Apple Unveils The iPhone 5S
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The last occurrence of that would have been almost ten years ago. They've always highlighted their technical superiority in presentations.
Touch ID is a lot! No more password entering on iTunes. A godsend for someone who has a 26 characters passphrase like me.
(A little paranoid, though.)
Isn't that always the case? But "now" is a moving target.
Flexible displays are coming soon.
The paths for easy integration with multiple low power wearable peripherals have just been forged, and the area is still in its infancy.
Mobile payments have not fully arrived yet.
The phones are all still in rectangular boxes - something that will look ridiculous in 20 years.
I think there is a lot yet to come hardware-wise.
Clickable buttons, raised hyperlinks, textures - all coming soon!
Wearable peripherals are a different category, they're not smartphones. Regardless, I dont have terribly high hopes for these future devices.
Mobile payment is mostly not a hardware issue. It's a software issue and a matter of coordination or market forces selecting a standard or two. It's things like THIS that are the next battleground in mobile: services and integration.
They are in rectangular boxes because that shape, for various reasons, happens to be extraordinarily efficient. TV's haven't changed shapes.
I think smartphone hardware is pretty much dead. The major leaps - touch screens (which is so ridiculously underappreciated as an innovation), HD screens, HD cameras, CPU horsepower, nice OS's, voice recognition, blah blah - are behind us. There is a reason that almost all of the best selling smartphones look alike, feel alike, and generally have the exact same feature sets. The differences between each other, in the grand scheme of things, are lamentably minute.
Integration with low power peripherals will be nice, but don't forget about high powered peripherals like tablets and tvs. If I put down my phone right now and pick up a tablet, I should be able to finish typing this comment with no interruption.
The processor is more powerful than many old computers, and the 30" screens need no more pixels than the iPhone screen already has.
People will be using their phones as desktops (if not serious workstations) sometime soon. And once they use them as desktops, phones won't be fast enough until they have performance comparable to workstations (which, as you point out, won't happen).
The only limit we face now is users finding sufficient aggregate need for all that power & bandwidth. Build AppleTV into a touchable monitor, drop a wireless keyboard on the desk, and eliminate that 4" bottleneck for most users - BAM, death blow to Windows etc.
They could have put "2x faster than iPhone 5" in their slides, but they deliberately chose to put 40x (referring to the original iPhone) and leave it slightly ambiguous.
"We have a new fingerprint sensor! But, you probably don't want to use it because privacy crazies online think Apple is a front for the NSA."
"We're moving to a 64-bit architecture! But, geeks with low reading comprehension think it's not that useful because we have tiny RAM, so you should just ignore this point too."
"We have the best mobile phone camera ever created! But, everything was already good enough, so we've probably just wasted two years developing this and wasting shareholder dollars instead of entering the virtual cow social abuse market."
As a photo enthusiast that part of the presentation was a lot more exciting than the (rather marginal) improvements to lens and sensor.
http://www.tbreak.ae/features/camera-comparison-nokia-lumia-...
Many better known sites like DPReview.com think that the Lumia 1020 has the best smartphone camera:
http://connect.dpreview.com/post/5234892048/nokia-lumia-1020...
Since most people use their cameras to shoot pictures of cute cats or children, and then upload them to FB, I think the vast majority of people would prefer the fast and very good quality of the iPhone over the slow but excellent quality of 1020.
There is also a new instruction set to go along with the bump to 64-bits which improves things. However, I remember Herb Sutter saying that, in the case of x64, Microsoft generally found that the improved instruction set performance gains were a wash due to the increased cache misses caused by the doubling of the pointer width. I'm not sure how much ARM 64-bit instruction set improves things.
Yeah, I don't think they ever supported GC in iOS. Now that you mention it, it's probably not a coincidence that it was added to the Mac shortly after the entire product line had switched to 64-bit. You could still do it in 32-bit, but I doubt they were expecting many developers to start writing new 32-bit apps at that point.
What does use a conservative garbage collector on iOS, however, is Safari's JS engine. But I assume that the conservative scan is only used on the stack (that's what FF does), since it would be kind of silly to do a conservative scan of the heap for a language that doesn't support pointers. So it doesn't seem likely under normal circumstances that you'd have many false hits even with 32-bits.
This discussion is frankly insane. This stuff is called "marketing". Virtually every company does it. Companies that don't do it are called "failures".
Shame on them. They should be like the more well-behaved companies, which emphasize numbers when they're behind and ignore numbers when they're ahead.
The problem is that they hardly have qualitative aspects left that they can claim over the competition. They are engaged in a race to the bottom.
When the highlight of the keynote is a feature that has been available on cheap Thinkpads for five years, you wonder if Apple will ever innovate again.
http://secureidnews.com/news-item/motorola-releases-fingerpr...
(This is a joke: I know 64-bit ARM is substantially improved, but it's really not a big selling point to the general population anymore, is it?!)
I don't see them talking about this any more than they've talked about every iterative processor improvement in the past. Being the first 64-bit smartphone is a slightly bigger deal than selling 2.6GHz instead of 2.4.
"Architecture transitions used to be a big deal. We have built a software and developer ecosystem that makes them worth a single slide. ARM: Don't get too comfortable. Intel: Show us what you can do."
Looking at Intel's roadmap and the success they've had with Haswell ULV, I think they have at least a fighting chance at ending up in an iOS flagship product within 2-3 years.
Disappointing shortsighted shareholders, but in my opinion an absolutely perfect time to buy AAPL: they have huge cash reserves and pushing in to the massive Eastern market with the Gold iPhone will only pad further those cash reserves that that low P/E.
ie: 22 Karat.
* OpenGL ES 3.0 support (things like true HDR rendering, etc. will finally be possible)
* 64-bit support. For most app developers, this will just be a recompile. The tricky part is that any closed-source 3rd party SDKs/libraries/frameworks used will also have to be rebuilt first by their authors.
This was well covered when desktops switched, but the main advantages are that certain operations are faster (e.g. RSA) and the extra address space lets you use mmap() and the page cache for everything, instead of writing your own stupid cache.
Disadvantages are that 64-bit code consumes more memory. There are ways around this.
