People use their phone today to: Manage 100k+,1M+ bank accounts, 2FA, secret messaging, sensitive media, medication, credentials and more.
This privacy feature makes a lot of sense.
Give it a couple of iterations and I think this will be the standard in business. It never made sense to me the trust that we put on no one looking at the contents of a display at the same time as us.
I'm much less concerned about a rando looking over my shoulder than I am the wealth of information the software hands out to its owners. It's like the difference between being seen in public by other pedestrians versus being captured by thousands of fixed surveillance cameras. Look all you want, so long as you're not wired into a database. Different threat models, I guess.
Or displaying your card out in the open, flashing it in front of everyone in the restaurant, grocery store, etc. With remote workers scanning through video feeds of people in public, it won't be long before they figure out the Meta glasses and similar cameras are high enough resolution to capture sensitive information, even if the actual user is 100% innocent and not doing anything wrong.
There was a gas station cashier that was using a memory palace trick to memorize card numbers and details, then stealing money later on. The bar was one of a little effort - not many people can do the memory palace thing, so it wasn't a threat vector. Now, everything is being recorded all the time, and you basically have to trust that everyone in the long list of people who have access to the video won't use it maliciously. We absolutely don't live in the type of society where that type of trust is warranted - there's gonna be lots of crime from unexpected places.
Throw in capturing logins, secure pins, touchscreen swipe sequences, etc, it won't even matter if you have all the best security features in the world.
Maybe implanted cryptographic key devices are the way to go, and you have to go into a perfectly secure SCIF with a faraday shielded closet in order to enter in your personal key, which can be used to provide tokens for other logins, verify actions, etc.
No one sane buys it for the list price. During launch there are always various discounts. I got S25U for 800 (without sending my old phone, just some coupons) with a 5eur/month contract last year at launch. If it really lasts 7 years it's not even that expensive.
Are these comments from 2018? 'Pro' models of iPhones have been $999 or more, not adjusted for inflation, at their lowest tier since 'Pro' has been a thing. I would expect the same of a Samsung 'Ultra' flagship?
significantly and dramatically are two different things. I was sceptic when buying it but have no problem using the display with privacy screen on, and dont see that much difference in brightness, even in direct sunlight, fwiw.
Bonus with it on you can stretch your battery life, only half the pixels actually active saves quite some battery, who knew!
This chip is faster in Geekbench than the Ryzen 3900X system I just upgraded. At the time, this was at the top-end for multithreading performance, with a 105W TDP. Now outclassed by a phone.
I just don't believe these geekbench numbers represent real world performance numbers. Like... Firefox compile times or late game civ 6 turn times or such things
Yeah, watch out for those nosy people looking over your shoulder at your phone, they're spying on you.
Please ignore all the data mining we're doing on your phone and please don't make us continually harass you first thing in the morning every morning to accept new terms and conditions. (For what it's worth, my Fold 7 harasses me to accept two sets of updates to terms and conditions first thing in the morning every morning)
It is needed for a bunch of things including all bixby stuff (which is admittedly starting to get useful) but those constant ToS updates can drive a man mad.
If any Samsung employees are reading this: whoever is pushing those ToS changes is probably a on Apples payroll ;)
I've had Samsung phones for years and never made a Samsung account. Every few weeks my phone suggests signing in or accepting new terms and conditions, and I refuse.
I know Google is mining my information, but I convince myself I'm "sticking it to the man" and taking at least one small stand...
There are a bunch of free or cheap alternative apps. Probably not as smoothly integrated, but years ago a change to Samsung's terms popped up in the health app; I saw it said they could do anything they want with my private health data, so I rejected the terms and stopped using it.
I was hoping, this being Wired, the article would have at least a surface-level technical description of how a software-defined privacy filter works, but alas.
How does it work? I'm guessing it's some kind of extension of the LCD polarizer, but all I can find online are explanations of the software like in the Wired article.
Its not a filter or layer, its the pixels themselves. Half are normal wide viewing angle pixels, the other half are pixels with a much more narrow viewing angle. When activated they just ... switch off the normal ones.
Basically half of the pixels are polarized, the others are not, when you activate the privacy mode, only the polarized pixels remain, so you can see the screen only looking straight.
There was a gas station cashier that was using a memory palace trick to memorize card numbers and details, then stealing money later on. The bar was one of a little effort - not many people can do the memory palace thing, so it wasn't a threat vector. Now, everything is being recorded all the time, and you basically have to trust that everyone in the long list of people who have access to the video won't use it maliciously. We absolutely don't live in the type of society where that type of trust is warranted - there's gonna be lots of crime from unexpected places.
Throw in capturing logins, secure pins, touchscreen swipe sequences, etc, it won't even matter if you have all the best security features in the world.
Maybe implanted cryptographic key devices are the way to go, and you have to go into a perfectly secure SCIF with a faraday shielded closet in order to enter in your personal key, which can be used to provide tokens for other logins, verify actions, etc.
The world is so ridiculously insecure.
Everything has become so incredibly expensive it just isn't fun to buy anything anymore.
My iPhone 11's FaceID broke a few weeks ago and despite that I think I will just stick with it with today's phone prices.
Right, thats the top specced 1TB version isnt it?
Amazon Germany has the basic 256g version for 1200€
AFAIK it significantly decreases the brightness. Jerry Rig Everything demonstrates this here - https://youtu.be/TRW4W7KkJXs?t=32
Bonus with it on you can stretch your battery life, only half the pixels actually active saves quite some battery, who knew!
It's good enough to use on the go I'd say but not beyond that.
Please ignore all the data mining we're doing on your phone and please don't make us continually harass you first thing in the morning every morning to accept new terms and conditions. (For what it's worth, my Fold 7 harasses me to accept two sets of updates to terms and conditions first thing in the morning every morning)
It is needed for a bunch of things including all bixby stuff (which is admittedly starting to get useful) but those constant ToS updates can drive a man mad.
If any Samsung employees are reading this: whoever is pushing those ToS changes is probably a on Apples payroll ;)
I know Google is mining my information, but I convince myself I'm "sticking it to the man" and taking at least one small stand...
How does it work? I'm guessing it's some kind of extension of the LCD polarizer, but all I can find online are explanations of the software like in the Wired article.
See for example:
https://gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s26_ultra-review-2939p3....
Or from the official Samsung presentation:
https://youtube.com/shorts/qnUVGPkeCCc
I got this explanation for the mkbh video: https://youtu.be/nfHRMqqO578?t=141&si=iEhVrdCuLN0fkasd which illustrates it very well (2m24 if timestamp doesn't work)