Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/15/sleeper-cells.html
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Since I started wearing this I’ve had no problems.
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I guess it’s a step up over other work arounds…
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But if I’m dead; will I really care?
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What is apple’s Face ID countermeasure when you’re wide awake and handcuffed to a table in an “interview” room?
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But you are not saying that right now your iPhone can discriminate when you are under duress and when you are not?
But say they work this out, and your iPhone “adds ‘fear’ to the range of emotions” it can detect. So I’m walking down the street and witness a horrific accident. I take out my phone to call emergency services and my phone will not open for me. Because it assumes I am handcuffed to a table?
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Here, as a case in point, are two excerpts from the media; the first, quoted in that epitome of the nauseating, Time, is – so help me – what Time calls “the ultimate dream in telephone service” as described by Harold S. Osborne, former chief engineer of AT&T:
“Whenever a baby is born anywhere in the world, he is given at birth a telephone number for life. As soon as he can talk, he is given a watch-like device with ten little buttons on one side and a screen on the other. When he wishes to talk with anyone in the world, he will pull out the device and punch on the keys the number. Then, turning the device over, he will hear the voice of his friend and see his face on the screen, in color and in three dimensions. If he does not see him and hear him, he will know that his friend is dead.”
I don’t know; I really don’t find this funny. It is really sad. It is heartbreaking. Anyhow; it is not going to happen. The kids have already seen to that. “Phone freaks,” they are called, these particular kids. This is what the L.A. Times says, in an article dated earlier this year:
"They (the phone freaks) all arrived carrying customized MF’ers – multi- frequency tone signals – the phone freak term for a blue box. The homemade MF’ers varied in size and design. One was a sophisticated pocket transistor built by a PhD in engineering, another the size of a cigar box with an actual coupler attaching to the phone receiver. So far, these phone freaks had devised 22 ways to make a free call without using credit cards. In case of a slipup, the phone freaks also know how to detect ‘supervision,’ phone company jargon for a nearly inaudible tone which comes on the line before anyone answers to register calling charges. As soon as phone freaks detect the dreaded ‘supervision,’ they hang up fast.
“Captain Crunch was still in the phone booth pulling the red switches on his fancy computerized box. He got his name from the whistle found in the Cap’n Crunch breakfast cereal box. Crunch discovered that the whistle has a frequency of 2600 cycles per second, the exact frequency the telephone company uses to indicate that a line is idle, and of course, the first frequency phone freaks learn how to whistle to get ‘disconnect,’ which allows them to pass from one circuit to another. Crunch, intent, hunched over his box to read a list of country code numbers. He impersonated to the overseas operator, and called Italy. In less than a minute he reached a professor of classical Greek writings at the University of Florence.”
This is how the future has actually come out. None of us science fiction writers foresaw phone freaks. Fortunately, neither did the phone company, which otherwise would have taken over by now. But this is the difference between dire myth and warm, merry reality. And it is the kids, unique, wonderful, unhampered by scruples in any traditional sense, that have made the difference.
Philip K Dick 'The Android and the Human
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It’s holding the volume up and power button for a few seconds. That disables face recognition until you enter your PIN.
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Man, the sunglasses on Bernie were way ahead of their time.
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No. Nor am I suggesting that that would be in any way a good idea, for the reason you mention and many others. 
FYI you can make an emergency call without authenticating. The “you didn’t unlock it” screen has a fairly large button labeled “emergency” which gives you the ability to dial 911 (actually it recognizes the emergency number form most countries, so if you are from the UK and in the USA and pick up someone else’s phone and don’t know that 911 is the emergency number here 999 gets mapped into 911). That screen also has whatever “medical ID” notes the owner decided to store.
Or you can use the “much more intuitive” interface of rapidly clicking the power button until it either makes an alarming noise and tells you if you don’t cancel it 911 will be called in 5…4…3…; or you get a screen with 3 options, the most prominent one being the emergency call. I’m not sure if the difference is a hardware or iOS version number thing. (and yeah, “much more intuitive” is sarcastic)
You can also generally record video/still frames without unlocking an iPhone, and access the voice assistant (although that one may not recognize a stressed voice as yours).
hmmm, couldn’t you just hold the glasses over the sleeping persons face, or wouldn’t that work?
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