From the deck: -32bit RISC Instructions -64bit GP registers -64bit operands -64bit pointers
Note that the 32->64 bit register and address size increase is by far not the only difference between 32-bit ARM and 64-bit ARM. Aarchv8 (64-bit arm) is effectively a complete clean redesign of the ISA, designed to be modern, fast, and only maintain some backwards compatibility, discarding many signature features of ARM that no longer make sense. Such as predication of everything and free shifts in every instruction.
64-bit ARM should be significantly faster, at least once the compilers catch up.
Personally, I think I'd rather stay with my passcode.
Did you btw know that you can turn off "simple passcode" and then use a purely numeric longer passcode? In that case the iPhone will still show the big easy-to-hit numeric keyboard allowing you to type in the arbitrary length numeric code.
Yes. It's not as safe as a long alphanumeric password, but this gets annoying SO quickly, I'd rather type in my 8 digits.
It's mentioned in the video as well: http://www.apple.com/iphone-5s/videos/#video-touch
If they send out 8 bytes of your fingerprint data hidden in every picture you take (so your fingerprint can be regenerated by looking at your first 500 pictures) I doubt anyone will ever find it.
Additionally -- if things are like they used to be when I was in the biometrics world in the mid-90s -- the fingerprint template will be small and work like a one way hash; if you have the template you cannot reconstruct the fingerprint from it. It wouldn't really be very useful to the NSA or anyone else.
That's what I means by "we have to consider the iPhones backdoored". Once you can't trust the device any more, all bets are off and thus we can't be sure that what Apple says they do with that fingerprint is what they actually are doing.
(edit: regarding jailbreaking, I seriously doubt that a sufficiently well-hidden backdoor would be found by a jailbreaker. Or have we found the backdoors in OSX or Windows yet? Since the latest leak, we know they are there)
They might want to do approximate matching, though. That could make it hard or impossible to do without the decryption key.
edit: Also, there is a difference between a subtle crypto vulnerability and sending data to a server that, according to the announcement, is designed to be protected in its own enclave and never sent anywhere. The latter would be far more obvious in the code and easier to spot.
But we can't see the code. And it's far from certain you'd be able to pick it up through watching data packages.
good spy novel stuff... steal the prints of some foreign bigwig, or say Julian Assange, plant a copy in some compromising crime scene...
If you're going to do anything, including working on the computer you're typing your comments on, you have to trust a lot of parties. Some of that trust involves knowing who made the code, and some of it may involve the knowledge that the NSA will not be using their best, most secret backdoors against a whole lot of people.
Makes perfect sense.
How many webapps have encypted and stored their users password "only on their own servers", to later have them leaked via combination of exploit in 3rd party software that allowed the download of their DB and a little brute force?
Only difference on an iPhone is that there are literally 100s of thousand of apps that can possibly be exploited
Brilliant! I did not know that. I haven't been using Long Passcode Mode because I didn't want to type on the tiny keyboard to unlock 100 times a day.
I think the fingerprint scanner is positioned not to be some indestructible lock like RSA or a safe-deposit box, but a reasonably decent deterrent like door locks and The Club. It seems to be at the same level of security as your iPhone passcode -- a well-equipped intruder can certainly get into your stuff, but your mom or a pickpocket won't be able to.
When a third-party loses your password, you change it and life goes on (you are not reusing passwords, are you?). When a third-party loses your fingerprint, what do you do? Cut off your fingers? Grow a new hand?
Yes. The fingerprint information is supposed to be irreversibly hashed. But so are passwords. And yet we still see them being stored unencrypted. No. I'm very careful with my fingerprints.
Also, the data on my phone must be some of the most valuable data I have. When I lose my phone and you gain access, you immediately own all my online identities. My phone has SSH keys, it has the password to my Email account stored in its keychain (very handy for all these "I have forgotten my password" features on all the sites), it has my 2 factor authentication tokens - I can't even begin to imagine how bad it would be if somebody had access to my phone.
Yours is probably as valuable to you.
Fingerprints are a horrible biometric.
They might be a bad biometric but it's not because they aren't universally available to everyone.
That said, I can see how this could potentially dramatically increase the availability of public fingerprints if it were hacked. More importantly the fact you can't reset your fingerprint is something I overlooked. I do think that in general though anyone building a system that relies exclusively on a fingerprint as a highly hack-resistent security measure is foolhardy regardless of how prevalent fingerprint data is. In other words, your iPhone passcode isn't protecting your data anymore than your fingerprint if someone gets their hands on your phone, so I don't really see how this point is material to if it's a good idea to use fingerprints to unlock phones.
My passport also is one of the last ones you could get without it containing any biometric data.
As such, I'm reasonably sure that no third-party ever had access to my fingerprint. And I'd love for it to stay like this (see my parent comment for the reasons why)
And to someone who may ask me "why would you want the freedom to do something bad?" I'll answer that three of the biggest monotheistic religions are based on a guy a girl who were allowed to do bad things (Adam and Eve). I'm agnostic myself but I find it pretty self-explanatory nevertheless , you just can't impose the lack of free-will on people.
Is it just me, or is HN getting really frikkin' paranoid?
to someone who may ask me "why would you want the freedom to do something bad?"
I think you're over-reaching.
But pragmatically, the more data they have, the more likely you are to show up as a false positive. Worst case; you handle something in a hardware store and it's later made into a bomb by a third party. You're going to need a solid alibi for that one.
Or you get placed at the scene of a protest even though you weren't present for it. Now you're on the terrorist list.
Additionally they can catch you more easily for victimless crimes, like if your fingerprints are on a bong they collect. I figure it's easy enough for them to stick you with a felony even without actively helping them get more data. So I'm trying to minimize the felonies I can be stuck with.
What does that even mean? You wear gloves in public all the time? You wipe down everything you touch?
Which makes me wonder, aren't one's finger prints all over your iPhone exterior anyway. If someone steals one's phone wouldn't it be easier to dust it for prints than crack the security on the digital copy?
Ding ding ding! We have a winner.
Almost as silly as not using a biometric logic because "what if they use a backdoor to get a photo of my face?"
I think there is too much of an emphasis on using uniqueness for security. The idea is that if "It could only be you!" you are secure.
The sci-fi vision is a world where a fingerprint or retina scan is taken and that's it. There's no username needed, just the fingerprint itself is enough to confirm your identity. In reality, the idea of uniqueness for security actually would create security problems, because it removes the other factors involves, and biometric codes like fingerprint cannot be changed as needed (technically a fingerprint can be changed 9 times. A voice on the other hand cannot.)
