I salvaged my shattered iPhone with a ‘Band-Aid’ screen cover

After a BBQ last Sunday (there may have been alcohol), I dropped my phone. Multiple times. And I wasn’t lucky. Although my iPhone 6 Plus has suffered tiny hairline cracks in two of the corners, this time the drops were critical hits resulting in a spiderweb of substantial cracks, the majority of them around the bottom right corner — you know, where your thumb always is. Typing on it meant risking a tiny shard or two cutting into my thumb, and even when I avoided that, those cracks still irritated my fingertips. Touch functions were also impaired. Google Maps was not cooperating. While the brunt of the damage was in the lower corner, the drop had also crippled my front-facing camera. Perhaps the camera leaves the screen structurally weaker there, or was this the universe’s way of saying I’d taken one too many self-portraits?

And yet the next day was Monday, a work day. The Apple Store was fully booked. I needed a miracle. Or at least a cheap short-term solution. I turned to Pitamo’s smartphone bansouko (“Band-Aid”), a cut-it-yourself three-layer screen for broken smartphones. It promises to contain any more shards of doom, stop the cracks from getting worse, and keep your phone useable — all for under 10 bucks. What could go wrong?

I heard about the smartphone “band-aid” from my colleagues at Engadget Japan. None of them had tried it out — possibly because they were sober enough to not drop their (caseless) iPhone multiple times. I went to one of Tokyo’s many giant electronics stores to make a purchase.

I picked it up and grimaced. “Cut to size,” it said at the bottom of the packaging. I was going to be dependent on my cutting and tracing skills for this to work even remotely well. There’s a laborious nine-minute, Japanese-language tutorial on how to apply it, but the pictures included with the cover explain everything, even if you have no kanji-reading skills. You trace the outline of your phone (and because you cut it yourself, you can use it on any smartphone model). Then you cut out your phone-shaped sticker. Carefully. The guide then suggests you use a toothbrush to gently remove any excess phone screen shards. Except my thumb had done that for me already.

Then there’s the heady (actually low-stakes) tension of attaching your screen cover: no bubbles, get the sides aligned just right, and make sure nothing gets trapped underneath. In case you’ve never used one before, welcome to the wonderful world of smartphone screen covers. These little sheets of curvy plastic have the inexplicable superpower to trap air, hair and dust no matter how hard you try not to. (The Apple Store offers this service for free for a reason: You’ll screw it up on your own.)

The base layer of this particular cover is made of a softer material that keeps what’s left of your screen in place and intact. It also has a bit of flexibility to it and feels like it’s tightly bound to my phone. The topmost layer has a low-reflective satiny finish which the maker says should resist fingerprints more easily — though that’s really the least of my problems.

When it finally went on, it felt good. Peeling a “fresh” cover off an out-of-box smartphone is the primary reason most tech writers get out of the bed in the morning. This may be the reverse of that, but it feels just as satisfying. However, the struggle wasn’t over yet. I then had to grab a craft knife and cut away and areas that needed access to the outer elements: the home button, speaker and front-facing camera. The scrape of a craft knife on my iPhone made me queasy — especially on the home button — but I pushed through. Still, the glass-based damage to the front camera (coupled with multiple layers of plastic) means I’m going to have to learn how to take selfies with the iPhone’s main camera.

Is my screen perfect again? God, no. Look at it! But the smartphone cover is helping. I can safely run my fingertips over the screen; it’s at least useable again. My iPhone will live another day to play games, get me places on Maps, and help me rant on Facebook. Fortunately, I had paid extra for Apple Care, and so I’ll be taking my phone in later next week to get it replaced. This “Band-Aid” cover is very much a short-term solution, but by that criteria, it works.

One of Apple’s earliest Siri engineers reportedly leaves for GE

Apple hasn’t had a great time holding on to the original Siri team, and we don’t just mean the founders — there are precious few of those core members left. And today, we’re learning that one of those last remaining pioneers may have walked out the door. The Information’s sources claim that Darren Haas, a Siri co-founder and Apple’s head of compute-focused cloud engineering, has left the company to join GE a few weeks after one of his fellow Siri alumni, Steve D’Aurora, reportedly did the same. The two are believed to be working on a similar cloud platform at their new employer.

