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What’s up with Face ID timeouts?

The Loop posted a great summary of Apple’s Face ID security whitepaper.

Two points about how the timeout works really baffled me. Face ID is disabled when:

  • The device hasn’t been unlocked for more than 48 hours.
  • The passcode hasn’t been used to unlock the device in the last 156 hours (six and a half days) and Face ID has not unlocked the device in the last 4 hours.

If the phone hasn’t been unlocked for 48hrs, it’s a good assumption that the phone has been lost or stolen. But why bother disabling Face ID? Is Apple nervous about it’s real-world effectiveness? Nervous that a thief may be able to unlock the phone with their face?

The second timeout seems more arbitrary. Why 156 hours? If I generally only use my phone once every 4hrs 5mins, then after 6.5days I will have to re-authenticate with my passcode? Why? It seems completely arbitrary.

Any smarter security minds out there have any thoughts?

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The eLitePhone 5S

I’ve come to the conclusion that the iPhone 5S is too fancy for me.

With the gold-trimmed sapphire home button and the extremely high price tag – topping out at $1040* in Canada; it feels like a $1000 watch to me. I don’t just live a lifestyle (or have the taste for fancy things) that would accommodate a $1000 watch.

Granted the iPhone has always been high-end, but for a long time it has also been the only reasonable option IMHO. The 5C feels more my speed. I can only imagine this divergence in products is a conscious effort by Apple to continue to position themselves as an ultra-high-end retailer.

* including GST + MB PST

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My Teardrop iPhone 5 Prediction

With less than 48hrs to the next iPhone announcement, I thought I’d weigh in on the iPhone 5 teardrop prediction with some first-hand experience.

I have a TV remote that’s roughly teardrop shaped and every single time without fail I hold it upside-down.

In this blogger’s opinion, there will be no teardrop iPhone.

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How To Use Your iPhone to Stalk Yourself

It looks like the privacy hippies were finally right about something, your mobile phone really is a pocket sized tracking device.

Turns out that as of iOS 4.0, iPhones have been tracking your physical movements and logging it along with the phone’s backups.

A small team of researchers have discovered these logs in iTune’s backup files, they’ve released a handy little app that collects all the data from your user folder and plots it on a map. iPhoneTracker.app and further information available here.

Here is the visualization of everywhere I’ve been since Sept 28, 2010:

You can see lots of activity in and around Winnipeg (including trips up to the Gimli and Victoria Beach), a flight to Toronto and subsequent travel around southern Ontario and a road trip to Minneapolis. It’s fascinating.

I’m not sure if this is a terrifying privacy hole or a neat little hidden feature. I’m leaning towards neat feature, since the data is stored locally on your computer and can be encrypted automatically by iTunes.

At this point in time a method for disabling the “feature” does not exist. I expect Apple will be responding in short order.