An NFC tag/card/ring, seems much better to me, since these can be changed as needed and would be more difficult to hack than taking a fingerprint off the phone.
An armed thief could steal your ring or fob along with the phone, but they could also make you use your finger to unlock your phone for them. So I don't think that's really any added protection in that situation.
The thief that just grabs your phone off the counter or out of your pocket will have a much tougher time with the NFC tag than with the fingerprint.
It's not quite the same with private keys because you can always generate some new keys and publicly revoke your key if it could have been compromised. Since you cannot regenerate your fingerprints and could have already lost them, simply revoke them up front.
Edit: expanded on this in my blog: http://blog.oleganza.com/post/60865284958/key-revocation-and...
Now, instead of waiting around for lawyers, your finger will be physically forced onto the home button.
http://www.gastongazette.com/news/local/police-want-to-finge...
Plus, as others have mentioned below, most conceal carry firearm permits will require it, at least here in Illinois.
So, the govt. already knows that I'm a registered Republican, they have my fingerprints (twice), they know I have a FOID (Firearm ID in Illinois), they know my travel patterns (via airlines, gas stations, etc).
I think the last of my worries is some fingerprint scanner on a smartphone. At least I won't have to type in my PIN to unlock it while driving...
Clapper's testimony to congress?
We are dealing with the realm of speculation, but it is not speculation fueled by some sort of tinfoil hatted lunacy. With the role that smartphones fill in peoples' lives today, you are just going to have to come to grips with the fact that, going forward, some people are going to consider the privacy of new devices to be very relevant, and well worth discussing. Don't be surprised when people error on the side of caution.
You want to talk about battery life and color? Well I want to talk about display DPI and privacy. Learn to cope.
I assume you mean digitally record, unless you're wearing gloves. ;)
> In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet...
Compelling.
So from that you extrapolate all devices made by US companies are secretly under the control of the NSA? Pretty big logical leap there.
That leads me to believe that you're either part of an organization that's subverting the internet and assisting the NSA or you're willfully ignorant.
Fact is, your other comments point that you have not well-researched the situation.
Every week there's a new revelation of just how deep the surveillance really is-- not just "metadata" but ALL data is being collected. The NSA hacks into companies, pays off others for cooperation. Backdoors. Broken encryption. It's all there out in the open thanks to the documents that have been leaked.
You do harm to the liberty of others by dismissing these facts.
> It's all there out in the open thanks to the documents that have been leaked.
You dismiss his point that unsubstantiated documents is largely the source of all this speculation and then you remake a bunch of unsubstantiated claims, saying they are all proved by the aforementioned documents.
Even Obama and the NSA itself has backed this up.
They'd been trying to extradite Snowden ffs, get your head out of the sand.
That is to say: there are some things that we know and are verified (e.g. that there is a program, called PRISM, etc.) but other things where there's a lot of speculation, but less or no verification (e.g. that the iPhone is backdoored.)
Some of us like to distinguish between these things. Some of us don't. It doesn't help to call people names over it, though.
http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-iphone-slides-in-der-spie...
(Sorry for the BI link, but the relevant slides are shown immediately)
> In one case, after the government learned that a foreign intelligence target had ordered new computer hardware, the American manufacturer agreed to insert a back door into the product before it was shipped, someone familiar with the request told The Times.
> At Microsoft, as The Guardian has reported, the N.S.A. worked with company officials to get pre-encryption access to Microsoft’s most popular services, including Outlook e-mail, Skype Internet phone calls and chats, and SkyDrive, the company’s cloud storage service.
Please do your duty as a human being and read more.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/06/us/nsa-foils-much-internet...
They obviously have broad powers to spy on individuals through a variety of channels, which isn't, or shouldn't be, news.
For those who want to believe it, I doubt there is any amount of information that could ever be released to convince them that the NSA isn't spying on people anymore.
The NSA is a spy agency, of course they are spying on people. Unless the NSA ceases to exist it will spy on people. They are not actively trying to claim otherwise (only that they try really hard to only spy on people who are in someway connected to someone who is not an American or has been designated dangerous).
Scheier's special prosecutor plus truth and reconciliation commission seems reasonable. But we're getting way off topic.
The comments will go away when the issue goes away. The issue isn't going to go away. Therefore, don't expect the comments to, either. Welcome to the world we now live in.
I think what's happening here is that you are being asked to go away. Your comments aren't adding anything to this discussion about a new iPhone.
The answer to all of the above, if we assume that talking about a product is 'helpful' to begin with, is "Yes." Privacy is simply something that people are going to consider and discuss from now on. There is no reason we should treat it differently from the other things we consider.
You might as we'll be discussing religion or politics here. This is not the place. I heard your warning the first ten times.
Change starts by making enough people aware of and angry about the issue that the politicians can't afford to support these programs any more. If we're just distracted the next time $TECH_TOY or $NATURAL_DISASTER comes along, then nothing at all will change.
I don't particularly care if people find my anger at the NSA's systemic intrusion of our privacy annoying. I care more about that particular issue than I do what a random person on the internet whom I've never met might think of me. I care more about keeping you talking about the issue than I do about you liking me.
There is no new information about the NSA there. Just more speculation.
It won't.
The adolescent libertarian smell combined with semi-hysterical, semi-supported outrage on this issue is rapidly beginning to stink.
We know that the NSA has their hooks into US hardware and software vendors. At this point, it's difficult to trust the promises that US-based companies make about security and privacy because we know that they're being compelled to lie. That's an extremely important variable in the discussion of a new piece of internet-connected hardware that collects biometrics. Dismissing discussion of it as "annoying" is juvenile and myopic.
I am a fan of hyperbole, but at least keep it coherent... At the very least, cheald is on topic while they are notoriously not.
For those of us in the other 200 odd countries it really is boring as hell to have to wade through your pointless, unsubstantiated paranoia.
For instance, something in the safe-harbor blabla says citizen data handled by public angencies in Europe is not allowed to go through US nor, obviously, to be stored in the US. This rule is not new: in my previous job we had to ditch gmail and gapps in order to comply, and it was f*ing painful.
So the GP is right. African governements in general do not have the means to spy on your electronic life.
Speak for yourself, not for the rest of us, please.
Wow - that has to be hands down the absolute most ignorant, ridiculous and bullshit comment I have ever read on HN.
