>Some of the biometrics, including the ability to unlock your phone by scanning your face or irises, are so poorly executed that they feel like marketing gimmicks as opposed to actual security features.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/05/technology/personaltech/s...
> The probability that a random person in the population could unlock your iPhone is 1 in 50,000 with Touch ID or 1 in 1,000,000 with Face ID. This probability increases with multiple enrolled fingerprints (up to 1 in 10,000 with five fingerprints) or appearances (up to 1 in 500,000 with two appearances).
The problem is that it says random people, but people aren't random. We don't periodically just stir all the people in the entire world and redistribute them across the globe.
In courts you'd get a situation where a jury is told there's only 1-in-10-million chance this evidence would match a random person. Only a few hundred people in the whole world could have been the one, and yet this suspect matches. And what they may not get told unless a defence lawyer brings it up is oh, by the way, six of those few hundred people were in the place where it happened and four more lived in the same street as the suspect.
Bob's Face ID may only match 1 in a million people. But if one of those "1 in a million" people is Bob's twin brother Dave who is always pranking him, and another is Bob's cousin Barry who doesn't look that similar to a person, but mathematically it turns out Bob and Barry's faces look identical to a computer vision system due to their bone structure, then Bob won't find "Face ID" much use.
That’s not accurate. Family members have more similarity in their prints than among random people, twins even more similarity, and identical yet more.
I can’t immediately find authoritative references for family and fraternal twins, but here’s a reference for identical twins:
“Identical twins have the same chromosomes and similar physical characteristics and, therefore, they have a high class/type similarity in their fingerprints.” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3338710/
Time to switch to a good old PIN if you have an (evil) twin, then!
(1-p)^n
1 - n × x
(1-0.00002)^5 = 0.999900004
You can ask the same question of face/iris scans, people have and it's quite difficult to replicate, but not impossible. There's a plethora of YouTube videos about this.
I recently bought a Samsung watch. It's a solid responsive device with ok software, depending on what you may do in the wearables app it may or may not crash(The watch itself seems to have good battery life and pretty stable). I had an apple watch for a while that I gave my mom and unfortunately I have to say the Samsung device feels like a device with a lot of potential but not quite there yet. A lot of it has to do with the ecosystem. Tizen seems great, but the app store is so-so. The entire samsung login, region, payment, app store experience feels half-baked compared to the experience on a mac/apple device. I've been recently trying to figure out if I should buy a samsung device to access the ToF camera, but the documentation is virtually none existent(it's scheduled to come "eventually")
I somewhat wish they would license their tizen version to other vendors since it's way better than the WatchOS alternative.
I haven't been using mac/iphones in a few years rather than to test stuff, so maybe it really got a lot worse since then. But from what I remember the general experience felt a bit more smooth.
https://www.blog.google/products/pixel/titan-m-makes-pixel-3...
Never used a Samsung myself so I'm just remembering stories.
But, you can you elaborate?
Spring and summer, TouchID works flawlessly. Once the air gets dry in the fall and my skin starts to get gross, TouchID struggles. But I guess that's to be expected.
It routinely misses touches altogether, complains that I'm not covering the sensor even when I am doing (and yet this doesn't seem to bother Touch ID in the slighest) and doesn't seem to have much of a delay between attempts making it very easy to "lock out" the fingerprint sensor and being forced to enter the PIN due to several mismatches in a short space of time.
Also whoever decided to put the fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone should be prevented from designing phones ever again.
> Also whoever decided to put the fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone should be prevented from designing phones ever again.
Just tested it- less than one second to log in via finger, and it works almost all the time. (I've had motor oil on my fingers and it's still worked, not that that's a good idea...)
Also people who suggest serious consequences for failure to abide by a personal opinion should, IMO, stop talking.
I hope it means that Samsung compares the data on the whole sensor, and not that anyone can unlock it :)
I found it to be the worst place to put it.
- Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 - pretty good finger print scanner on the back
- Samsung Galaxy S8 - absolutely terrible fingerprint scanner that was so bad I switched to pin after a while
- Samsung Galaxy S10 - new fingerprint scanner under display, works most of the time but still unreliable, also it is not the quickest.
You would have thought that leading brand (Samsung) would have decent fingerprint scanners on their flagships, but it is just not the case.
The thing with bad fingerprint scanners is that you cant rely on them, so I rather choose reliable slower 3s unlock with pin than unreliable maybe faster 1-10s unlock with fingerprint.
They also touted "face recognition" but it was a poorly-made piece of software that used a conventional camera (no depth) and was just a marketing check-off item, and not a real feature.
That's certainly a matter of opinion, and is not a "huge downgrade for no reason". I prefer my fingerprint scanners on the front, and I know others do as well.