There’s no official confirmation yet (both employees still list themselves as Apple employees on LinkedIn), so take this with a grain of salt. We’ve reached out to Apple to confirm the move. If true, though, it’s not exactly heartening news for the team at 1 Infinite Loop. While this is unlikely to be a fatal blow when many people are still working on Siri, it’s a symbolic loss for a company that was one of the first to embrace intelligent voice commands in the mobile world.

Source: The Information

Apple Pay finally becomes useful in Canada

Apple Pay technically launched in Canada back in November, but it might as well have been non-existent — you could only use a directly-issued American Express card, which isn’t all that common in the country. At last, though, things are opening up. Apple has announced that its tap-to-pay service is now available through a much, much wider range of providers. Right now, you can use it through heavyweights CIBC and RBC (both credit and debit cards) as well as smaller providers ATB (initially MasterCard-only) and Canadian Tire (MasterCard). The other big three (BMO, Scotiabank and TD) aren’t ready yet, but they’ve all committed to letting you pay with your iPhone or Apple Watch in the months ahead.

In some ways, mobile payments may have an easier time catching on in Canada than they do south of the border. The country has had tap-to-pay cards (and the terminals to match) for longer than the US — Apple Pay may be more likely to work at a store near you. There’s no mention of corresponding Canadian support for Android Pay, but it’s easy to see that coming when point-of-sale systems that support Apple Pay tend to support Google’s alternative.

Via: Globe and Mail, iMore

Source: Canada Newswire (1), (2), (3), (4)

How Armenian gangsters blew up the fingerprint-password debate

Paytsar Bkhchadzhyan is a woman with a colorful past and a bummer of a present.

She arrived this week in news stories with a string of criminal convictions, and gained notoriety for pleading “no contest” to felony identity theft early this year. Her iPhone was seized from her boyfriend’s house, one Sevak Mesrobian, who is a member of Los Angeles based gang Armenian Power.

Her fingerprint then began its long journey to giving civil liberties fetishists a new storyboard for their “bad touch” role-play scenes.

“Bad Touch” ID

Much ado has been made over a Los Angeles judge’s February decision to grant a search warrant allowing authorities to take Bkhchadzhyan’s fingerprint and use it to unlock her iPhone. Surfacing in the news this past week with drama and fanfare, it’s an unprecedented revelation that has divided legal experts, and given our collective Big Brother paranoia and infosec hysteria a shot in the arm that we really didn’t need.

The decision came in record time, probably thanks to Touch ID’s own timeout function giving the authorities a helpful spike of urgency to their request. Within 45 minutes of Bkhchadzhyan’s arrest for identity theft last February, the warrant to search her phone was granted, and her fingerprint was taken and used to bypass the biometric password for her iPhone’s Touch ID.

Things would have been different had she been using a regular password or passcode, which is protected by the 5th Amendment’s safeguards for self-incrimination.

The federal judge weighing in on the search warrant, U.S. Magistrate Judge Alicia Rosenberg, didn’t consider a fingerprint the same as a password. Rosenberg’s decision was preceded by a Virginia Circuit Court judge in October 2014, where it was a ruled that giving biometric data is not the same as divulging knowledge.

Some argue that what happened in LA violates the woman’s 5th amendment rights. But the issue is far from being decided. In the meantime, some authorities are quick to exploit the law’s failure to keep pace with technological advances like Touch ID and the public’s perception of what a password really is.

The jury is out

As we learned in the San Bernadino iPhone case, phones are just about the most valuable real estate law enforcement can get its hands on. We also learned that the whole situation of laws and phones and threats and passwords is messy and baffling.

But think about it this way: Our laws around tech, privacy, and the needs/wants of authorities are a bit like an old building. One that has had every inch of usable space utilized, with no overall plan for expansion. But in the era of cyber, it must remodel. The only thing really guiding it is the structural bits that can’t be moved (like the 5th Amendment). To expedite growth into the next room, cops are just punching through walls. And judges, like the tech companies whose inventions are facilitating this explosive growth, are really not interested in signing off on anyone’s expansion plans.