This is The Best place to be talking about the National Security Agency Technologically spying on everyone, building in parallel infra and forcing the biggest tech companies in the world via court gags and threats to providing them with access to encrypted user data.
Your comment is mind-boggling, to me, how you could even think this is not the place!
Edit: Toned it down a notch.
Your comment makes a good point, but it's too hysterical.
To quote him. Please explain how he "did no such thing"
To put it another way: the problem is not the topic. It's the tactic of derailing every other topic that people want to talk about just because you think something else is too important to be ignored. That tactic, as well-intended as it might be, has a history of driving good users away from once-good fora precisely because it's so annoying to not be able to talk about anything else.
Thank you for your succinct statement, I have very little faith we will get through this any time soon given the reaction I see on HN, Reddit and other sites where the most seemingly qualified among us to do anything cannot even comprehend how pernicious this problem is.
Fingerprint scanners are not yet prevalent in modern smartphones, and fingerprints are one of the primary ways that law enforcement can trace / track individuals. If the NSA, which has already been shown to have backdoors into Apple's systems, was able to access fingerprint data on a massive scale, this would be a massive affront to privacy for millions of users around the world.
pilif's comment was absolutely relevant to discussion of the iPhone 5S launch, as one of the phone's primary new features has the potential to be a massive security and privacy breach given information we've recently learned regarding Apple's close relationship with the NSA.
Do you that the NSA loves us all and is just, y'know, kinda watching out for us?
We all need a big brother to save us, right?
I'd say HN is one of the most important grass roots forums for this today.
Technology - aka OUR industry - is going to rapidly change in response. I think it's critical that there is discussion.
I'm actually really interested in your view. Do you think everyone questioning NSA surveillance of iPhones is wearing tinfoil hats?
"We should expect comments about the NSA and spying to become a part of the common dialog regarding technology and personal information. Asking them to go away is just asking people to stick their head in the sand and ignore it."
That is a useful comment that would further the discussion. So I will now respond to that, since I don't want to debate what snark means.
I don't mind useful or constructive comments about technology and the NSA, but most of the comments I see are very reactionary and misinformed and painfully naiive. They are similar to all the old comments on stories about Microsoft where people would say things like "Micro$oft is obviously evil" and such.
So if a comment is interesting and useful, and happens to be about the NSA, then great. I haven't seen many of those.
> I don't mind useful or constructive comments about technology and the NSA, but most of the comments I see are very reactionary and misinformed and painfully naiive.
Perhaps our energy would be better spent pointing out why these comments are naiive and misinformed, rather than discussing whether they're worth saying at all, then?
(Meta-meta-point: I wish I could collapse comment threads on HN.)
If the NSA wants to target you specifically, you're fucked no matter what unless you move to a cave. No point in being needlessly worried. I'm more worried about this causing someone to cut off my finger while stealing my phone than I am the NSA coming after me.
So yes, by all means, keep talking about it.
It is a perfectly cromulent word.
At this point, the overwhelming evidence is that we are being spied upon at a scale never seen before in history. Legal checks and balances such as search warrants are consider inconveniences to be routed around with border confiscations.
I would begin to believe things are changing when I see officials on both sides of the Canada-US border going to jail--yes, jail--for things like spying on their ex-spouses or for routing around search warrants.
You know what? Neither are derisive comments that imply the NSA is not, in fact, violating our privacy. You'd have to be out of your goddamned mind to actually think they've stopped.
Who said what they're doing is illegal? The whole problem is that the entire surveillance regime is completely secret and completely legal.
If you can comprehend what is going on here, you should be loud and obnoxious about it. Get people talking. Make it the focus and refuse to give up that focus. The only way this is going to change is to get so many people angry about it that it becomes more politically advantageous to oppose than support it. If you get angry about hearing about it, then I'll take that - you now have an incentive to help get it changed so people will shut up about it.
I'm not trying to stop you from having the discussion. Can you just label the thread "NSA can get your fingerprints off that iPhone 5S" and have at it. There is a time and a place for everything. Everyone here has heard about the NSA situation by now. The word is out.
Nope. I'm just asking you to not ask others to not discuss their politics. You're more than welcome to not participate in the conversation if it's not useful to you.
We really can't discuss the finer points here because no matter how polite I am, I will simply get voted down for not agreeing with the HN politics. By the way, recently I heard a few tech heavy-weights come out in favor of the NSA (e.g. Larry Ellison, Max Levchin).
If you are comfortable with the current NSA behaviour, you are part of the problem.
HN, similarly, is just going to be the place where a bunch of libertarian-leaning programmers became, from my perspective, conspiracy theorists. But more charitably, maybe, we can say they are now radically opposed to government invasion of privacy.
The Snowden revelation, whatever you think of it, has been one of those events which divides time into before and after for this crowd.
It's foolish not to speculate on reasons why giving your thumbprint to a vendor may not be in your best interest. I'd much rather see the OP comment on the top of this discussion rather than some inane debate about whether the new phone is an incremental upgrade or an exciting evolution.
Nope. This is called critical thinking especially given our current global surveillance state.
It's like any new product/app created will now get some NSA snark unless its a link to a github repo. And even then I'm sure there are ways...
Does the signature output of the sensor even resemble something that would be useful to a third-party? It seems doubtful that it dumps out a little JPEG... and it might not even be possible to reconstruct.
The saddest part to me is that people are attempting to put an end to this worry by saying "well, Apple said they don't give apps access to it." And no other tech company has ever told us about any of their involvement and cooperation with the NSA in the collection of private user data.
People shouldn't wooed by this new feature and be blinded to its security implications. Start taking this stuff seriously, instead of what these companies are telling you.
There's either absolutely nothing you can do about it, or it's not as bad as you think and you are being wildly over fearful.
But since we don't know if they compromised apple(an american company), and the benefits of fingerprint ID is not that big, maybe we need to think about not using it?
In any case, we're talking about devices that can already spy on you to an enormous extent (conversations, photos, e-mail, passwords, plenty more). Fingerprints seem way down the list of important things they could be stealing.
For the NSA? A hell of a lot harder than backdooring iPhones.
Since fingerprints can't be changed, he more widely they are used for authentication, the more likely that they will be compromised and the less useful they are for authentication.
However, it's not at all an argument against using fingerprint scanners as an optional choice for authentication, just because the scanner could be used to steal your fingerprint.
