you. Should it show the message (and breach your privacy) or not (and make you miss the message that arrived on your phone. It just isn't sensible.
Note Android doesn't do multiple users either.
Windows Phone does have the concept of a sort of guest account for kids, which could make sense for some. And Apple has a patent for a way of having multiple privilege levels, which could be used for temporary loans without the complication of logging out/in.
But full on multiple user IDs - they are seldom enough used on consumer PCs, let alone needed for post-PC communications devices.
Actually the back button does exactly what it says on the box. It goes back, back meaning what you were doing previously. If you have a menu open, back closes the menu, if you're in a new screen, back goes back to the screen one level up, if you're at the root of the program back closes the program, if you're in a web browser back goes back.
If it was so logical, why did Android introduce the up "Up" button concept to do some of those functions?
Incidentally why do we need consistency?...somehow 99% of the applications out there provide a somewhat consistent and easy to use interface to the user
You answer your own question.
If an app is too hard to use, don't use it. The problem will solve itself with 1star ratings from users who get stuck in a menu because the App hasn't implemented a back button properly.
Your term "hasn't implemented a back button properly" also shows that actually you both understand and accept that consistency is valuable. There is no benefit to having inconsistent apps out there, that users may end up wasting time on.
The Jabber one doesn't work under iOS 7. (Or: show me the API that lets it, in the developer docs. I can't spot it.)
The mail one... for a third party mail app, if you check your mail at 8am every day, it can download at 7:50 for you. But if you *receive* mail at an unusual time, and it doesn't match a time when the system has "learned" that you're likely to open it, then it's not going to be able to pre-fetch it for you -- you can't know you got the mail until you open the app.
So you are saying you WANT push but your previous message for some reason excluded them. But iOS7 allows apps to respond to push notifications without the user being alerted, so there's no reason not to implement it that way.
Maybe you were just going a round about way to saying there is no way of making sure that a background is serviced every X seconds. And for sure that is right. By design. Polling is not a good way to design network apps for battery powered devices.
While I am sure there are some efficiency improvements in iOS 7 UI and features, overall people should be keenly aware that not much has really changed under the hood. I mean turning on 64bit when compiling iOS 7 is not innovative, neither is a 64bit CPU. Apple is pulling the wool over everyone's eyes and making it seem like iOS 7 and iPhone 5s are significant upgrades, when in reality they are barely incremental updates. Apple needs this deception if they want to improve their stock performance.
And yet despite your talk of efficiency and performance, the fact is that the iPhone 5s is approximately twice as fast as the fastest Android phone.
They spent exactly 5 minutes talking about iOS 7 at the iPhone release.
They talked explicitly about iOS7 from 7:10 to 16:35 = 9 minutes. Which seems quite enough for an event which was about launching 2 new phones. That was the new news. iOS7 had already been presented in much more detail at the WWDC keynote.
Finally while the iTouch is cool, without support for User Profiles iTouch is just a useless contrivance for people too-stupid to remember a 4 digit passcode. There is no point "knowing" who is using the iDevice when there is no simply no iOS feature that is aware of who is using the device.
There's no such thing as "iTouch". Touch ID is not simply for those who can't remember a PIN. It's significantly faster and more secure than a PIN.
There is no point "knowing" who is using the iDevice when there is no simply no iOS feature that is aware of who is using the device.
Any phone OS that has a concept of multiple users is designed by a moron. Phones are personal devices, they are not multi-user systems.
Have a look inside Google's apps, e.g. Play Store, G+, YouTube or Now. It's all flat "cards", the same as their web versions. The OS is similar, especially the icons in system apps like the dialer and calculator, or in the notification shade.
On other words there's a mish-mash of pseudo 3d and flat icons. iOS 7 on the other hand has a new design entirely without pseudo 3d highlights and shadows. That's why it was compared to Windows Phone, not Android. Because Android does not have a consistently flat UI.
Slashdot Mirror
It might, if it were true. The included video certainly doesn't prove the claim.
Congratulations for using the word "if". TFA does include a video, but it doesn't prove the hack. The demonstrator shows the training of his index finger, then uses his second finger, covered with a bit of what looks like latex to unlock the phone.
Yet you can train the iPhone 5S to use multiple fingers, so we don't know that he hadn't previously trained the phone with this second finger/latex combo previously.
The 5S Touch ID sensor uses capacitative imaging, which means it's taking biometrics from below the skins surface, so it's highly unlikely the claimed procedure would work. But the obvious hoax method I describe probably would.
So we should await confirmation one way or the other.
