Touted as the iPhone X’s new flagship form of device security, Face ID is a natural target for hackers. Just a week after the device’s release, Vietnamese research team Bkav claims to have cracked Apple’s facial recognition system using a replica face mask that combines printed 2D images with three-dimensional features. The group has published a video demonstrating its proof of concept, but enough questions remain that no one really knows how legitimate this purported hack is.
I believe the term should be spoofed, not hacked. The video in the post shows Bkav using a homemade mask trying to spoof a person’s face registered using Face ID. Hacking would be breaking in and stealing credentials, or installing a back door, that sort of thing.
That said, something doesn’t sit right looking at that video. When I first saw it, my instinctive reaction was that it was fake. But even if the mask was successful in spoofing the user’s face, I just don’t see this as an issue.
More from Taylor’s post:
If you’re concerned that someone might want into your devices badly enough that they’d execute such an involved plan to steal your facial biometrics, well, you’ve probably got a lot of other things to worry about as well.
And:
Prior to the Bkav video, Wired worked with Cloudflare to see if Face ID could be hacked through masks that appear far more sophisticated than the ones the Bkav hack depicts. Remarkably, in spite of their fairly elaborate efforts — including “details like eyeholes designed to allow real eye movement” and “thousands of eyebrow hairs inserted into the mask intended to look more like real hair” — Wired and Cloudflare didn’t succeed.
If Bkav has the goods, I suspect we’ll hear more from them, perhaps a follow-on post with a more clearly defined demonstration. Or, perhaps, we’ll hear from Apple about some patch they made to Face ID in response to Bkav’s work. As is, color me skeptical.
iCloud Photo Library, when it fits your needs, is a great way to avoid having to manage where your images and videos wind up. You capture video on your iPhone or drag an image into Photos in macOS, and it just syncs everywhere while making a central copy at iCloud.
And:
However, there’s one configuration I can’t advise, and Macworld reader Eric writes in with a question that prompts a discussion. He’s wondering if he could rely on iCloud to be his “main backup of images.” The short answer is no, but it’s not about distrust in Apple’s technical abilities. Rather, about the frailty of all material things, and the risk of putting all one’s digital eggs in one basket, no matter how firmly the basket-storing company is holding that basket.
Interesting read, some good insight on iCloud Photo Library.
Details on “Unsane” have slowly trickled out in recent months, including the fact that the film was shot in secret and entirely on Apple’s iPhone, according to Entertainment Weekly. The film stars Claire Foy, Juno Temple, and Jay Pharoah, with Pharoah describing the picture as “reality-horror type” with some similarities to Jordan Peele-created smash hit “Get Out.”
The movie was filmed this summer, meaning the best iPhone it could have been shot on was the iPhone 7 Plus.
I’m looking forward to seeing this movie in the theater, at the very least to get a sense of the look of an iPhone shot movie on the big screen. It will be interesting to compare the look of this film with future films shot on an iPhone 8 Plus or iPhone X.
Also, I loved Get Out and am a big fan of Claire Foy, Jay Pharoah, Steven Soderbergh.
Pandora, the largest streaming music provider in the U.S., and Sonos, the wireless home sound system, today launched new ways for listeners to control their music on Sonos within Pandora’s award-winning mobile app. Listeners can now control Sonos directly through the Pandora mobile app and command Pandora stations with voice commands via Alexa. The new experience also includes support for Premium, Pandora’s on-demand service launched earlier this year.
Just tried this and it worked great. Why can’t Apple do this? HomePod, I guess. I am looking forward to getting one of those.
What better test for the iPhone X than to put it through its paces trying to capture some high speed flat track action?
Serenity’s writeup takes you through the specifics, but for my money, the real nugget of gold in her review is the pulse-pounding video embedded below. Those are some great slo-mo shots.
Be sure to bump the resolution up to 1440 in the YouTube window for best results.
What I love most about Face ID is that it’s passive. It works without me needing to do anything, such as place my finger on a fingerprint reader. Need to view my Safari Keychain? Face ID authenticates me. Opening a secure app such as a banking app? Face ID to the rescue. On the Mac, Face ID would be able to do all of this in an even more seamless fashion.
For instance, unlocking your Mac would become an automatic process. By the time you sat down and opened your MacBook, Face ID could recognize and authenticate you – there’d be no waiting involved. Similar to how Auto Unlock works when your Mac is paired to your Apple Watch, logging in would be a completely passive and secure process.