Fingerprint theft is a problem regardless. You can't really target systems that enable that theft, because it's an ever-present risk. Instead, worry about systems which fail due to such theft.
Fingerprints are fine for a gym, because who cares if somebody fakes yours. They're fine for a smartphone for many people, because it's intended to stop casual theft, not be an impenetrable barrier. Fingerprints should definitely not be used (at least on their own) for, say, nuclear launch authorizations or other things of similar import, because they can be stolen and faked.
However, if you're using a fingerprint to unlock, it's much harder to say "I've forgotten my password" - or stop them from using your finger while you're unconscious.
Deniability becomes much lower.
If you're talking about ISP monitoring, that's not specific to the iPhone, and not relevant to this discussion.
If iPhones phoned home information on stored on phones, I'd expect there to be a huge shitstorm and ample evidence of suspicious traffic. Do we have any evidence _at all_ that this has happened?
We know that the info can be sucked out of Apple (or Google, or Faceboob, etc) if the NSA wants to (for now).
So if they have your fingerprint data ... or even the ability to suck stuff off your phone ... then ... well qed
look obviously I'm in the minority, in caring about my biometrics being "built in" at such a "ground level" to a device that has so much connectivity to "the cloud" ... if you're not disturbed by this, then fine. I'm ok, you're ok. It is ok to hold different views.
For me, it's very relevant whether we have any evidence that the government is collecting data residing _on_ iPhones on any scale, or whether the iPhone has any such capabilities built in. As far as I know, this hasn't been reported.
I know that Apple technically can push out a software update that would enable data collection or even covert audio recording, but in the end I have to make a decision on the likeliness of this vs. the convenience of having a smartphone handy.
Regarding fingerprint data, the US already has that and will continue to do so for 50 years, due to the fact that I had to travel to the US for work related reasons. Not happy about that, but, well, that's life.
Do you believe disabling the reader in a software-setting is enough to be sure it's not working? I don't. With all these NSA concerns going about, having a hardware fingerprint-reader on your smartphone that you can't avoid touching is something to think about.
10,000 of those would keep the NSA quite busy.
(I guess you'd need a live terrorist's finger to replicate though. Those NSA types are pretty smart.)
Welcome to the Total Information Awareness world.
Even ignoring the specific issue of fingerprints, which I am not convinced is a major concern, the widespread use gives numerous other reasons for pause.
It's your hardware after all. If you're worried about it, take steps to protect yourself.
If I ever own one of these phones, I might have to make it a point in my muscle memory to use my knuckle to press the home button.
Firstly - the NSA has no need to be able to access the fingerprint. The fact that the fingerprint is your passcode barometrically ties you to the device, without a doubt, and makes the meta data all that much more accurate.
What we know is that the NSA has complete upstream dominance, direct and indirect access to company data and extremely powerful correlation tools.
With the features of the 5S' "always on motion sensors, tied to health apps - they basically can construct not only WHO, WHERE, HOW, WHEN, you do something, they'd be able to go as far to be able to develop a "health number" into that dossier.
The fact of the matter is that while the Apple product is a nice shiny thing - and sure - as a phone and a tech, I'd love to use it -- but the data it produces about its users is 100% transparent to the NSA, based on everything we have seen so far. And more egregious; the fact that the NSA unabashedly abuses this access and does construct elaborate pictures of your behaviour then SHARES this with other agencies.
The passcode and fingerprint only serve to prevent the data the NSA IS collecting from being wrongly attributed to another human body.
the same statement about "not providing direct access" will get them off easily like it already did for them and Google/FB/etc in case of the rest of personal information.
I'd say it would be negligent on the part of NSA to not use such a convenient source of fingerprints of "foreign" persons :)
>at least hope, that Apple has designed the hardware involved to be subpoena proof
why would a corporation intentionally do it? Conspiracy of obstruction of [future] justice comes to mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_%28crime%29
In criminal law, a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime at some time in the future.
I would prefer the NSA not have my prints but virtually every other piece of data they collect is more likely to be used against me.
It may be optional, but that doesn't mean the device cannot acquire it without your knowledge. It is built into the home button after all.
This means that GCHQ (and by implication probably the NSA), already have my fingerprints.
How to fake fingerprints from ChaosComputerClub: http://dasalte.ccc.de/biometrie/fingerabdruck_kopieren?langu...
I wouldn't assume that a device is incapable of accumulating GPS tracking information in "airplane mode" and forwarding it when the radio is turned back on, however, or that intelligence and law enforcement agencies would never quietly disable "airplane mode" in the course of specific investigations.
However, while the NSA has surely overstepped its bounds I don't believe it is omnipotent. At some point its influence ends. I'm still willing to believe in airplane mode. Perhaps next week's scoop will change that, but for now I'm somewhat confident it works.
Did you honestly not suspect they were doing this all along? Why the concern just because some details have been leaked?
Plus, who can resist a good "I told you so!" ;-)
The ideal would be a 4-8 digit numeric PIN with strong "10 tries and it dies" plus fingerprint, and as a backup, a full length desktop-style passphrase (iCloud passphrase). And maybe some kind of "only works on pre-authorized devices" enrollment system requiring the passphrase to generate local keys, too.
I want to be able to set, at my option: 1) PIN-only
2) FPR + PIN (where you must use iCloud to get in if your FPR doesn't read)
3) for morons, FPR only.
I currently use a much stronger than 4 digit numeric PIN, but it is honestly a pain. If I could set both the FPR and PIN as required to get in, I could use a shorter PIN. If I'm allowed to bypass the FPR entirely, the PIN has to remain as strong as it is now.
(What I'd also like is something better than hardcoded timeouts for requiring the PIN. Like "require FPR every single time you unlock, require PIN+FPR if it has been <30 minutes or <120 minutes but no movement on accelerometer OR connected in my car, require FPR+icloud passphrase otherwise". Fully configurable by the user.)
So not really a good idea.
I rather have the option of unlocking the phone via PIN, then have the option of sending a FPR hash to a site of my choice. Speaking of which, I wonder if they salt or provide some other way of sending unique hashes to different web sites or is this now the equivalent of using a fingerprint as the same password for all sites.
Which is worse, since you can't really get a new finger (well, you get 19 more resets including toes) since your print is somehow compromised (website leak, etc.)