You have to have the updates if you want the latest features though. Google releases most features as app updates
Not through choice. They have to deliver app features that way as most Androids don't get official OS upgrades, and if they do it's a LONG time after they have been released by Google.
It's a band-aid over a fundamental problem, not a positive feature.
That troll under your bed must have installed it.
Sure. But it does have lots of new features and improvements. They've obviously made huge and deep changes from XCode 4. Expect they'll speed it up and make it more stable in future releases.
How are you feeling now about the horizontal pinstripes in early OSX versions?
Nonsense. If you are abusive or a troll you'll get posts deleted or you'll get banned, same as any other forum. Requests for and answers giving support won't be deleted though.
I remember 10 years ago Linux took minutes to boot on my PC
In 2003, Linux was taking minutes to boot? What were you doing wrong? Running it on mid 90s hardware?
now Ubuntu starts up in about 30 seconds and looks much better.
On a completely different PC. It certainly wouldn't do so on that 1990s PC you were using in 2003.
Newsflash: Most operating systems are getting faster, not slower.
No they are not. The hardware is.
Now sometimes OSs do get faster ON THE SAME HARDWARE. It depends on your starting point. The early versions of OSX all got faster with each release, because there were a lot of easy wins like caching and hashing opportunities. But the more you optimise for the next release, the harder wins are to find for the version after that.
But in general, new versions of OSs bring new features, that need more memory, and they make the OS a little slower. But that's more then compensated for by the ever increasing speed and memory capacity of the computers that run them.
Try to run the latest version of Android on an old Android phone, and it'll be sluggish, just as doing that on iOS will.
Not necessarily. The experience of sluggishness is mostly to do with how long it takes to react to a UI input. If the animation starts immediately, it may not appear sluggish, even if it takes longer.
If the animation is long enough to slow down the next input, then that too might give the impression of sluggishness. But that is not a given, just because the animations are longer than on iOS6.
One of the significant improvements in the iOS7 is a consistent feeling of place, coming largely from a more consistent zoom-in and zoom-out animations, rather than the more arbitrary animations of iOS7. And given animations have certain speeds that they look best at.
It's a trade off. And one that seems better overall than on iOS6.
And as a result, your battery life is shit.
Meanwhile your opinion of what is not possible with iOS multitasking is woefully out of date.
Well it rather looks like it was designed to look for external threats. ICBM trails from Russia look very different from internal passenger jet trails. Needle in a haystack problem.
Obviously Apple aren't giving full information about how it works. But the hashing part has been mentioned in several places.
This is the best source of information I found. It includes both what Apple have revealed, together with some informed speculation.
http://www.techhive.com/article/2048514/the-iphone-5s-fingerprint-reader-what-you-need-to-know.html
Actually the most interesting part is that the scanner takes a capacitative rather than optical image. Which explains why the lens isn't transparent (to visible light) and why it's not going to be fooled by photos and photocopies of fingerprints.
It also means that even if someone did get access to the image (which seems impossible), it wouldn't match up with optical fingerprints they might have from elsewhere.
What you say is entirely in conflict with the Google developer document I linked to. I don't expect you to change you mind. People on discussion forums seldom do. But I've proved my point.
If you want to go full on paranoid, that everything you are told might be a lie, they might be. But why ask the question here. We might be lying.
If however you're interested in the technology, an image of the fingerprint isn't stored anywhere. The fingerprint scanner creates a hash, and that is stored in a dedicated secure area in the CPU, salted with a UID from the phone. It's not possible to recreate an actual print from the hash, even if the hash were accessible from software, which it's not.
There's certainly not an image file of your finger print stored on your phone that spyware could upload.
If you're interesting enough for intelligence agencies to want your fingerprint, they'll come and get one off a glass or door handle you've just touched.
Thanks for that. I'd missed the introduction of those.
I can see that some people might want this for tablets. They are more likely to be shared in a family than a phone. I know you mentioned tablets earlier, but I've just been talking about phones.
As an Android user I've neither seen nor heard of an Up button, but thanks for throwing that non-event into the mix.
Your missing knowledge of the OS on your phone doesn't help your argument.
http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html
And all this still magically happens without any prescription of how something should work by a 3rd party.
And yet that same link IS a prescription of how something should work. Official from Android. AND it makes my point about consistency too.
Killing three birds with one link. Nice!
I'm contractually obliged to work a certain number of hours a week and the timekeeping system is there to ensure that.
Indeed. That's pretty much the definition of a non-professional. You're kidding yourself about your status.
Ask any parent
Smart parents know the difference between their valuable communications tool, and a kids toy. They might give their last phone to their kids to play with, but they are fools if they give them their current one.