I have mixed feelings about this. I use my Apple Watch to unlock my Mac and, once it’s unlocked, it tends to stay unlocked for long stretches. I unlock my Mac from 2-10 times a day, at most. My phone on the other hand, can require an unlock as many as 100 times a day.
My point is that I don’t think the cost of adding Face ID to a Mac, purely for unlock, would be worth the expense to me, given that I have an Apple Watch.
But:
In terms of broader security, Face ID would bring major improvements to the Mac. Currently, if you have passwords and log-in information stored in Safari, macOS doesn’t prompt you for any authentication when you go to sign-in to a website. Apple assumes that the initial log-in to macOS was enough authentication, and while this is true in most cases, it still represents a potential security hole if someone were to get ahold of your Mac after you’d already logged in.
The key would be if Apple tightly integrated Face ID throughout the operating system, as they did with Touch ID and Face ID throughout iOS. And, of course, I would expect Apple to do that.
But I think Face ID on the Mac would go way beyond security. For starters, the facial mapping would allow you to use Animoji throughout macOS. More importantly, whatever technology follows Animoji in taking advantage of facial mapping will also be possible on your Mac.
As augmented reality evolves, facial mapping and machine learning will evolve as well and it will be nice having the additional hardware that makes that facial mapping possible on both platforms.
As an example, take a look at this video, which shows off a deep neural network that allows you to change your hair color in real time. Imagine an app that does that for everything about you, swapping out glasses, facial hair, masks, colors, earrings, tattoos, what have you, all tightly tracked to your face.
Face ID on the Mac would allow macOS to keep up with iOS in this space. The question is, would Apple prefer this sort of technology to be available throughout the ecosystem, or would they prefer face tracking to be something that distinguishes iOS, a gentle nudge to move all users to iOS devices.
One of the great things about Face ID is that the data associated with your initial Face ID photo is always being updated to account for even subtle changes in your appearance. That being the case, there’s an incredibly simple way for iPhone X users to train Face ID to work flawlessly across all situations. So if you’ve been noticing that Face ID works great 99% of the time but seems to slip up if you hold up your phone at an angle or from a new distance, we’ve got a solution for you.
And:
The next time you try to unlock your iPhone X with Face ID and it doesn’t take, don’t try to unlock it with Face ID a second time. Instead, enter in your passcode. Doing so effectively tells Face ID to incorporate facial data from whatever new angle or position you happen to be holding your phone in. That being the case, the next time you attempt to unlock your phone from the same position, your phone will unlock immediately.
I stand by my claim that iPhone X is the best damn product Apple has ever made but that doesn’t mean it can’t and shouldn’t get better. That includes how new features like Face ID, gesture navigation, Control Center access, and Lock screen buttons are currently implemented.
A solid list of ideas, all of them filed as feature request radars, with the radar numbers if you’d like to dupe them yourself.
Oliver Thomas has identical twins and an iPhone X. As you might expect, he made a video testing to see if one twin could unlock the iPhone X registered to the other twin.
The text went pretty much as you’d expect it to. But what I found really interesting was Oliver’s use of night mode in an old night-vision camcorder to capture the IR dot pattern put out by the iPhone X.
In the video, jump to about 30 seconds in and check out the spread of that pattern. It goes pretty wide, so much so that Oliver had to move one of the twins out of the spread to be sure he didn’t get a false positive.
The wide spread shows how far of a face detection reach the iPhone X has.
In addition, at that same place within the video, check out the pattern of the dots on the wall. They almost look like 5-pointed stars, rather than round dots. Is that just my imagination? Is there a shape to the dots beyond simple circles? If you know any of the detail, please do ping me.
Apple calls iPhone X the future of the smartphone, but after using it for a week — and coming from months of Android use — I can comfortably say that it’s a really great phone. In fact, it is the best iPhone to date, and I’ve had a tremendous time with it, but it doesn’t drastically change my opinion of the iPhone as a product, nor of iOS as an ecosystem.
That’s not to say Google and its hardware partners can’t stand to learn a few things from the iPhone X.
Let’s cut to the chase.
As you make your way through this review, keep in mind that this is written by the Managing Editor of Android Central. I found it to be objective, but clearly told from the view of an Android user. Keep that in mind, but do read the review.
