Is the iPhone 5s really upgrading from the 5

iPhone 4 is still doing me fine after three years. I'll spend the £700 on something far more useful until it stops working.

As for the Android fanbois. LOL!
 
I'm amazed ANYONE wants to give the NSA/MI5/MI6 direct access to biometric data without batting an eye. Surely the last few months of revelations have made people question just WHAT they are happy with companies and agencies having access to.

Usually you would have to be arrested before the government takes your prints. These days we just hand them over voluntarily.
 
I have a work issued iPhone 5 and wont bother asking IT to upgrade me to a 5S as I'll just wait for the 6 to come out. Not enough extra features for the effort.

My personal phone is an Xperia Z, I prefer it to the iPhone due to the bigger screen (web browsing) and customisable home screen. All the apps I use are available on both platforms.
 
nucastle said:
I'm amazed ANYONE wants to give the NSA/MI5/MI6 direct access to biometric data without batting an eye. Surely the last few months of revelations have made people question just WHAT they are happy with companies and agencies having access to.

Usually you would have to be arrested before the government takes your prints. These days we just hand them over voluntarily.
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What is the big deal? I'm sure if they wanted some biometric data from you, they could get it perhaps even without you knowing.
 
nucastle said:
I'm amazed ANYONE wants to give the NSA/MI5/MI6 direct access to biometric data without batting an eye. Surely the last few months of revelations have made people question just WHAT they are happy with companies and agencies having access to.

Usually you would have to be arrested before the government takes your prints. These days we just hand them over voluntarily.
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Lol...
 
Dunno what is so Lol'some about that.

It's now on record that we are being permanently spied on and data mined. And now we are presented with a 'handy' fingerprint scanner for authorising payments and locking/unlocking phones - It raises a serious question just what people are willing to hand over just for the sake of convenience or their obsession with technology.

I know of businesses who installed fingerprint scanners (my gym etc) who had to remove them as people were not happy having biometrics stored by any tom, dick or harry.

And now it's being 'securely' stored by Apple. Yeah right.
 
nucastle said:
And now it's being 'securely' stored by Apple. Yeah right.
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Unless you choose not to believe Apple, the fingerprint data is stored on the sensor itself only, it doesn't get sent anywhere.

Obviously some people will choose to completely ignore this though, and probably believe it's being sent to the lizard men on Mars right as we speak...

People who moan about being "spied on" in my experience usually are either completely paranoid anyway, are up to no good in the first place or can't actually provide a valid argument as to why it's supposedly so bad that it ruins their lives.
 
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nucastle said:
I'm amazed ANYONE wants to give the NSA/MI5/MI6 direct access to biometric data without batting an eye. Surely the last few months of revelations have made people question just WHAT they are happy with companies and agencies having access to.

Usually you would have to be arrested before the government takes your prints. These days we just hand them over voluntarily.
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/Facepalm

What a ridiculous comment...
 
A bit like when Facebook said it was not giving data to the NSA, then it turned out they werent 'giving it' but rather the NSA was 'accessing it'. It's all a bunch of legalese to muddy the truth.

A little childish going the whole straw man route with the lizard men baloney, but in this day and age an adult discussion about privacy concerns is not just the domain of conspiracy theorists. The information might be stored on the sensor, but whats to say you can't get the data off it in some way.

I guess that that conversation might get in the way of the cooing and hyperbole about how wonderful any feature is.
 
nucastle said:
I guess that that conversation might get in the way of the cooing and hyperbole about how wonderful any feature is.
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No, it gets in the way of enjoying life and getting on with it. There are more important things that worrying about this sort of ****.
 
lol what do you honestly think they will do with such info? Why are you so important that they would need your biometric data.
 
So if the Police knocked on your door and asked nicely for the same information (they even brought a nice ink pad and pre-filled in form with your name on it and space for the fingerprints), and a cheek swab for good measure (yes, a joke) ... Would you happily do the same?

I just think it's interesting how Jony Ive can speak very smoothly against a white background with some starbucks esque hipster piano music on in the background and we all form an orderly queue to store our fingerprint on something connected to 'the cloud'.

FWIW my house is filled with Apple gear, so this aint an attempt to troll the thread. Only the fingerprint thing just excites and scares me both at the same time.
 
nucastle said:
Please explain how it's ridiculous.
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Does it really need explaining... surely you can't be that blinded by your own stupidity?

nucastle said:
So if the Police knocked on your door and asked nicely for the same information (they even brought a nice ink pad and pre-filled in form with your name on it and space for the fingerprints), and a cheek swab for good measure (yes, a joke) ... Would you happily do the same?
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Completely different... but to answer your question... yes, yes I would as I am a law abiding citizen and if asked by a police officer for certain information then I would give it to them. What do you have to hide? Why do you think Apple are in cahoots with NSA/MI5/MI6? That is tin foil hat talk...

nucastle said:
I just think it's interesting how Jony Ive can speak very smoothly against a white background with some starbucks esque hipster piano music on in the background and we all form an orderly queue to store our fingerprint on something connected to 'the cloud'
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It isn't set to the cloud... it is 'stored' on the device in an encrypted location. I say 'stored' as the actual print isn't stored anywhere.

