9m iPhone 5s/c sold in three days, fingerprint security hacked

Nine million units of Apple’s new iPhone models, the 5s and 5c, were sold during the first three days of their availability, Apple has announced. Apple said the total was a record for a new iPhone and that the demand had meant its initial supply of the flagship 5s had been exhausted. Online orders should be shipped “in the coming weeks,” the firm said.

Meanwhile the firm’s latest mobile OS, iOS 7, is now live on more than 200 million devices, the firm said.

Such a performance in the first weekend of availability suggests that demand for the iPhone remains robust. The new model supports a far wider range of LTE frequencies than the first LTE-enabled version, so it may also reflect latent demand for an LTE iPhone from users on previously incompatible networks.

In a less positive development for Apple, German security and hacking organisation the Chaos Computer Club announced that it had successfully bypassed the firm’s fingerprint recognition solution, one of the headline capabilities of the 5s. The CCC said it had achieved the hack using readily available items.

“We hope that this finally puts to rest the illusions people have about fingerprint biometrics. It is plain stupid to use something that you can´t change and that you leave everywhere every day as a security token”, said Frank Rieger, a spokesperson for the CCC. “The public should no longer be fooled by the biometrics industry with false security claims. Biometrics is fundamentally a technology designed for oppression and control, not for securing everyday device access.”

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