> A new study out from health startup Cardiogram and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) suggests wearables like the Apple Watch, Fitbit and others are able to accurately detect common but serious conditions like hypertension and sleep apnea.
And:
> Sleep apnea affects an estimated 22 million adults in the U.S., with another 80 percent of cases of moderate and severe obstructive sleep apnea undiagnosed, according to the American Sleep Apnea Association. This is a serious condition where the person affected stops breathing in their sleep and can lead to death.
The current process for diagnosing sleep apnea typically requires an overnight stay in a sleep center, where they connect an array of sensors to detect and track your sleeping and breathing patterns. Often, a breathing device is prescribed and fitted, with another overnight to verify that it is working correctly. Every element of this process is expensive, and (at least in the US) is not always covered by health insurance. Higher levels of magnesium in the body are associated with better sleep, longer sleep times, and less tiredness during the day. For those seeking alternative sleep support, CBN nighttime capsules are gaining attention as a natural option to promote relaxation and improve sleep quality. If you’re looking to take magnesium for better sleep, you can find the best magnesium brands at health well being website.
Anything the Apple Watch can do to cut down on the inconvenience and expense is a boon.
A California filmmaker has revealed how his Apple Watch saved him after a kiteboarding mishap left him stranded a mile off the California coast in shark infested waters.
Stranded off Ventura, where a great white shark nursery was recently discovered, he used his watch to call coastguards – and was even able to direct their rescue boat towards him.
Emirates unveiled its new first class suites for its Boeing 777 and the amenities surpass most luxury hotels. Inspired by the Mercedes-Benz S-Class, each zero-gravity seat is enclosed in its own cabin with floor-to-ceiling sliding doors for complete privacy. Everything from the 32-inch TV screen, lights, and temperature are remote controlled. For those not lucky enough to snag a window seat, each interior room is equipped with its own virtual windows that project the view from outside the aircraft using real-time camera technology.
I’ve flown First Class before but I can’t imagine ever being able to afford First Class at this level. That’s a real shame because I’m headed to Australia in a few weeks and the flight is literally 24 hours in total. I’d love this “suite”.
Our passports are packed and we’re crossing the border. Before you know it, Lyft will be coming to you live in Toronto. We’ve been looking forward to taking our brand of ridesharing international for some time, and we’re super pumped to share this with our close friends up north.
Lyft is a great service and the one I use all the time. This is a good first step to expand Lyft’s reach.
YouTube has confirmed it is working to resolve a bug in its mobile app that causes significant battery drain on Apple devices, even when the app is running in the background.
Definitely something to keep on an eye on until it gets fixed.
Josh Hawley, a Republican seeking to unseat Democratic U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill in next year’s elections, announced at a press conference that he issued an investigative subpoena to Google. He expressed concern over the accuracy of the company’s privacy policy, allegations it misappropriated content from rivals and claims it demoted competitors’ websites in search results.
The first thing I wondered is if Reuters put the first line in because they think this is a political move. Regardless, Google will have to answer the charges.
On November 12, 1970, the Oregon Department of Transportation blew up a dead whale that had washed up on a Florence beach. In what was called a “controlled explosion,” they used a half-ton of dynamite. It didn’t go well.
Chunks of dead whale blubber ended up all over both bystanders and the beach, flying out as far as a nearby parking lot where the flying flesh severely damaged at least one car. The decision to publicly dynamite an enormous mammal has become one of Oregon’s all-time most bizarre moments.
This is one of those videos that showed me the power of the internet. I still remember seeing this decades ago in a tiny QuickTime window and marveling at the fact that I could watch it on this “internet thing”.
I also marveled at the fact people could be so stupid as to think they could blow up a whale carcass.
Thanks to my friend and lifelong Oregon resident Ian Schray for the link.
Before you click to start the video in this tweet, realize that the card turning crowd caught at the end of the video usually spells out O-H-I-O, while chanting the same.
The camera catches the card turners just as they reveal the letter I.
According to numerous blue-shirted “geniuses” that Business Insider spoke to, a rising tide of store visitors and on-the-job performance expectations have pushed the system to the breaking point.