Plus, since liveness checks are weak, anyone with access to anything containing your prints. I suspect at the next Defcon there will be a fun challenge to defeat it given a print lifted from a glass using $5 in supplies in 30 minutes. And then at the Defcon after that, the same contest will be in the children's area.
In the security world, things which are novel are not to be trusted. The security of a system is measured in how many serious researches have attacked it, and to what degree they succeeded.
I expect that there are solid biometric security standards that have been subject of serious analysis and attack. If it turns out that Apple's implementation uses one of these standard and tested solutions then I think I'd trust it in place of a PIN. In the absence of that evidence, the Properly Paranoid position is the skeptical one.
A quote from Babbage in 1864 is apropos: "One of the most singular characteristics of the art of deciphering is the strong conviction possessed by every person, even moderately acquainted with it, that he is able to construct a cipher which nobody else can decipher."
Screen locks do not provide meaningful security vs. a determined attacker, and never will no matter what the unlock mechanism is. Unless you encrypt all storage with a strong password (not a 6-digit PIN) and a good PBKDF, all you get from this stuff is protection against casual snooping.
Now that Jobs is gone and competition has heated up, we're seeing Apple back away from that with the iPad mini and the 5s. It feels like a big shift for Apple.
Seriously, what does this have to do with the point you're making?
>But Apple executives, including Mr. Jobs, were seriously considering selling a less-expensive but similar phone as early as 2009, according to former executives involved in the plan. Then, the manufacturing teams were most opposed to it.
>Their concerns, which I previously reported on in the Wall Street Journal, were about manufacturing complexity: how could Apple build so many models with so many different components? Apple’s relatively simple supply chain had always been a big competitive advantage. Having relatively few products allowed it to focus, buy parts at scale and keep things secret.
http://jessicalessin.com/2013/09/10/what-really-held-up-the-...
What I want to say is, none of us, I suppose, were in the man's head, or worked at Cupertino. We can only speculate why there is a single iPhone/iPad. (And as you can read from the article, it may be due to operations and not because Jobs was so much about “simplicity“.)
Saying “Now that Steve is dead” contributes nothing to discussion unless you work at Apple and really know what you're talking about. (In which case your comments are very valuable.)
Without visionary leadership, most big companies are unable to resist the temptation to take the kitchen sink attitude toward product development.
The coherence of Apple's product strategy will most likely decrease as we move further past the age of Jobs... unless they find a new similarly-capable leader.
From a consumer perspective it seem extremely hard to differentiate between different years’ iPhone models. This new clear (also visual) distinction makes it easier and provides more guidance for consumers. It’s a bit more work for Apple (what with them having to make two iPhone models every year) but for the consumer it should be much easier to understand.
The 5C stands out and makes it really clear that Apple has something that costs a bit less than their flagship. Yeah, it’s just the 5 repackaged – but I think it’s really important signalling and should make Apple’s lineup much easier to understand for consumers.
There’s still the 4S to muddy the waters, though. Ah, I guess that’s some Jobs-era legacy mess. Selling a two year old model is really lame and confusing after all :-)
The MacBook line wasn’t split. The MacBook Pro is the Intel powered successor to the PowerBook. The MacBook is the Intel powered successor to the iBook.
hey·day: the period of one's greatest popularity, vigor, or prosperity
When the MacBook was introduced, it was way less popular than it is now. Apple sells 2,5 times as many computers than it did back in 2006.
At first this meant they cut back to only selling four products: two desktops (premium Power Mac and value iMac), and two laptops (premium PowerBook and value iBook). But as new products came on they eventually got this treatment too.
I've long been wondering when/if Apple would take on NFC and things like payments more aggressively. I get the feeling that they're going to skip NFC entirely, and that TouchID is going to be a large part of processing transactions without the need for any physical device interaction (swipe/tap/bump).
Right now I've got that hazy tip-of-iceberg feeling that Apple is probably in the early phases of executing some grand vision that I can't yet see the entirety of.
And that's why Apple continues to be the leading consumer device co: who else out there has "vision?" Google is the closest, but IMHO Android has always felt reactionary, not visionary.
In my mind, NFC has always sort of felt like a clunky way of imposing a physical constraint on what should be a purely electronic transaction.
Primarily, NFC is much lower power consumption than bluetooth, much smaller field, and much lower data/bandwidth. NFC is more in the category of RFID.
Secondly, NFC tags are unpowered and rely on the reader for energy. They store several dozen bytes up to several thousand bytes and are useful for QR-style applications, like "Tap here for our address" and so forth. I did up some business cards with tappable tags on the back that take a device to my website. They also make tags fully embedded in paper and cardboard for cosmetic appeal.
NFC tags are very cheap, on the order of a few cents each up to a dollar each, and are therefore well suited to the smart objects applications such as, for example, tapping a pill bottle to retrieve non-trivial amounts of information about the medicine, or storing identity information on personal possessions.
Really, the applications are endless. I think Apple has missed the ball on this one. They should have included NFC early on. You can buy an iPhone case with NFC, which is useful but of course it's never as good as having it built in.
(Interestingly, the linked article is on TechCrunch, a news website that recently published an article "NFC = No One Fking Cares!". Of course, the author, a journalist apparently with no engineering background, drew a lot of caustic comments for that one, and subsequently I stopped reading that publication. This iPhone 5 article is poorly edited; it's too bad this out of probably dozens of choices is the one that made it into YC.)
Using NFC, the act of reading uses very little power, and of course tags are unpowered, but the reader needs to constantly scan for nearby tags, and that can be a battery hog. There are reports of 50% shorter battery life on NFC-equipped android phones.
Expecting more today from Tim Cook, the Apple announcement left me flat. Understand, that while I'm a long time Apple user, my Android phone(s) have offered features to which Apple is still playing catch-up. Apple is the reactionary these days; they may have introduced the iPhone as a ground-breaking product back-in-the-day, but Android is outpacing the iPhone with each new release.
<opinion>Aside from the MBP I use for work, I won't be purchasing another Apple product anytime soon, FWIW.</opinion>
Google's vision is definitely out there, but it's intangible. Glass is a $1500 product that is geared towards geeks. Folks who don't even know how to properly use a BT headset would be overwhelmed by Glass.
I guess it's about target market. Apple makes it available, like, everywhere, and accessible to folks like my parents. Google puts it way out there (cool), but it requires a nerd to use or grok.