They get a phone call, a text or an email, and they have to wrench the phone from the kid playing a game on it? Ridiculous.
For sure there is a place for parental controls, to stop kids spending money or undesirable things ON THEIR OWN PHONES, where costs have to be paid for by a parent.
But what if there was a multi-user phone, logged in as someone else, and a message comes in for you. Should it show the message (and breach your privacy) or not (and make you miss the message that arrived on your phone. It just isn't sensible.
Note Android doesn't do multiple users either.
Windows Phone does have the concept of a sort of guest account for kids, which could make sense for some. And Apple has a patent for a way of having multiple privilege levels, which could be used for temporary loans without the complication of logging out/in.
But full on multiple user IDs - they are seldom enough used on consumer PCs, let alone needed for post-PC communications devices.
Actually the back button does exactly what it says on the box. It goes back, back meaning what you were doing previously. If you have a menu open, back closes the menu, if you're in a new screen, back goes back to the screen one level up, if you're at the root of the program back closes the program, if you're in a web browser back goes back.
If it was so logical, why did Android introduce the up "Up" button concept to do some of those functions?
Incidentally why do we need consistency?...somehow 99% of the applications out there provide a somewhat consistent and easy to use interface to the user
You answer your own question.
If an app is too hard to use, don't use it. The problem will solve itself with 1star ratings from users who get stuck in a menu because the App hasn't implemented a back button properly.
Your term "hasn't implemented a back button properly" also shows that actually you both understand and accept that consistency is valuable. There is no benefit to having inconsistent apps out there, that users may end up wasting time on.
The Jabber one doesn't work under iOS 7. (Or: show me the API that lets it, in the developer docs. I can't spot it.)
The mail one... for a third party mail app, if you check your mail at 8am every day, it can download at 7:50 for you. But if you *receive* mail at an unusual time, and it doesn't match a time when the system has "learned" that you're likely to open it, then it's not going to be able to pre-fetch it for you -- you can't know you got the mail until you open the app.
So you are saying you WANT push but your previous message for some reason excluded them. But iOS7 allows apps to respond to push notifications without the user being alerted, so there's no reason not to implement it that way.
Maybe you were just going a round about way to saying there is no way of making sure that a background is serviced every X seconds. And for sure that is right. By design. Polling is not a good way to design network apps for battery powered devices.
While I am sure there are some efficiency improvements in iOS 7 UI and features, overall people should be keenly aware that not much has really changed under the hood. I mean turning on 64bit when compiling iOS 7 is not innovative, neither is a 64bit CPU. Apple is pulling the wool over everyone's eyes and making it seem like iOS 7 and iPhone 5s are significant upgrades, when in reality they are barely incremental updates. Apple needs this deception if they want to improve their stock performance.
And yet despite your talk of efficiency and performance, the fact is that the iPhone 5s is approximately twice as fast as the fastest Android phone.
They spent exactly 5 minutes talking about iOS 7 at the iPhone release.
They talked explicitly about iOS7 from 7:10 to 16:35 = 9 minutes. Which seems quite enough for an event which was about launching 2 new phones. That was the new news. iOS7 had already been presented in much more detail at the WWDC keynote.
Finally while the iTouch is cool, without support for User Profiles iTouch is just a useless contrivance for people too-stupid to remember a 4 digit passcode. There is no point "knowing" who is using the iDevice when there is no simply no iOS feature that is aware of who is using the device.
There's no such thing as "iTouch". Touch ID is not simply for those who can't remember a PIN. It's significantly faster and more secure than a PIN.
There is no point "knowing" who is using the iDevice when there is no simply no iOS feature that is aware of who is using the device.
Any phone OS that has a concept of multiple users is designed by a moron. Phones are personal devices, they are not multi-user systems.
Yeah right. Helvetica Neue was copied from Microsoft. (via a time machine.)
As the biggest Android Fanboy here, you wouldn't.
Have a look inside Google's apps, e.g. Play Store, G+, YouTube or Now. It's all flat "cards", the same as their web versions. The OS is similar, especially the icons in system apps like the dialer and calculator, or in the notification shade.
On other words there's a mish-mash of pseudo 3d and flat icons. iOS 7 on the other hand has a new design entirely without pseudo 3d highlights and shadows. That's why it was compared to Windows Phone, not Android. Because Android does not have a consistently flat UI.
And yet we still have Fandroids complaining that iOS doesn't have the buttons that were on old Androids and have been deprecated in new Androids.
It shows the mindlessness of those complaining about everything that is dissimilar with iOS.