uroshnor

Chipsy4 said:

uroshnor said:

By contrast, an iris scan done with a UV camera one one eye ,

It's infrared light . UV light would damage the eyes. Infrared is perfectly safe though. This BTW is also the reason why they work perfectly in low light situations.

zoetmb said:

brucemc said:

Hopefully not a replacement.  The current TouchID is so good (reliable, except when fingers wet), and so convenient (unlock without looking at device a lot), and so fast, that facial/iris scanning would be a step back if the only method.

Agreed and I'd have to wonder if there were any health risks to having my eyes scanned numerous times per day, 365 days per year, for years.   

Unlikely. It's just taking a picture of your Iris.

This is NOT a retina scan, where you might have to project something into the eye to see the back of it.

tzeshan said:

May be he needs first to improve CarPlay?  Why the world's largest auto maker would not adopt CarPlay?  He needs to be able to answer this correctly?

The world largest Volkswagen/Skoda/Audi/Porche , did adopt CarPlay (as did Ford, GM and Fiat/Chrysler/Jeep). Toyota, and a few others, like Land Rover, are staunchly sticking to the belief that they know how to do user interaction better than Apple & Google, and are trying to prevent the phone companies getting between them and the car.

At least most Toyota units are standard 2 DIN brackets and you can rip out the factory one and put in a after-market unit like Alpine or Kenwood.

Land Rover's App idea has some interesting attributes, but I'd prefer if they were able to integrate it WITH Carplay, rather than reject CarPlay .

9secondkox2 said:

Should have partnered with Apple to handle mapping data

Perhaps , but Pokemon Go's data set is close to being identical to what Niantec used for their previous game, Ingress, and Niantec was deeply Googly, until Google ejected them from the company family in the Alphabet restructure.

Apple Maps is not yet cross platform (that will likely change once they make it available to web sites), and Android is very important to Niantec (at least psychologically).

it would be great to see Pokemon Go, or a game like  it, adopt Apple Watch interactive notifications (instead of selling its own wristband to do essentially the same thing, as well as a bunch of other Apple features, as they deal with parts of the Pokozombie / distracted walking /driving issue really well (eg linking distance tracking to Apple's activity tracking mechanism would be way more accurate and safer than what Pokemon go does)

ericthehalfbee said:

I don't see it. Fingerprint is super fast and convenient. What good is there to having two completely separate biometric devices on one iPhone? People will just use the one that works all the time under any conditions (fingerprint).

TouchID uses a single fingerprint, and to make it reliable to unlock, is pretty tolerant of errors. 

This is means that TouchID data is unique and does not collide with someone else's fingerprint  about 1:50,000. A FBI fingerprint database standard single print, correctly taken from a person is about 10x better than that , at 1:500,000. If you tried doing that level of accuracy to unlock the phone , you'd get a lot of refusals to unlock, and falling back to password .

You leave copies of your fingerprints all over the place, and fingerprint hacking experts like Starbug in Germany have demonstrated building artificial 3D fingerprints from prints left lying about, and using the  copy to unlock the phone. If you get a good enough print, it only takes s few hours for someone to make the replica.

This creates a problem for Apple in government, financial services an other markets about using TouchID to unlock, as they need to disable TouchID at the lock screen due to these kinds of issues.

By contrast, an iris scan done with a UV camera one one eye , is equivalent in complexity to a full 10 print at FBI record quality, so it's potentially over 100x stronger as an unlock mechanism as TouchID is today. ie you get a "collision" in iris scan data about 1 in 5 million people. I say potentially , because Apple might take a very conservative path as it did with fingerprints, to make false refusals to unlock a low rate error.

There is a company called B2I biometrics that made an iris scanner / fingerprint scanner case for iPhone 4, that was sold to law enforcement, to acquire data and ID people in traffic stops, bail checks, etc. They have a lot of public material on the trade-offs between iris scan and fingerprints.

Iris scans are very fast, and might be combined with existing TouchID to offer a 2 factor authentication mechanism to unlock. Many people look at their phone when unlocking anyhow, so it could be very seamless & slick.

techguy911 said:

greg uvan said:

I agree that this totally stinks. I have a Nest, and I do like it. But I really resent the fact that I'll never be able to use it with the rest of the Homekit ecosystem.

This is the worst example of tribalism that leads to a crappy experience all around. I also got some smart light bulbs for christmas, and they too are not homekit enabled. I don't want to be ungrateful, I appreciate receiving a gift. But it just sucks hard that my "smart" home devices are not integrated with my smartphone platform of choice: iPhone.

Tribalism?  It was Apple that chose to make HomeKit a nonstandard, proprietary protocol for the purpose of locking people into iOS.  

That's true at one level, but HomeKit also specifies and tests that devices meet baseline requirements for security and privacy, as well as being able to patch.

Open standards frequently don't apply the same level of assurance activity,  and whilst they can be as secure or more secure, the market reality in the internet of things space right now is the majority of products outside of HomeKit are a shambolic mess in terms of user privacy & security of their  very intimate data.

There is clear air between HomeKit devices and most of the market.

does it enable platform lock in to iOS ? Yes it does, but in doing so it gets other details right