To put it another way, each apple feature is clearly tied to a consumer-relatable use case. Collections of features form pieces of apples vision, rolling up use cases into the "experiences" that they mentioned today.
I think you can't reset or jailbreak a locked even today.
Either Bluetooth 4.0 or NFC would suffice.
NFC has enough Point Of Sale inroads (esp. in the rest of the world besides the US), that it is a more natural choice.
It's possible Apple didn't want to radically redesign the 5S case and internals in the manner necessary to include NFC.
But if Apple hasn't implemented NFC by next year's redesign, then they must have something else in mind.
Personally, I'm betting they put NFC into the new iWatch. Authenticated via the new fingerprint reader in the 5S.
I'm also betting that new M7 chip shows up in the iWatch.
They now send out a small pulse a few times a second, and then watch the decay on their own antenna.
A change in the decay rate means another resonant antenna is nearby and stealing its energy - so then they power up fully to check things out.
Apple always says stuff like that until they're ready to unveil what they've been working on.
Bigger screens, Hi-Def displays, etc. - all right out of the same playbook. You can't trust exactly what they say, because they have their own agenda.
Apple being apple trying to keep margins high.
The new colors kind of suck but great for high school girls.
But here in Canada, where I spent almost all my time, the only place I've ever had any significant coverage issues is when I was in the far north, and I've only been there once. It's essentially a non-issue for me.
(Hence my 64GB device with the majority of space used by music)
I like my phone. But I don't think I'll ever buy anything without at least 32 gigs of storage, or a place to plug more memory in.
My younger brother has filled up two 16GB iPod Touches (second gen and fourth gen) with music and videos.
My extremely non-technical father has filled up the 8GB SD card his phone came with, with just music. I'm sure if he could, he'd use more space but a €30 microSD card is more than he's consider spending on phone extras considering he paid €90 for the phone on prepay.
People use more storage than you think. If it was not a big deal, why would phone companies use it as the sole upsell towards their more expensive phones?
* It takes 20 seconds of buffering just to start. * Assuming it's 360p, it runs for about a minute or two, then starts to buffer again. If it's higher, it lasts even less. * The video starts to buffer again. This takes another 20 seconds. * This repeats until the end of the video. * My phone company charges me €2 for data used in excess of my daily allowance.
My home internet connection is mostly the same experience, except I can watch a 480p video, and I don't get charged €2 for it.
A lot of places that I might be don't even get EDGE coverage, never mind 3G or anything better. For 25 of the 30 minutes of my most common bus trip, I don't have 3G coverage.
Here's what happens when I watch a video of any quality on my microSD card.
* I open the video in my video player. * The video plays, without interruption, until the end.
I'll be sticking with local storage for a while yet.
The 5c for $200 seems better than the 5s with 16GB. At least to me, the extra storage makes the 5C more appealing.
Every time I come back into the USA after coming back from a trip outside the country, I have to scan multiple of my prints.
I'm sure someone did it before (I seem to recall IE5 letting you change the interface to match the early iMac colours) but your comment (and a quick glance at the linked image) is misleading as it stands.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac#Inter...
Release the kraken.
How about a series of emails joking & griping about your wife's habits to your best friend? Completely harmless but not exactly the kind of thing that you'd want them reading.
Our digital selves trail back in time farther and farther these days; would you want your wife reading emails between you and an ex from before you met her?
I just point it out because I find it's funny.
If you're married and your SO can't just ask you for your PIN code - and you will, without even thinking about it, give it to them - you might want to take some time to think hard about your relationship.
We don't feel any particular need to check up on each others' communications, though. It's just a practical matter for us.
"Your dad sent a text, want me to read it to you while you're washing dishes? I know your mom's in the hospital."
"Mind if I use your phone to call our friends and tell them we're running late? I left mine at home and you're driving."
"Is it OK if I use your phone to put on some music? It's already paired with the reciever."
And so on. Checking a partner's phone doesn't have to include spying. Sometimes it's just the most convenient thing to do.
Our digital selves trail back in time farther and farther these days; would you want your wife reading emails between you and an ex from before you met her?
My gf has a habit of using the same PIN for everything. Now I can choose the PIN and set up her finger as one of the unlock mechanisms.
What does that even mean? I'm getting tired of claims like these. They're obviously non-sensical and groundless and they should be publicly shamed for it. But that'll never happen I guess.
the 40x CPU and 56x GPU numbers are referencing the 5S against the original iPhone (as a 'look how far we've come' retrospective)
There will be open source, open standard, secure authentication and identity systems chained together, kind of like an evolution of Persona or OpenID, and when you view a website on your friend's phone, it will recognize you immediately.
Why would they take such a risk?
I don't recall the exact wording of that law, IMHO it already covers such argument, but if not, it just needs a single sentence amendment. Government certainly can grant immunity against pretty much any civil claims.
They also can pass a law stating "Any and all contracts between Apple and 'gareim' shall be considered null and void.", though they probably won't do that - but adding an exception to the laws regulating advertising truthfulness is trivial. In fact, they could simply revoke those laws and then noone could bring any class actions for 'being sold a product on a lie'; class actions as such were only made possible by specific regulations and congress could eliminate the whole concept of class action suits if they wished to.
I don't recall reading NSA can now force companies to include finger sensors, and then force them to collect data they wouldn't be collecting otherwise.
That NSA can't force a company to include fingerprint sensors in their new phone?
Delete your fb, g+ and twitter accounts. There will be a social price to pay, but it's still not too great for a significant amount of people. For many, though, even that is costly.
Get rid of your Nokia, Apple or Android phones. Suddenly, harsh. Still possible, because there's some alternatives, but if you want to avoid US and Chinese companies (srsly, Chinese), your options are limited and not well-known.
And, you've done both. Um, most SSL implementations. Your bank account. You'd have to go cash only.
Seriously, there isn't much we can do in any immediate way. Just vote the right way, and talk to people. Less glorious than pointlessly sacrificing yourself, sure, but actually works.
edit for clarity
1)They said the detection gets better every time you use it. So my guess would be that multiple versions of the raw fingerprint data are stored inside the A7 chip. (That information never leaves the chip.)
2) You can use your fingerprint to authenticate apps like iTunes, as well as third party apps. For this, yes I am sure they will use some hash that cannot rebuild the fingerprint.
