For most people, a fingerprint is a decent way to unlock their phone. It's fast and good enough for banks to trust it with payments. It can easily be disabled in an emergency situation (press the power button 5 times rapidly). Thieves aren't equipped to lift your print and unlock your device, and will just sell it on or break it down for parts.

For fingerprint unlock to be an issue you would have to consider a threat actor who can get your device before you have a chance to disable it, and then force you to unlock it before the biometrics time out and it defaults to needing your password (Pixel devices do that, not sure about others).

Well, with a police interaction, especially if they suspect you of something...you will be quickly separated from your phone and not be given a chance to click anything on it.

This is quite common....and even many cops have common sense to know this.

For what? Who I am is more relevant than what I know for the vast majority of transactions I have. Phones have functions to lock out biometrics, simply rebooting the phone would trigger a password requirement on every mobile I've used recently. I can't face unlock or thumb unlock a freshly started phone. On the iPhone you can simply press power + volume for 2 seconds and it will disable touch/face ID until the next time you enter your passcode.

Keep in mind, you likely will not HAVE the opportunity to click or hold anything on your phone with a cop interaction....quite often the first thing they'll do is separate you from your phone if they suspect you of something.

So, keep in mind, if you can't disable your biometrics....you're screwed.

Typing in a passcode/password is fast enough for any transactions I do with my phone...it isn't rocket surgery.

Maybe it wasn't such a great idea to literally connect every fucking thing to the internet with tissue paper systems that were known to be blatantly insecure?

No, no, you just go ahead and connect your refrigerator, toaster, coffee machine, and front door lock to the internet for "convenience", safe in the assumption that your government is doing exactly the same thing for critical infrastructure for "reasons" that have more to do with not losing allocated budgets than any actual value.

FOMO and idiots overwhelm what I would say was a reasonable prediction of how informed consumers would behave. The error here was in assuming consumers were faintly aware of their own self-interest and still retained some ability to defer gratification.

The fact is, despite people bitching constantly about not having enough money, too high of rent, and having miserable lives never able to make ends meet, they still cheerfully drop $20/mo to six different subscription services to watch movies on their $1200 phone and buy a $8 latte every morning with a credit card that is nearly maxed out.

Don't blame /.'s "unrelenting upmoderrated pessimism" for getting it wrong; in fact, I'd argue that /. posters weren't cynical enough. /. to recognize that common sense is truly dead and that the sheeple who formerly skated for free on Netflix would cheerfully and instantly buy their own account, guaranteeing that every other service is now going to implement draconian sharing-policies because it's clearly the route to big profits.

Why you should (if you own an iPhone) lock it with 5 clicks when doing things like going thru security lines or getting pulled over. Always. It requires the pin to enable touch or Face ID.

Why not just avoid using the biometric crap entirely?

I mean, I'm guessing the defendant, like many people would not have had a chance to click anything 5 times.

I've never used the biometrics, just a complex passcode/password.

We know that's protected the most to date.

to evade SEO spam. Google needs to do something about it or they'll be irrelevant in a few years tops.

The current streaming service apocalypse. A bunch of streaming services while they haven't gone under or so on profitable that they are licensing out content again and Netflix has been able to pick up a ton of shows and movies. That plus enforcing anti-password sharing policies against heavy users while being smart enough not to enforce them against light users has let them boost subscribers.

I had every intention of canceling it the moments they started blocking me from password sharing but they never did that. I'm sure that's because I'm a pretty light user but so is my kid that I share my password with. Meanwhile heavier users seem to be getting shut down pretty heavy-handedly..

Credentialism doesn't help. At one time, those with the right kind of mind tended to learn on a C64, Atari, or perhaps an Apple][ and then got a job. Before that, interested people took an aptitude test and got on the job training.

Now HR is all about the degree and some keywords.

if it ain't in your head they can use it.

Humanity created plenty of beautiful, wonderful things before governments got into the business of protecting the rights of authors and creators.

Creators will still create stuff, I have no doubt.

under Obama during his second term (when he had a little more political capital and could risk the inevitable lobbying backlash from the diploma mill industry). It all got rolled back under Trump. That's how/why the "University" of Phoenix closed for a while and then reopened.

I suspect in Biden's second term he'll do the same thing, but right now it would be too risky to spend that political capital, just like it was under Obama.

then often the loan terms are such that after X years of payments the loans are forgiven. This is how/why Biden's forgiven around $142 billion in loans. The terms of the loans were met and the loan officers were (illegally) still collecting. No punishment or requirement to pay back the ill gotten gains of course, let's not get too crazy...

But at these diploma mills the loans are super shady, so I doubt it applies unless the CFPB gets involved like they did here.

Lots of good reasons NOT to be on social media....

It puzzles me why so many participate in that voluntary hoovering up of personal information....

Israel has already lost this exchange. The goal of any terrorist attack is to provoke an overreaction which weakens the target and which strengthens the cohesion of the opposition while recruiting new soldiers for that opposition. Netanyahu's attempt to seize the land while there's a democrat in the White House did all that and so much more. And once he was knee deep in it it became very clear that his attacks were extremely unpopular with his own citizens and that as soon as they stop they're going to throw him out on his ass, which caused him to double and triple down.

If you're an American you saw the exact same thing play out after 9/11 with our invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. Word for word and beat for beat it was the exact same thing.

Trump's actual bankruptcies really did bankrupt him. We found out quite some time ago that the reason he isn't in the poor house (apart from the 1% taken care of their own) is because his creditors didn't want to take away all his money because they were hoping he would be able to use the billionaire branding to scam rubes out of some money and that they would get more of their money back over time.

I don't recall whether or not those particular creditors actually came out ahead or not it's tough to say since Trump has a habit of not paying people. But Trump was correct he really did go bankrupt completely it's just that when you're rich and famous you get away with it