[jyl]

What do you have on your iPad that isn't on your Mac or PC? How did you get it there?

No way 7.1 will bring back the former faux-realistic themes with the fake wood, pretend leather, 3D buttons.

As for the fingerprint crack, I don't see that it is really a hack. It is a fingerprint reader; if someone has your fingerprint, they can feed it to the reader. Just like if someone had your password, they could type it in.

That is the limitation of biometrics. You can make the protections more and more elaborate - require all ten fingers, require a retinal image, etc. Just like you could require a 30 character random password that changes daily.

The degree of inconvenience should be matched to the importance of the device and threat. If you are keeping truly secret stuff on your phone, better encrypt it, use both fingerprint and password, and then don't keep it on your phone anyway. But we're simply talking about an iPhone with my contacts, calendar and emails. If someone wants to follow me around, dust surfaces for my prints, find a clean and complete one that is of the correct finger, transfer it to a 3D mold, create a facsimile finger pad, steal my phone - I think maybe they have me mistaken for someone really important . . .

If they are that into me, they could simply break into my house and go through my papers and stuff. That would be a lot more fruitful.