I thought the password got hashed and sent out to Apple's servers to authenticate?
If so, wouldn't a new fingerprint based password have to do the same thing?
According to the press release, "fingerprint information [...] is never stored on Apple servers or backed up to iCloud." But nowhere do they claim it doesn't ever leave the phone. It looks like this leaves Apple the option to upload the data to "trusted partners".
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2013/09/10Apple-Announces-iP...
If you have doubts about the scanner, then don't buy an iPhone 5S. There's nothing much more that can be done besides what's being done already. And for others who know and don't care, that's their decision.
There, features people care about.
Just a thought.
edit: Thinking about it, an iPhone 5C 8GB seems like the most likely candidate.
They've just replaced the 5 with 5c.
Also, just 33 votes on HN atm - made me realize that probasbly people are already using HN votes as input for their stock trading aslgorithms :-)
(That is to say, my use case is such that I want a small device, and that is more important to me than the ability to have a big screen - it'd be useless to me because I would not want to take it with me, destroying the 'mobile' in mobile phone.)
How could they know that?
A swipe sensor would have needed less space to boot.
I do love the fingerprint sensor and the intelligent auto-focusing features, though.
Blurry smartphone pictures are so ubiquitous these days.
I'm still betting it will show up in the iWatch, though.
There is just so much NFC-enabled Point-Of-Sale hardware already out there.
If Apple had thrown their weight behind NFC, that would have closed the deal.
I give them one more year (one iWatch release, and the iPhone 6 release) and then I agree, NFC will be a dead end.
Maybe they're working on payment stuff, maybe they're not.. but since it's obviously not ready I'm not the least bit surprised that we don't see NFC on Apple devices.
NFC readers are normal for many point of sale terminals now and I would love to not have to get out a credit card to pay for something.
One of the Lumia phones was supposed to be able to do this, but it didn't work in the US or something because it required some weird encrypted SIM card.
They introduced emoji almost only for the japanese market at first, they could have done the same for NFC as well, that would have been great.
It's an underrated technology for pairing devices. Real investments and more hardware would follow if Apple jumped in the pool with everyone else.
PS: No need to lecture me on basic finance, unless you've also been on the management team of a $16bn equity fund.
They claim it is stored on the A7 chip itself. Is that secure enough for us to believe that the NSA can't get access to it?
I am genuinely asking about the security implications.
If all the fingerprints were on iCloud, then all the Feds have to do is force Apple to give them access to their servers.
Having the fingerprint pushed down to each individual device, that seems to be more secure.
But am I just being naive or is that truly more secure?
And once it's inside, the NSA is free to install a code snippet that uploads your fingerprint directly to their server.
http://www.accessibleresources.com/2013/09/10/apple-announce...
We just moved to an new office in august, and been waiting with buying displays hoping they'll be updated to the new formfactor of iMacs. too bad ... ;( really disappointed.
Apparently, iOS 4 did add ICC support in CoreGraphics for apps to use [2] but it seems to me that Apple’s apps don’t take advantage of it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorsync
[2] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/releasenotes/General...
It made a huge difference on my computer monitors.
I want a system wide color profile support, like what we have in Windows or OSX... Not a per app support.
It would be nice if images with embedded profiles rendered correctly to the screen, e.g. with Safari on iPhone, using a canned profile that assumes that Apple has correctly profiled the mean iPhone display and that the variance between particular screens isn't too high. From what I can tell the iPhone doesn't do color management at all and the display resembles sRGB enough to call it good enough for a consumer device.
On the other hand I'd assume that the number of people who would want to use an external colorimeter and make a profile for their particular iPhone was not a market big enough for anyone (let alone Apple) to bother with, and since the iPhone has no mechanism to actually use that profile, it's pointless except for the purpose of converting images to iPhone in a desktop app, but in that case why would you care about your particular iPhone?
Error 1: article says the A7 is a "40x CPU performance bump". Wrong; it's 40x over the original iPhone, not over the A6.
Error 2: article says graphics are "56x faster". Same error.
Error 3: article claims the M7 is a motion sensor; it's not. It's a chip which handles data from the various sensors.
Error 4: next paragraph after the first M7 paragraph finally gets it right. Bad editing.
Error 5: Apple didn't skirt the megapixel count for the new sensor as claimed. The new sensor has the same MP count, as was stated.
Error 6: article mentions a "10-shot burst mode". Wrong again. The burst mode is 10 frames per second, but is not limited to any specific number of frames.
Just an incredibly bad job, here.
This is another classic case of being first (or at least one of the first) out the gate is more important than the rest of the race. They just want to get the traffic up to speed for ad-views before making sure the story is correct.
Edit: I am wrong, ignore this.
1) NSA flaming
2) 'lol no 5 inch / 1080p screen' style comments.
3) filled with disappointment that the iphone isnt a whole world more than what has been leaked.
How useful it would be to find a forum where actual on-topic discussion was visible and it was the crap that got filtered out, instead of the other way around.
The best feature released is downloading new content in the background. That's wonderful, but not enough. iOS background processes are still crippled, so I can only have an open socket in the background if it's part of a VoIP app. And for some reason the VoIP flag also signals that I want the app to run on startup?
I don't see why we should care about iPhones or iOS anymore. The latest upgrade is a fingerprint scanner and it's faster. Ok. The operating system finally drops the idiotic skeuomorphism and lets people share photos with Apple's version of NFC. Includes a 2D game engine. Great. Oh beacons? Wonderful, now we can opt-in to targeted localized advertisements.
I'm more interested in getting a device that doesn't force its requirements inbetween me and my workflow. That means widgets, sideloading, intents, and applications that can edit the same files. Removing the animations or reducing their duration (jailbreak an iPhone, install the Accelerate package, and tell me that isn't a much better experience).
On iOS you still can't even delete their default apps if you don't want them. I thought Apple was supposed to be about style? My old iPod Touch still has a folder full of apps I don't want. And an empty Newsstand.
Apple is for children and the computer illiterate. The only benefit of iOS over Android is that you don't need to be totally vigilant over what you install. But the cost is living in a walled garden under the watchful eye of your nanny. I'm disappointed in iOS and the iPhone. They are becoming increasingly irrelevant. They're going to find that the preferred style changes over time, whereas Android is going to have a technical fan base for quite a while even after the "massive screens" fad dies down.