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Comment by sunsetMurk | Hacker News Reader

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--

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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.

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