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Comment by ctdonath | Hacker News Reader

Projector-based 3D face recognition. Nifty. Shines an IR dot pattern onto the face, recognizes with that, works in the dark. Seems on continuously, wonder how much power draw.

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I'd bet ~30 days with this in the public's hands we will see headlines like "How to beat iPhone's facial recognition with X". There are some crafty folks out there--

They look like they worked hard to cover that, even training the network to reject 3D face models done up by Hollywood makeup artists. It's hard to see how you'd spoof it better than that.

Doesn't really have to look like a hollywood mask though, fooling neural networks is a growing area of research these days: http://www.evolvingai.org/fooling

There are probably many redundancies in face ID, but I wouldn't be surprised if some interesting techniques for fooling it show up.

These approaches assume you have access to the trained neural network weights, i.e. that it's a "white box".

This is a fundamental issue with developing secure software/tech in a private. You have to hope you are the smartest team in the world and that you thought of everything. It's you vs everyone else.

Since it's based on neural nets, I think there might be ways, but they will likely not work consistently.. they will only work in certain conditions. Also note that they also track head position (must face camera) and check the eyes (must be open and look at the camera).. this will be hard to get right all at once.

I'll be surprised if this works for me as a blind person. There's no way I could directly look at the camera. I don't need the iPhone X since I don't care about camera quality, but if touch id starts being removed from all new iphones I will be giving Android a long hard look.

Apple's pretty good at accessibility, they may have thought of that with one of their settings.

They seem to work so hard at making sure all their products work well for people various levels of vision problems I have to believe they would've done something. After all even the Apple TV has support for people with total vision loss. I don't see why they'd break their flagship product.

If it's true that touch id was expected to ship until a couple months ago they may not have found an alternative. If they are expecting touch id to be in next years model I could see them not making face unlock accessible since you can still get new iPhones with touch id. Remember Apple did not make the iPhone accessible until the 3gs, so there's no guarantee that new features will be accessible.

I wasn't aware that the 3G didn't have accessibility, but they've trumpeted it a lot over the last few years so I have a hard time thinking they would just give it up.

I mean you could just make a setting that ignores whether someone is "looking" at the phone. It would make it a little less secure but at least it would still work.

I have a very hard time believing the rumors that they took touch ID out at the last moment. Maybe when people do teardowns will see some empty space but I figured that something they would've had to lock down early in the year.

I've got to admit I'll miss touch ID. I wonder if it'll ever come back if they figure out a way to get that sensor-under-the-screen thing going, or at this point do they just decide Face ID is good enough and go forward with it alone?

Update: an article I read this morning says you can choose to disable the attention checking.

Is Android support for visually impaired users still as spotty as it used to be?

I'm not sure. It was truly bad in the Android 2.3 days. I own a Moto E since it was cheep and I was curious if Android had improved. Running 5.1 was pretty accessible, but was slow which is expected since it's a low end phone. Android apps on a chromebook work pretty well, but who knows how that will translate to a modern mid range Android phone.

Sunglasses?

Also, what happens when I shave my big beard off? :( Or grow it bushier?

They had that as a test case in the video and said that the phone will learn that.

As long as you keep unlocking your phone while your beard grows, it'll learn your new face.

Fine, but how can it possibly learn while I shave the beard off?

I think it depends on the amount of beard you shave off.

Worst case is that you have to use the passcode and it'll relearn your beardless face.

Can be used by police to unlock your phone by pointing it at your face.

Sure, but it might be stronger than fingerprints. If your eyes look away it won't unlock.

Also, there's a "cop button", in iOS 11 you can disable touch/face id by pressing the power button quickly 5 times.

They should have an option to lock your phone, disabling face recognition, on voice command.

How is that any different than them forcing your finger onto a TouchID sensor?

It's not. Anybody who uses iPhone authentication methods other than a random six digit passcode with a ten-attempt wipe is asking for trouble.

THIS is all I could think since the rumors started. If someone wants to steal your phone can't they just hold you for 1 second and point the phone to your face to unlock it?

iCloud Activation Lock still applies unlocked or not, you need to enter passcode to disable it.

Also if you close your eyes or look away it wont unlock, arguably harder to force than putting someones finger on the phone

It probably activates when the phone is raised or held at certain angles. They're pretty smart at recognising the ways devices are held and moved, such as with the watch activating when you raise and turn your wrist to check the time.

Also when Craig demonstrated it, he raised the phone, looked at it and also swiped up from the bottom. If that's how it works, they might activate the sensors at the beginning of the swipe gesture.

Likely only on when the screen is on, and the device is locked. So maybe a total of 5 minutes a day?

There were indications during the presentation that it actually runs face recognition often, including as a power-saving technique (sounded like it would turn screen off when you weren't looking at it, back on when you do).

I'm not a camera hardware expert, but my understanding is that (like most things), the booting process uses up more power than the same duration of time in a steady state. So the "five minutes" number is misleading; if that 5 minutes is broken up into hundreds of discrete startup cycles (which is not at all unrealistic - people instinctively check their phone a lot more often than they think – and there's no way for the phone to tell whether you're turning it on to glance at the clock or to unlock it until after it's turned the camera on), then it's a significant amount of power draw.

Regardless, they said the phone gets 2 hours better battery life. That's pretty remarkable.

Fantastic for when I'm skiing or in bed with half my face stuck in a pillow.

When you're skiing you're also unlikely to use touch id.

This is a very fair point.

Maybe turn your face 45 degrees for a second?

Or just use the passcode if you're unable to do that for some reason.

Yeah I'm not sure if that's new or not but it's the first I've heard of it. That seems like a really cool idea.

Isn't this what the Kinect does to determine who you are and sign you on for the Xbox? I think that's been around for 4-5 years. Impressive they can do it all on the phone.

They bought the company Primsense that did the original Kinect in 2013, seems obvious now why.

Apple actually bought company (PrimeSense) that was responsible for Kinect sensor and it seems to work the same way. It's just impressive that they manage to fit it inside these size phone. Google tango devices are bigger.

It is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTKlNGSH9Po

It’s technically an older concept, and has been used previously for other kinds of 3D scanning of people, but this seems to be the first mainstream miniaturized version of this.

Not unique, but fitting that hardware on a phone is pretty incredible.

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