Month: April 2019

Enlarge / A slide from Samsung's Galaxy S10 launch. (credit: Samsung)

This year in the world of smartphone fingerprint sensors, Qualcomm's ultrasonic in-display fingerprint reader, the 3D Sonic Sensor, is expected to get widespread adoption. The first phone with the new sensor, the Samsung Galaxy S10, has been in the wild for about a few weeks now, and users are already figuring out ways to defeat it.

Imgur user "darkshark" presents a pretty convincing way to thwart the sensor: take a picture of a fingerprint off of an object like a wine glass, add some depth to it in 3D editing software, and then print it out on a 3D printer. Specifically darkshark used the Anycubic Photon 3D printer, a resin stereolithography printer that can be had for under $450. (You could buy two of these for the cost of a Galaxy S10+!) A video in the Imgur post shows the S10 unlocking with the printed finger facsimile, which looks a bit like a glass microscope slide.

Fingerprint sensors work by measuring and storing the ridges and valleys in your finger, and various types have come to mainstream smartphones over the years. The most common is a "capacitive" sensor, which is an opaque, case-mounted sensor that exists on the back of most Android phones. These sensors would measure the electrical capacitance of your fingertip, allowing it to sense the ridges and valleys of your finger by the change in the electrical charge on the pad. Since it's difficult to replicate the electrical qualities of human skin at home, especially with the level of detail in a fingerprint, capacitive fingerprint sensors are the most logistically challenging to crack.

Enlarge / The ultimate compliance car? Sergio Marchionne, the late CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, had said that the company lost either $14,000, or $20,000, on every Fiat 500e, depending who you believe. (credit: Fiat Chrysler Automobiles)

Over the weekend, the Financial Times reported that Tesla and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) have entered into an agreement that will deliver Tesla a fresh influx of cash and deliver FCA from the hands of Europe's tough new emissions regulations. Beginning next year, new European Commission rules begin to phase in that require a car maker's fleet-wide emissions to average no higher than 95g/CO₂/km—a figure that works out at roughly 57mpg for gasoline vehicles, or 76mpg for diesel-powered vehicles.

From 2020, 95 percent of an automaker's new cars sold in the EU have to meet this target, with the remaining 5 percent falling under the law in 2021. And the penalties for failing are draconian: a €95 ($107) "excess emissions premium" per gram of CO₂ over the target, for every single car registered in the EU that year. For some OEMs, this has the potential to be ruinous; if FCA's portfolio were the same in 2021 as it was in 2018, the automaker would have to pay some €2.77 billion ($3.12 billion), out of total net global profits of €3.63 billion ($4.1 billion).

Some OEMs are going all-out in their efforts to electrify in order to meet the new rules; VW's Roadmap E should be viewed in this context, for example. But for others, the road to electrification is not so simple. Although FCA announced a bold, €9 billion ($10.5 billion) plan to electrify its lineup by 2022, its actual plug-in portfolio is currently limited to the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid (which is not sold in the EU) and the Fiat 500e, a car thought to lose the brand many thousands of dollars for each one sold.

Enlarge / A headset sits on a keyboard at the Avise Techno Solutions LLP call center in Kolkata, India, on Sunday, Dec. 24, 2017. (credit: Bloomberg | Getty Images)

Years into the robocalling frenzy, your phone probably still rings off the hook with "important information about your account," updates from the "Chinese embassy," and every bogus sweepstakes offer imaginable. That's despite promises from the telecom industry and the US government that solutions would be coming. Much like the firehose of spam that made email almost unusable in the late 1990s, robocalls have made people in the US wary of picking up their cell phones and landlines. In fact, email spam offers a useful analogy: a scourge that probably can't be eliminated, but can be effectively managed.

Finding the right tools for that job remains a challenge. The Federal Trade Commission has had a strong track record in its 140 robocall-related suits, including a recent victory at the end of March that targeted four massive operations. Bipartisan anti-robocalling legislation is gaining traction in Congress. Apps that flag or block unwanted calls have matured and are solidly effective. And wireless carriers—in part facing pressure from the Federal Communications Commission—have increasingly offered their own anti-robocalling apps and tools for free.

Yet the number of robocalls continues to hit new highs. The anti-robocalling company YouMail estimates that March 2019 saw 5.23 billion robocalls, the highest volume ever. And other firms recorded similar highs. But those numbers don't take into account calls that were successfully blocked. A more useful measure might be the number of complaints filed per month to the FCC and FTC, which remained mostly static in 2018 and the beginning of 2019.