Look at me, I'm the adblocker now

from here and here (source tweet)

If you're technical enough you might be able to save your expensive smart TV from the clutches of advertisers, but I tend to think it will be easier for most people to just download their TV shows from the Internet, and then what's the point of paying for a fancy smart TV? Viewers are going to take whatever path gives them the better user experience, and filling the top half of a navigation screen with ads is not a good user experience.

Unfortunately, that solution only works for smart TVs. It's not going to save you from ads on smart fridges or other smart devices. The Internet of Shit is rapidly becoming the Internet of Shitty Ad Players.

Biometrics, how do they work?

from here and here (image source)

Is this a real mistake that people make? I don't know, but I do know that people do make mistakes with biometrics. Try as we might to make idiot-proof systems, the universe just keeps making bigger and better idiots.

There must be less disfiguring ways to foil surveillance

from here and here

I'm a bit taken with the idea of burner phones, perhaps because I can't really get them here. Prepaid phones are way too expensive to "burn" (use for a short time and then throw away as a means of protecting yourself from surveillance) in Canada.

Of course, with the Samsung approach to burner phones, I suppose you probably get your money back and potentially a new face while you're at it.

At least it still stops butt-dialing

from here (image source)

Being able to unlock a phone with a finger instead of a fingerprint is certainly more convenient, but sometimes convenience isn't worth the cost.

Graham Cluley has an interesting theory about how this problem works (that enrolling with the screen protector on means you enroll a fingerprint without ridge details), but doesn't see how a software update can fix it - and in the strictest sense he's right that a software update isn't going to make the ridge details magically appear, but the software update would be able to detect the absence of those ridge details. In essence it could detect when poor biometric data has been used for enrollment and protect users from the consequences of this failure by alerting them to it and/or refusing to use poor quality biometric data.

Hopefully they can quarantine awful shows while they're at it

from here

Virus-scanning all the things is the price of "Smart" technology. All general purpose computers support viruses, and the people making smart devices are putting general purpose computers in them because it's cheaper to put a general purpose computer in a special purpose box than it is to create a special purpose computer. Samsung was just trying to accept the reality of the situation when they told people to scan their sets.