And:
Retail employees notice that the stores are packed. One says that his store can’t keep up. “We haven’t been able to keep up with traffic since I started 8 years ago,” a senior Genius at a small store in the Midwest that has yet to be redesigned told Business Insider. “I wouldn’t even walk in the store because of how crowded it gets. During Christmas [season] you can hardly move.”
Even consumers who purchased their phones through their wireless carriers now increasingly turn to the Apple store as their de-facto service center. In some cases, the arrangement is deliberate: T-Mobile earlier this year started bundling AppleCare, Apple’s warranty and service program, into its own device insurance program, funneling its own customers to Apple for service.
This is a natural result of Apple’s enormous success. The question is, what is Apple doing to help alleviate this strain?
In 2016, Apple introduced a new repair role, named Technical Expert, which can do iPhone repairs and replacements for customers, but can’t repair Macs. The new Technical Expert roles seem to be doing a better job accommodating people who walk in with broken iPhones without appointments.
And:
With the new store design, Apple is rethinking the concept of the Genius Bar itself. Although new stores still have the traditional scheduled appointments for customers, the system has shifted to what Apple calls the “Genius Grove,” in which roving techs can service customers in a large tree-lined part of the store.
I go to the Apple Store pretty regularly, and I am seeing a difference. The original service model reserved the majority of the floor for sales, pushing all technical/service issues to a relatively small space at the rear of the store.
But the modern Apple Store feels different, the flow of technical/service response feels more triaged. Go in, find any Apple-shirted person, and explain your issue. Frequently, the path to a solution starts with that person either responding directly, or connecting you to the right someone in the store to work through a problem, often without spending time in any sort of queue at all.
It’s a night and day difference, from a customer experience perspective.
To begin with, Apple has sourced its OLED panels from Samsung Display, which offers the best and most mature phone solution currently on the market. (Pixel 2 XL was sourced from LG Display.)
That does mean the iPhone X is stuck with a diamond pixel arrangement, which has oval green pixels with square red and blue pixels arranged around them, rather than the RGB stripe traditionally used for LCD displays. It’s a way to mitigate against the significantly lower lifespan of blue pixels in OLED, and it’s what can currently be supplied at scale.
Read the rest of Rene’s review for more detail, but bottom line, you end up with more green than red and blue.
There have been a number of pictures showing the overall look of this arrangement (including the images in Rene’s review), but I found this tweet from Steve Troughton-Smith really brought a sense of what the diamond matrix arrangement meant in real life:
So what does PenTile mean in practice on iPhone X? Only green is 'true 3X' You need exceedingly tiny text to notice the effect, just about the limits of decent human vision. (full-res test PNG: https://t.co/iuR0SQzXoz) pic.twitter.com/XFr2cawtV0
Tap the image and notice how much sharper the green text is than the red or blue text on either side.
With that image in mind, go back to Rene’s review and read what he has to say about the iPhone X display and how Apple gets the most out of it. Great stuff.
About six months before the iPhone hit store shelves in 2007, Steve Jobs called Corning’s CEO, Wendell Weeks, and asked him if he could create a glass cover for a new Apple product that would resist scratches and breakage.
And:
The original iPhone spec called for a plastic cover over the touchscreen display. The story goes that Jobs, after using a prototype iPhone for a few weeks, became very worried that the device’s display would get scratched when jumbled around in user’s pockets with keys and coins. So he gathered his engineers and demanded a new glass covering be used for the iPhone. Hence Jobs’s phone call to Weeks.
And:
While many other smartphone makers have crowed about using Gorilla Glass, Apple has rarely (if ever) publicly acknowledged Corning as the maker of the iPhone’s glass cover.
Corning is a critical part of the iPhone’s success and the iPhone a critical part of Corning’s growth as well. If you ever find yourself in the finger lakes region of New York, take some time to stop by the Corning Museum of Glass.
And spend a few minutes with Tim Bajarin’s article, as well as this fantastic New York Times article which details the iPhone’s move, under Steve Jobs’ urgent direction, from a plastic to a Gorilla Glass screen.
Reinhard Görner is a German photographer specializing in architecture and the fine arts. For the photographic series “Libraries”, he travels across Europe to capture the solemnity of the libraries of the Old Continent. From Madrid to Stuttgart, passing through Turin, he immortalises modern immaculate white interiors, monumental frescoes and the old woodwork of these places dedicated to knowledge.
