My thanks to The Theme Foundry for sponsoring the Very Nice Web Site RSS feed this week.

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Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

Myke Hurley was kind enough to have me on CMD+Space this week, where we chat about my days making up Apple rumors.

And here I am writing about technology like a sucker.

Dustin Kirkland:

I could see some value, perhaps, in a tablet that I share with my wife, where each of us have our own accounts, with independent configurations, apps, and settings.  We could each conveniently identify ourselves by our fingerprint.  But biometrics cannot, and absolutely must not, be used to authenticate an identity.  For authentication, you need a password or passphrase.  Something that can be independently chosen, changed, and rotated.

From a security perspective, he’s absolutely right. If I were designing a corporate security policy, I would not allow TouchID to be used to secure sensitive information (which is why I’ve been kind of surprised to read how TouchID is supposedly a boon for the iPhone in the enterprise).

From a consumer perspective, however, this genie is already out of the bottle. Fortunately, as loose as it is, it’s more secure than what was being used before.

I think his perspective on how private your fingerprints are (“not private at all”) is interesting. Speaking personally, having once had a security clearance and having adopted a child, the government’s already got more copies of my fingerprints than they know what to do with.

AndroidBeat’s Stefan Constantinescu on the “neat software trick” the Galaxy Note uses when you want to use your phone one-handed:

When you enable a buried option in the one-hand operating menu, you can enable a “tiny screen” mode with a simple swipe gesture. Like Alice in Wonderland, what you see on your Note 3′s display suddenly becomes smaller and you’re effectively using Android as if it were a windowed application on your desktop computer.

Phabletous!

(Via Matthew Panzarino and Sebastiaan de With)

On The Talk Show this week I mentioned the black MacBook having been more expensive than its white counterpart and a few people took to Twitter to complain that the black version had better specs. My point was that the black model was more expensive than a similarly configured white model, which you could only get as a Build-To-Order (BTO).

When introduced, the stock high-end white MacBook had 1 GB of RAM, a 120 GB hard drive and a 2.2 GHz processor and it sold for $1299. The stock black model had the same configuration except for the hard drive which was 160 GB and it sold for $1499. I was able to find comments that indicate that if you did a BTO on the high-end white MacBook to get the 160 GB drive, the black MacBook was still $125 more.

That confused me because as I said on The Talk Show I thought the difference was $50. Then I remembered that I bought the second generation black MacBook. The high-end white MacBook and the black MacBook of that release both came with 2 GB of RAM and a 2.4 GHz processor. The black model had a 250 GB hard drive versus a 160 GB drive in the white high-end model. The price points for each were the same as the previous generation. I can’t find evidence of this, but I believe that when you did a BTO on the white high-end model to add the 250 GB drive, it was still $50 cheaper than the black MacBook.

Update: Looks like I was wrong, the premium on the second generation was $100. (Thanks to Josh Stoner.)

ZDNet’s Zack Whittaker:

Windows 7 generated more growth in share in the past month than Windows 8, amid warnings on continued poor PC sales and a weak “back to school” season during the third quarter.

I suspect Windows 8.1 could turn that around, but… yeeeeeesh. Meanwhile, most iOS users are on iOS 7 now.