If you want to enter the USA (for instance) they will take you prints or deny you entry... Deal with it... What have you got to hide?
 
nucastle said:
Please explain how it's ridiculous.
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It's ridiculous that you assume that this data is being sent from the device to any server, where is your proof that justifies your scaremongering? The revelations about the NSA & Prism isn't proof.

Secondly, how many of the millions of people who pass through America's borders and have their fingerprints taken have been subject to any negative consequences from doing so?
 
Moses said:
Do you reckon they're produce an iTV which is an actual TV? Aren't TV profit margins absolutely tiny? I'm sure I've read they are... which would lead me to think they'll continue down the ATV route where they just have a box which plugs into basically any TV.
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I agree. The thing with TVs is nobody but lunatic AV nerds upgrade their sets on the reg, and Apple have got 'in the back door' with the ATV; it's cheap, it seemed innocent enough as a tiny box that connects to your TV, and people have been buying them.

Slowly their functionality and content have expanded at a leisurely pace without drawing too much attention to themselves, so Apple's 'hobby' hasn't got to justify itself as some sort of game changer.
 
nucastle said:
I'm amazed ANYONE wants to give the NSA/MI5/MI6 direct access to biometric data without batting an eye. Surely the last few months of revelations have made people question just WHAT they are happy with companies and agencies having access to.

Usually you would have to be arrested before the government takes your prints. These days we just hand them over voluntarily.
Click to expand...

Found this post on Macrumours regarding the fingerprint ID security if you are worried !

For those who don't understand cryptographic one-way hashes, they cannot be reversed to produce the original data without a dictionary attack. A dictionary attack in this case would require a collection of actual human fingers or replicas of them to run through Apple's Touch ID to see which cryptographic hashes match the one stored on the device.

Also note, that there is a really really really small chance that two fingerprints will generate the same cryptographic hash. Cryptographic hashes by their very nature have LESS data than the source data for which they are hash. This means that the if the source data has potentially quadrillions of combinations that there may be only billions of values that they hash to (a one to many mapping of hashes to source data). More likely scenario is that your fingerprint hashes to the same value as a fingerprint that does not currently exist on the planet today and may never exist.

Think of a large 500-page book as a just a collection of letters, numbers, spaces, and punctation. You could pound on the keyboard and produce a book of random text or you could carefully craft an actual readable book. The hash reduces the book to a hash of say 500 characters which is generated in such a way that even changing a single letter in the book or the capitalization of a single letter produces an entirely different hash (cryptographic hash algorithms magnify any change to cyclically change other parts). Obviously, there is no way you could take 500 characters of data and regenerate the 500-page book (that would be the most amazing lossless-compression algorithm in the world, but also mathematically impossible). Because of this you cannot reverse it. You could however, run a hash on all books known to man to find the one that matches the same value (a dictionary attack). Finally, there is a possibility that two carefully crafted books hash to the same value, but it is far more likely that a book's hash would match some of the billions of permutations of random letters , numbers, spaces, and symbols that have never been bound into a book.

It is the same for fingerprint data. Your actual fingerprint could only be determined if somebody already had a replica of your finger in a database and could make Apple's Touch ID sensor generate the same hash from it. The worst somebody could do is break into your phone or prove that a phone did indeed belong to you. What's more, the odds of somebody else's fingerprint matching yours is like two monkeys pounding out the exact same content on a keyboard after an hour of bashing away at it. Either way, there is no chance of your fingerprint being cloned and used in other places to impersonate your presence.
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p.s. The US government already have my fingerprint, gave it when i entered the US last year. The HK government has my fingerprint, gave it when i applied for my ID card.
 
no it isn't. I loved my iphone 4S and I 3GS before that. When the strange screen shaped mock-ups of the 5 turned out to be true, I decided to sit one out and went with the GS3. I'll see what next year brings.
 
mame said:
no it isn't. I loved my iphone 4S and I 3GS before that. When the strange screen shaped mock-ups of the 5 turned out to be true, I decided to sit one out and went with the GS3. I'll see what next year brings.
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I booked a holiday to Florence today, so that's iPhone money spent lol, guess I'll stick with my ancient iP4 until it either dies or totally full then I'll upgrade.

It works and I don't really need anything more than what it does at the moment.
 
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