This map helps you find the antipodes (the other side of the world) of any place on Earth.
Drag the left map, by clicking and holding as you move it, and when you will find the desired location, just click on it, and our “man” will dig a tunnel from selected location, right through the center of the Earth, up to the other side of the world which will be represented on Right Map.
This is pretty cool but, for the majority of us, our opposite point will be in an ocean.
Depending on the camera you have, the typical life of a shutter can vary from anything as low as 50,000 shutter actuations right up to 350,000. Some photographers may get unlucky and find themselves on the lower side of those numbers while others may find their cameras are still going strong after 500,000 shots.
For this reason, it’s crucial you keep an eye on how many pictures your current camera has made and how many frames your particular model will be at when it reaches the end of its life cycle. Knowing these numbers is equally as important to be aware of when looking to purchase a camera secondhand. If something you find on eBay has already taken a lot of pictures it may not last as long as you hope or be as much of a bargain as you think.
No, this won’t tell you definitively when your camera’s shutter will fail but it might help to know how many actuations your DSLR has done. It’s also helpful for those who buy used bodies to find out how much wear and tear there may be on the shutter mechanism.
It’s better than any advertisement, social campaign, or press write-up. Appearing onstage at an Apple press event is the dream of every iOS developer. It can almost instantly lift a tiny bootstrapped company from obscurity to name-brand status. It can also be the beginning of a long-lasting and lucrative relationship with Apple.
But as the folks at Scrollmotion, a New York-based iOS app developer, can tell you, getting there is a long, careful dance that can be full of heady highs, heartbreaking lows, and sudden death. The company marshaled a laborious campaign to present its app onstage at an Apple event last spring, and while the campaign was unsuccessful, the company says it would do it again in a heartbeat.
I know developers are of two minds – it is a Darwinian pressure cooker attempting to satisfy all of Apple’s demands and to be better than a dozen other developers, some of them your friends, who are all trying to do the same thing. But, on the other hand, it’s the kind of jumpstart a small company craves.
For years, Canadians have been able to watch episodes of iconic American classics such as “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Batman” or “I Love Lucy.” But where was Canada’s TV heritage? Why was our homegrown fare always, after its initial run, locked away in a vault?
Well, “The Littlest Hobo” has finally been let out of his kennel. After years of development, the Canada Media Fund and Google Canada have teamed to launch encore+, a new YouTube channel giving viewers here and around the world access to decades of Canadian film and TV gold.
My weekend just might be spent watching “The Littlest Hobo” reruns.
Disney has kept a tight lid on details about all the new “Star Wars” movies — but its strategy has been breached by Google Maps.
The service shows the street views of addresses all across the world via satellite images, which are typically one to three years old.
But Kevin Beaumont found something interesting at Longcross Studios, a film and TV production facility near London, on Google Maps: The Millennium Falcon is on site, or at least near a golf course close by. And it’s surrounded by shipping containers, seemingly in an attempt to hide it.
On November 10, 1975, two ships made their way in tandem across the stormy waters of Lake Superior. One was the Arthur M. Anderson, led by Captain Jesse Cooper. The other, captained by Ernest McSorley, was the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.
The ship was last seen on radar around 7:15 p.m. All 29 men on board were lost with it, and today, 40 years after the most famous shipwreck in Great Lakes history, the cause is still a mystery.
Here’s what we do know about the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald, and what happened to it that fateful day.
“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is a beautifully tragic song from Canadian songwriting legend Gordon Lightfoot. I’m probably not wrong in saying that all Canadians, at least those over the age of 40, know every word to that song.
Put simply, Face ID is the most compelling advancement in security I have seen in a very long time. It’s game changing not merely due to the technology, but due to Apple’s design and implementation.
And:
I believe Face ID is slower at actual recognition than Touch ID, but it’s nearly impossible to notice due to the implementation. In the time it takes to move your finger to the Touch ID sensor, Face ID could have already unlocked your iPhone.
That’s the real Face ID revolution. Since you’re almost always looking at your phone while you’re using it, Face ID enables what I call “continuous authentication.”
This is a fascinating article, worth the read. But even better, if you’ve not yet seen it, is the video embedded in Rich’s piece, which I’ve embedded below.
In it, Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern tries her best to defeat Face ID using siblings, triplets, and a well crafted theatrical mask.
