Month: March 2017

Enlarge / The Samsung Galaxy S8. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Samsung just recently took the wraps off its latest flagship, the Galaxy S8. In addition to the super-slim bezels, tall screen, and speedy new Snapdragon 835 (or Exynos 9) processor, the device is also coming with a ton of biometric authentication options. You get a fingerprint reader, iris recognition, and face recognition. With the public's first exposure to the Galaxy S8 happening a few days ago, it was only a matter of time until one of these biometric solutions had some holes poked in it.

One of those holes is that Galaxy S8's face recognition can be tricked with a photo. At least this is what a video from Spanish Periscope user Marcianophone purports. About six minutes into the 40-minute Spanish-language video, you can see the attendee take a selfie with his personal phone, then point it at the Galaxy S8, which is trained to unlock with his face. It only takes a few minutes of fiddling before the Galaxy S8 gives in and unlocks with just a picture, moving from the "secure" lock screen right to the home screen. Once the user dials in his technique, he shows the trick is easily repeatable.

Google added a "Face Unlock" system to Android 4.0 back in 2011, and it had the same picture vulnerability that Samsung's solution has today. In Android 4.1, Google's face unlock added a "liveness check" that attempted to defeat the photo vulnerability by requiring the user to blink. This too was bypassed (rather hilariously) by grabbing a photo of someone, poorly Photoshopping a second copy of the picture with a set of closed "eyelids," and then switching between the "eyes open" and "eyes closed" pictures when the face unlock asks the user to blink. It seems Samsung built a face unlock feature from the ground up for the S8, and it's repeating the same mistakes.

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Are you upset because the virtual world has generally been lacking the ever-present advertising experiences that infect our everyday lives? Fear not! HTC is now rolling out its own VR ad service to developers on its Viveport platform, intended to "maximize your ad revenue while maintaining a great user experience."

Viveport developers can now easily place video ads, banner ads, 360° video and simulated "big screen video" ads into their virtual experiences, either as integrated parts of "in-app scenarios" or during loading screens and "end scenes." Ads can even be placed directly onto in-game 3D models, just as they can be plastered all over every surface in the real world. Now that's immersion!

HTC is already selling VR ads as a new, more effective way for marketers to get a targeted, memorable message through our ever-evolving personal filters. As the company puts it, "Ads that appear in immersive VR environments can not only provide more effective impressions, they can also track whether the users have viewed them or have turned away their gaze... Compared to ordinary Ad impressions, Ads that are seen by users in an immersive VR environment can not only meet the user’s needs by means of precise re-targeting, but can also be detected if they are viewed effectively by users"

Enlarge / Minnesota state capitol building in St Paul. (credit: Getty Images | YangYin)

Legislation approved by the Minnesota House and Senate this week would prevent ISPs from collecting personal information without written approval from customers. The quick action came in response to the US House and Senate voting to eliminate nationwide rules that would have forced ISPs to get consent from Americans before using or selling Web browsing history and app usage history for advertising purposes.

When the Minnesota Senate on Wednesday discussed a budget bill, it added an amendment that says ISPs may not "collect personal information from a customer resulting from the customer's use of the telecommunications or Internet service provider without express written approval from the customer." The amendment would also prohibit ISPs from refusing to provide services to customers who do not approve collection of personal information.

The Minnesota House added a similar amendment to its own budget bill on Tuesday, according to a Pioneer Press article.

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Fingerprint sensors are one of the most popular ways to unlock your devices today, particularly your smartphone. Synaptics is adding to its line of fingerprint sensors to offer more possibilities to OEMs for clever material and placement use of its sensors. The company just announced the new FS4600 family of Natural ID fingerprint sensors that's scheduled for sampling by the end of Q2 2017 and should be ready for mass production in Q3 2017.

The first thing of note about the FS4600 fingerprint sensor line is that it can support a bunch of different shapes including square, round, and pill. The sensors also support different coatings including polymers, ceramics, or glass, which should hopefully make it easier for OEMs to incorporate them into the designs of their mobile devices (Samsung's new Galaxy S8 smartphone has an all-glass back and a nearly all-display front).

The new sensors also support force-sensitive controls for "customer-specific applications" as well as swipe gestures. Force-sensitive controls sounds like Apple's ForceTouch feature but for a fingerprint sensor instead of a display. If it works similarly, it would allow other smartphones to use the fingerprint sensor like a button depending on how hard you press it. For example, a soft press could unlock the smartphone while a harder press could open an app-specific menu. Swipe gestures on a fingerprint sensor are not a totally new feature (Huawei and others have incorporated it into its handsets in the past), but Synaptics' integration of it could make it more ubiquitous across future smartphones.