Though, I think it’s safe to assume that Apple didn’t consider that its innovation was going to give law enforcement a pass to jump the search and seizure queue.

In this case, it all ended up boiling down to the relative value of the password protections afforded ordinary citizens versus the worth of a gangster’s girlfriend. And that’s where things start to get really interesting.

It turns out that Paytsar Bkhchadzhyan is a link worth clicking on.

If only she’d used a PIN code

If you think there’s irony in a woman getting sent up the river for identity theft ending up center stage in the biggest fight over passwords and privacy ever, just wait — there’s more. Authorities were actually after the treasure trove of information in Bkhchadzhyan’s phone, which most likely included her boyfriend’s activities in a gang called Armenian Power.

As described in an elegant piece by Halyley Fox for LA Weekly, Armenian Power members run with names like Thick Neck, Guilty, Stomper, Gunner, Lucky, Menace and Casper (and at least one lady gangster named Sugar). They earn these names from shootouts involving AK-47s on the streets of LA, as well as their occupations. Their business practices include kidnappings and protection rackets, but primarily involve exploiting security holes to perform identity theft, bank fraud, and card skimming through hardware hacking.

To that effect, the racket that helped land an Armenian Power leader in prison in 2014 was what the FBI called, “a sophisticated debit card skimming operation” involving “the installation and use of skimmers to steal thousands of customers’ debit card numbers and PIN codes.” Gangsters went into stores and swapped out point of sale keypads while checkout clerks were distracted, then returned to swap them again a week later, loaded with customers’ credit and debit card data.

Bkhchadzhyan’s boyfriend is currently in prison. But since news reports link the iPhone fingerprint warrant with an ongoing investigation, he may not be the droid they’re looking for. What comes to mind here is the Armenian Power’s well-documented willingness to fight for Syria’s President Bashar Al-Assad — self-described “gangbanging for Syria” and for their homies back in SoCal. Bringing that war home would be very bad, indeed.

At any rate these are the kind of guys, who, unlike the genteel security team members at Apple, would be more inclined to part your hair for you about eight inches too low than debate theories about password security use cases.

Now that American judges are treating Armenian gangsters like country mice in the big city, some of the more extreme hypotheticals about cops exploiting Touch ID have come home to roost.

And in light of the all implications here, paranoid jokes about fingerprint passwords posing a serious risk to outlying body parts under extenuating circumstances don’t seem so far fetched after all.

Images: Petrovich9/Getty (Lead); Bryan Thomas/Getty Images (No entry); Magdalena Mayo/PA Wire (ATM)

Cops hacked the iPhone owned by ‘Shield’ actor’s murdered wife

It might not have gotten the same amount of press as the San Bernardino case, but authorities also hacked into the iPhone of Michael Jace’s wife with the help of an outside party. According to the court documents obtained by LA Times, the Los Angeles Police District has been trying to get into April Jace’s iPhone 5s since 2015. Michael Jace (Julien Lowe​ from The Shield) is accused of killing April, and investigators believe they argued via text before she was murdered.

April’s phone had a passcode lock, and as you probably know by now, a set number of incorrect attempts will wipe an iPhone clean. An LA judge apparently ordered an Apple technician to help cops figure out a way to crack the device open sometime in 2015. That didn’t seem to work, and for quite some time, the phone wouldn’t even switch on.

Authorities aren’t going after Apple again for this case, though, because they found someone else who could hack into the device, just like the San Bernardino investigators did. LA Times says the LAPD found a “forensic cellphone expert” on March 18th who managed to override the lock screen. The court documents didn’t mention whether the expert also exploited a flaw in the phone and its unidentified platform. If he did and authorities also paid for his services, they might keep that particular flaw a secret from Apple, as well. Let’s just hope it’s a vulnerability the tech titan already fixed.

Source: Los Angeles Times