That's a great way to tl;dr my tirade against biometric security. Is the link worth reading?
Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
231–240 of 261 posts
Re: Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
My friend's 12-month old baby reset the unlock code on her mother's phone and they ended up having to wipe it completely in order to recover.
This is completely unrelated, but why do people say "12 months", "18 months", and "24 months" rather than 1 year, 1.5 years, and 2 years? I don't get it. I'd understand if they're younger than a year old (eg "My son is seven months old!"), but not once the age can be expressed in years.
Babies grow fast, so there can be a fairly large difference between twelve months and fourteen months, or fourteen months and eighteen months. You can't express those values well in decimal format, so you can't discuss milestones and development in decimal format. My experience is that people usually switch over to years once the child is older than two.
Re: Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a reason I chose the word "evidence" and not the word "proof". Yes, it is evidence. No, it is not proof. Further note that possession of a password ("something you know") is also merely evidence, not proof. Also, "something you have" is not proof either; having a token is merely evidence, not proof. We have no method of proof. If that is the standard you are looking for, then I have some bad news: It is impo…
>> what's the payback for cracking a fingerprint scanner, just to get access to a metaphorical Grandma's phone? Well, if said Grandma is rich and is sharing dirty selfies with someone she doesn't want Grandpa to know about... being able to steal and use that information will probably be worth much more than the value of the phone itself.
By definition, if Grandma's phone contains high-value information, then it contains high value information. In that case, Grandma should take more steps to protect her high value information. Yes, if you just rewrite the premise to the question, the answer changes.
This is some really sloppy thinking you're engaging in here. Rewriting questions to obtain the desired answer is a very dangerous cognitive habit to get into.
Re: Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a few attempts to unlock it with a fake fingerprint, and then they'd have to enter my code. And if they fail to enter my code 10 times, the phone is wiped. Are you saying that random people can pick up your phone when you go to the bathroom, touch the home button 3 times, and then enter "1111" 10 times, and wipe your phone? Is there some protection against this?
Protection against what ? That is the desired behaviour of most people. And if it isn't then you can simple disable the behaviour. It's not like you will lose data since it is backed up to iCloud.
> Protection against what ?
Um, protection against random people wiping your phone maybe?
Re: Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
#235All these academic arguments about the security of fingerprints are interesting but completely are detached from the day-to-day use of TouchID. I've been using it for about a week or so now. It's incredibly convenient. It unlocks my phone almost instantly. It prevents random people near by phone from being unable to unlock it. If a thief got their hands on it, they'd have a few attempts to unlock it with a fake finge…
This is a good point. But imagine this attitude is adopted and becomes commonplace. People WILL start becoming lax, and people who should not be storing critical information on their phones, or who don't realize that its critical ARE going to lose their phones and they ARE going to get cracked.
I guess the question at that point is, is a 4-digit code better or worse? I'm not fielding that one...
Re: Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
My friend's 12-month old baby reset the unlock code on her mother's phone and they ended up having to wipe it completely in order to recover.
This is completely unrelated, but why do people say "12 months", "18 months", and "24 months" rather than 1 year, 1.5 years, and 2 years? I don't get it. I'd understand if they're younger than a year old (eg "My son is seven months old!"), but not once the age can be expressed in years.
It's a really neat question, and as a new-ish parent I've given it some thought. In fact, there's even another layer to it: shortly after birth, people tend to count in weeks rather than months.
My guess at an answer is that human beings are more comfortable thinking about numbers that are small integers (between 1 and 20 or so?), and that (roughly speaking) we often want to be able to give a bit more precision than you'd get from just "1" vs. "2".[1]
So for baby growth, parents will talk about how many days old their child is for the first week or so, and then use "weeks" for the first few months, and then use "months" until they're around 2 years old. (There's also a real sense in which the pace of child development seems to progress on a sort of log scale: change is very rapid at first, but gradually slows down. The use of different age units seems to roughly parallel that.)
As an aside, this same human preference is presumably also why the English developed different units for (say) inches, feet, and miles rather than using one of those units for everything. [Side note: is there any common English unit between yards and miles? I grew up using "blocks", which is handy, but that's pretty city-specific.]
[1] By "precision" I'm thinking more or less about "relative uncertainty". If you assume that an integer value is accurate to within +/- 0.5, then the percent uncertainty on 1 or 2 is so large as to make the information almost useless, while the implied uncertainty on a big number like 50 is probably smaller than is justified for most contexts.
Re: Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a camera with effectively infinite depth of field? Probably not.
Couldn't the camera even just focus on a face and then the neck as a point of depth? Honestly, all of these quick-check systems have countless flaws. I'm ready to have a chip in my arm now.
The point is they're both in focus. The camera (lens) isn't able to focus on the face and not the neck.
Re: Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
#238All these academic arguments about the security of fingerprints are interesting but completely are detached from the day-to-day use of TouchID. I've been using it for about a week or so now. It's incredibly convenient. It unlocks my phone almost instantly. It prevents random people near by phone from being unable to unlock it. If a thief got their hands on it, they'd have a few attempts to unlock it with a fake finge…
> a few attempts to unlock it with a fake fingerprint, and then they'd have to enter my code. And if they fail to enter my code 10 times, the phone is wiped. Are you saying that random people can pick up your phone when you go to the bathroom, touch the home button 3 times, and then enter "1111" 10 times, and wipe your phone? Is there some protection against this?
That is no different than the current situation - enter the PIN code in wrong enough times and phone locks down. There's just an additional (print reader) barrier in the way
Re: Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
#239> Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
No they're not. A username is something you intentionally give out to other members of some community so they can identify you. A username is by definition not secret at all, and it must necessarily be easy for others to replicate. It is not easy to replicate a fingerprint.
Re: Fingerprints are Usernames, not Passwords
#240I can't help but think that there's a whole segment of HN readers who are thinking as single men. In the context of a family with kids this is a very different thing. My kids have access to my phone and my wife's --which are not locked in any way. I have access to my kid's iphones, ipods and ipads. Having devices locked to fingerprints in any way would be a nightmare. If you have really young kids, its a logistical m…
Funny, I have teen/pre-teen children and my reaction is the exact opposite.
I, mostly unsuccessfully, ban the children from having passcodes on their devices so that I can do backups, act as communal spy for various parents etc. They, on the other hand, mostly add passcodes (then change them regularly) so that their siblings don't go onto their phones and change the wallpaper to amusing photos, delete Minecraft etc.
Having Touch ID whereby only they, me and their mother can access their devices is manna. And it makes confiscation substantially more meaningful, assuming you can switch individual prints on and off.
I can't wait, although, as I'm too cheap to ever buy them the latest gear, it'll be a couple of years before this particular paradise occurs.