Lockdown Mode for Android

With Android Pie, Google finally added a lockdown mode similar to iOS’s panic mode which allows a user to quickly set a phone so it can only be unlocked with a password or PIN. This allows a user to use facial recognition or fingerprints for most unlock situations, while being able to switch to password only when, say, being pulled over by police.

The toggle to enable lockdown mode is in the Security & Locations options under the Lock Screen Preferences. Since Android manufacturers tend to customize these settings, I just did a search for “lockdown mode” to get to the correct setting.

Once enabled, users simply need to hold down the power button which will display a number of options including one for “Lockdown mode.” Selecting that option will place the phone in lockdown mode and require the password to access the phone.

Once the phone is unlocked with a password, it will revert to whatever normal methods of unlocking the phone are set. This is only intended to lockdown the phone temporarily not change the unlock behavior permanently.

This capability presents a nice security tradeoff. I can make my phone relatively easy for me to unlock during most situations, while still having the ability to quickly force my phone into a more restricted mode that would be harder to access.

Getting Free KFC Like A Boss

Epic.

A 27-year-old student was arrested for eating at KFC for free for a year in South Africa. He used to tell the employees that he was sent from the KFC headquarters for quality check.

The man whose name has not been disclosed was a student of the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. He ate for free every day for a year from different KFC outlets by repeating the same story every time.

Every single time he used to walk into a KFC and with a lot of confidence and tell the employees that he was sent from the KFC headquarters for quality assurance of the food served in the restaurant.

Seagate Is Shipping 16TB Hard Drives

According to Anandtech,

Continuing the march of progress in the HDD industry, Seagate has revealed that they have started shipping their 16 TB PMR hard drives. In a quarterly earnings call last week, the company reported that the drives have been shipping since late March, with current shipments coming ahead of high volume production of the drives. Seagate in turn expects to kick off mass production in the second half of 2019, and by Q2 2020 the new 16 TB drives will be its highest revenue SKU. What is particularly noteworthy here, besides the capacity of course, is that these drives do not use next-generation heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. Instead, they’re based around conventional magentic recoding (which is a new way to call perpendicular magnetic recording, PMR), which is being boosted by two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR).

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For a number of years Seagate has implied that HAMR will be first used for 16 TB drives, so the unexpected shift to CMR + TDMR raises several question about the the state of the market and the technology. Is the delay client-driven, with the company’s clients wanting to stick to proven technologies for another round? Or, since HAMR HDDs use different components (new media, new heads, etc.), do the manufacturing costs of HAMR hard drives present a hurdle to manufacturing and/or client adoption? Or is the change in plans due to something else entirely?