31–40 of 208 posts
Somewhat related: I've long wondered why ATM cards don't have something similar. 1234 is my regular PIN. 1235 is my help I'm being robbed PIN -- it dispenses the cash, calls the cops, and tags the video.
Probably because the SIM standard has no provision for two local PINs.
Privacy is important. But why not just avoid keeping weird stuff on your phone? Keep it somewhere else. Or say, "hold on let me log out of my bank app" or something.
Where? Keep my naked girlfriend pics in a recipe box? Wtf are you even saying?
I'd rather not turn into a dull prude just because apple is too lazy to implement a guest account on their unix OS.
I'm trying to imagine how dull and colorless your life must be. I took the pictures with my phone. The obvious place to keep them is on my phone.
Better yet, why hasn't anyone created an app that just simulates a guest mode? A launcher with two sets of home screens would be perfect. Or , you just disable your preferred launcher when handing your phone to a friend, revealing the mostly barren stock screens. It's as simple as hiding icons, since the apps might as well not exist if the icons aren't there (access doesn't actually need to be explicitly forbidden, p…
Somewhat related: I've long wondered why ATM cards don't have something similar. 1234 is my regular PIN. 1235 is my help I'm being robbed PIN -- it dispenses the cash, calls the cops, and tags the video.
Will people change banks for it (compared to say, vague promises of better customer service)? Will people pay a premium for it (compared to say, offering more air miles)? I'd be willing to bet that for most people it simply isn't worth the investment for them.
I would tend to guess it would cause more problems than it solves.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. If you're willing to log out of your smart phone context, and restart any needed tools in the new guest context whenever you hand over your phone. Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted instantaneous user switching? That's a smidgen harder than the 40-year-old solutions :)
> Oh, I'm sorry, you wanted instantaneous user switching? That's a smidgen harder than the 40-year-old solutions :) These OS have been able to run multiple concurrent user sessions for 40 years, and fast user switching has been a feature of all desktop OS since Windows 9x went the way of the dodo. There are specific issues (core services of these systems are probably — sadly — coded with the idea that a single user i…
E.g.
App1 has uid 100 User1 has uid 101 User2 has uid 102
If all userdata for App1 is owned by uid 100, User1 or User2 could potentially used App1 to gain access to the other user's app-specific user data.
(I'll admit that I'm not an iOS or Android programmer, so I may be a bit out of my depth here.)
Somewhat related: I've long wondered why ATM cards don't have something similar. 1234 is my regular PIN. 1235 is my help I'm being robbed PIN -- it dispenses the cash, calls the cops, and tags the video.
In the scenario that you're proposing, the only advantage is that police are called about 30 seconds sooner. But my guess is that in the vast majority of cities in the US, that 30 seconds won't be enough to catch the criminals.
Not to mention that if this became widespread (and therefore known) you've now given the victim a crude weapon that the robber may feel warrants more violence to convince the victim that they better not type in their duress code.
I'm more bewildered to why no tablets seem to have multi-user functionality. In my experience, tablets get shared far more often than phones.
> I'm more bewildered to why no tablets seem to have multi-user functionality. That's the first thing I wondered about when Apple released the ipad: from the start, this looked like a family/eminently shareable device (and within a month you had reports of it being used as a shared family device, picked and left on the living room table for quick sessions of browsing or game), it felt weird that all the tablets were…
This is also why any app that handles sensitive information (including, arguably, the photo and video galleries) on a phone should have at least the _option_ to set an in-app PIN that's required before it opens up. Lots of folks hand their smartphone to their kids to play games and even if there's nothing sensitive on there, they might have things they don't want deleted like treasured photos and videos.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm more bewildered to why no tablets seem to have multi-user functionality. That's the first thing I wondered about when Apple released the ipad: from the start, this looked like a family/eminently shareable device (and within a month you had reports of it being used as a shared family device, picked and left on the living room table for quick sessions of browsing or game), it felt weird that all the tablets were…
But if the whole family could share it, they might only buy one instead of four.