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Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

techcrunch.com

431–440 of 715 posts

Re: Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

#431

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Comments about the virtue of weight and thinness never go away, are they helpful? Comments about the importance of good UI design never go away, are they helpful? Comments about IT security never go away, are they helpful? Comments about performance never go away, are they helpful? Comments about the importance of battery life never go away, are they helpful? Comments about privacy never go away, are they helpful? Th…

Most of those topics are not sidelined by "everything they tell us is a lie and should be replaced by uninformed speculation." If we're discussing the importance of battery life, a comment such as "How do we know they aren't lying? Maybe the new iPhone doesn't even have a battery and requires you to turn a hand crank." is not helpful.

Yeah, you have a good point there. Speculation in discussions about smartphones is rather unprecedented isn't it?

Re: Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

#433
post #395
post #390

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"If you've ever handled a penny, the government's got your DNA. Why do you think they keep 'em in circulation?" - Simpsons

An internet-enabled smartphone fp-reader is probably just a little more accurate than a random penny floating about in society.......-_-

A Simpsons' quote is also probably directed a little more towards the humour end of the scale.

Re: Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

#434
post #94
post #81

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Apple specifically stated that your fingerprint is stored and encrypted only on the A7 chip, and not iCloud or anywhere else. It's mentioned in the video as well: http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/#video-touch

I'm just playing Devil's Advocate here, but if in fact the NSA required copies of all fingerprints, I doubt Apple would be allowed to publicize it.

Not publicizing it would massively backfire as soon as the first teardown happens.

Re: Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

#435
post #60

I was really hoping for NFC support - sigh. I do love the fingerprint sensor and the intelligent auto-focusing features, though. Blurry smartphone pictures are so ubiquitous these days.

Why does everyone keep going on about NFC? It's been on Android for years and it's never been used in any meaningful way. I don't see Apple introducing some new hardware component just for the sake of adding it. They'll introduce something when they have a really solid use for it, which is something that Google seems to have never really had with NFC.

It's chicken and egg problem - the vendors won't offer services until a majority of phones will have the [rather cheap] NFC hardware; so this Apple decision effectively means a significant global delay until such wireless services will be available to me and everyone else.

Re: Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

#436

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Something is going to replace the credit card. If Apple had thrown their weight behind NFC, that would have closed the deal. I give them one more year (one iWatch release, and the iPhone 6 release) and then I agree, NFC will be a dead end.

What I meant is, if NFC is the best way to replace credit cards then Apple would want to be in on making that happen, they wouldn't just put the hardware on their devices and leave someone else to implement it. Something like NFC has just been basically a bullet point on Android phones' feature lists, but that's not really Apple's style. They're going to build something to use it on day 1 or they're not going to incl…

The cynical side of me says that Apple won't introduce NFC until they can sort out the licensing deals that give them a cut of every transaction.

Re: Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

#437
post #334

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In terms of raw sensor performance, certainly. The new camera moves the software stack forward in a way that Nokia didn't though - extremely high frame rate to "catch" the best moment, programmatic selection of said moments, merging of exposure information across multiple consecutive frames, etc. As a photo enthusiast that part of the presentation was a lot more exciting than the (rather marginal) improvements to len…

You don't need to mess around with these software hacks when the hardware is as good as in the Lumia 1020. Besides these software features are already done in the HTC One (lookup 'Zoe'). Apple's playing catchup here.

I thought that the whole point of the 41 megapixel sensor was to give more information to those types "software hacks"!

Re: Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

#438

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I'm curious why you say FPR only is for morons. I feel like I'm missing something.

Imagine someone knocks you out and takes your phone. Use finger (possibly still attached) to authenticate. Profit. So not really a good idea. I rather have the option of unlocking the phone via PIN, then have the option of sending a FPR hash to a site of my choice. Speaking of which, I wonder if they salt or provide some other way of sending unique hashes to different web sites or is this now the equivalent of using…

I read a liveblog of the presentation, and they only mentioned using it to unlock the phone and to purchase from the iTunes store. I don't think it's usable for random websites.

Re: Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

#439
post #102
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple specifically stated that your fingerprint is stored and encrypted only on the A7 chip, and not iCloud or anywhere else. It's mentioned in the video as well: http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/#video-touch

Yes. And how exactly do we check this? Why is it that we can still trust Apple? For all we know, the data gets sent directly to the NSA or, if it doesn't, there might be some secret backdoor that will make the device send the data at a later point. The last round of leaks was specifically talking about backdoors with all bigger US companies in order to circumvent encryption. That's what I means by "we have to conside…

Well, you can't trust _any_ device if that's your line of thinking. Not an iPhone, not an Ubuntu phone, no device whatsoever. Not unless you've baked your own chips, or made some contraption running your software in parallel on different CPU architectures.

If you're going to do anything, including working on the computer you're typing your comments on, you have to trust a lot of parties. Some of that trust involves knowing who made the code, and some of it may involve the knowledge that the NSA will not be using their best, most secret backdoors against a whole lot of people.

Re: Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S

#440
post #320

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But you are accomplishing absolutely nothing here. Being annoying and ineffective doesn't help your cause. Do you know that Jesus loves you and he wants to save your soul? You might as we'll be discussing religion or politics here. This is not the place. I heard your warning the first ten times.

We're talking about it, aren't we? We haven't forgotten this issue, distracted like children by the latest shiny toy. Even in the face of the things that traditionally kill news stories, we're talking about it. Change starts by making enough people aware of and angry about the issue that the politicians can't afford to support these programs any more. If we're just distracted the next time $TECH_TOY or $NATURAL_DISAS…

Oh brother. We care about legitimate privacy issues but now you are suggesting that becoming the equivalent of the Westboro Baptist Church on these matters will somehow be effective.

It won't.

The adolescent libertarian smell combined with semi-hysterical, semi-supported outrage on this issue is rapidly beginning to stink.

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