Chapter 58 Fingerprint Recognition Technology? Lu Jingming, how dare you?!

The air in the gymnasium felt as if it had been sucked dry.

Hundreds of foreign reporters stared at each other, collectively struck dumb by the patent document The Pizza Hut of Donghai City had slammed onto the table.

Charles's mouth hung wide open, like a duck being strangled.

His foreign face turned beet red, and he couldn't catch his breath for a long time.

The Blonde Captain under the baseball cap swayed violently twice.

"It's hopeless; it's all over now."

He grabbed the sleeve of the young engineer next to him, his voice trembling uncontrollably.

Lu Jingming stood on the stage, his slender fingers toying with the xinghai pro.

He thoroughly enjoyed this suffocating silence.

"Everyone, silent already?"

Lu Jingming raised his eyelids, a playful smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

He raised the microphone, his voice languid yet every word stinging like a dagger.

"Someone just said that my device has no buttons and is useless in a pocket."

He paused, his gaze turning cold.

"Slide-to-unlock does indeed prevent accidental touches."

"But it cannot solve the security problem."

In 2007, losing your phone was like losing your underwear.

Anyone could just press a few keys, and all your text messages and photos would be exposed; at best, you could only set a cumbersome four-digit PIN.

Lu Jingming turned around, and the large screen behind him switched accordingly.

A high-definition render of the back of the xinghai pro slammed into everyone's faces.

In the center of the deep blue glass on the back of the device, there was a nearly imperceptible circular groove.

It was rimmed with a metal ring, exuding a cold, hard sense of technology.

"Passwords are anti-theft locks from the last century."

Lu Jingming turned back, waving his index finger in front of the camera.

"In this era, entering a password is too stupid and too slow."

Charles finally regained his composure, gritting his teeth to hold on.

"Mr. Lu, are you trying to say that you can lock a phone with just that circular pit on the back?"

He sneered, shouting loudly to bolster his courage.

"Is that an infrared ray or a sensor? Stop trying to fool people with sci-fi novel nonsense!"

"Whether it's sci-fi or not, open your eyes and see for yourself."

Lu Jingming flipped his wrist, facing the back towards the camera.

The large screen clearly showed that the phone was currently in a completely locked, black-screen state.

He didn't touch the screen.

He simply pressed his index finger gently into the circular groove on the back.

"Beep—"

A faint, crisp-sounding prompt tone rang out.

There was no waiting for a screen to slide, no delay for entering a password.

The screen instantly lit up, skipping the lock screen interface and cutting directly into the starry desktop filled with apps.

Unlocked in a second.

The entire process took less than 0.5 seconds.

The moment his finger touched it, the phone seemed to come alive, recognizing its owner.

The temperature in the venue seemed to spike to boiling point instantly.

"What the hell kind of black magic is this!"

A domestic tech reporter suddenly grabbed his own hair and roared at the top of his lungs.

"No password entered! No screen slid! How did it unlock!"

The foreign reporter section went completely insane.

Their cameras and lenses almost crushed the isolation barrier; the flashbulbs were as bright as the midday sun, blindingly painful.

Charles fell on his butt, legs flailing in the air.

He scrambled to get up, holding onto a folding chair, his eyes fanatical as if looking at God.

"Biometric features! That's biometric recognition!"

Charles loosened his tie and shouted at the top of his lungs in broken Chinese.

"Technology God! Lu Jingming is the Technology God!"

The foreign media, who had been shouting "plagiarism" just moments ago, collectively defected, their knees completely weak.

In the backstage control room.

Chu Xuan jumped a full meter high in excitement.

"Thud."

He bumped his head hard against the ceiling ventilation duct, grimacing in pain, but grinning like an idiot.

"Ms. Shen! Did you see that! Fingerprint unlocking! Mr. Lu's move is absolutely brilliant!"

Shen Qingqiu crossed her arms, her eyelashes trembling slightly behind her gold-rimmed glasses.

She suppressed the surging waves in her heart, but could not keep the corners of her mouth from curling up.

Introducing fingerprint recognition in this era was equivalent to forcibly raising the security barrier of mobile phones by ten years.

Downstairs, the Blonde Captain had completely collapsed into his chair.

He panted heavily, his dead-fish eyes fixed on the big screen.

"Slide-to-unlock was just the threshold... fingerprint recognition is the real trump card..."

He was on the verge of tears, pounding his thighs in despair.

"What do we have to fight back with? Steve's hard work has all become waste paper!"

Lu Jingming stood under the spotlight, tucking his phone back into his jeans pocket.

He looked down at the foreign reporters, whose eyes were filled with worship.

"xinghai pro comes with a built-in biometric fingerprint recognition module."

He snapped his fingers, his voice filled with an arrogant, condescending air.

"Your fingerprint is the most unique password in the world."

Lu Jingming's gaze swept across the direction of the baseball cap quartet.

"Colleagues across the ocean, if you are not convinced, you are welcome to copy at any time."

"I'm just afraid you won't even be able to copy it right."

Across the ocean, in Silicon Valley, USA.

On the top floor of the Apple headquarters, the circular panoramic conference room was pitch black.

Only the huge projection screen on the wall emitted a harsh, cold light.

On the screen was the live broadcast of the Xinghai launch event.

Lu Jingming's young, mocking face looked down over the entire conference room.

"Crash!"

An exquisite glass cup was violently smashed against the screen.

Water splashed everywhere, and shards of glass scattered all over the floor.

Steve, wearing a black turtleneck sweater, trembled violently in his thin frame.

His eyes were bloodshot, like a beast backed into a dead end.

His chest heaved violently, and his throat emitted rough wheezing like a broken bellows.

"Fuck! Fuck! These damn Chinese thieves!"

Steve kicked over the leather chair next to him.

He grabbed his hair and paced frantically around the conference room, his leather shoes crunching on the broken glass.

Cook sat at the end of the long table, his face as pale as paper.

The calmness and shrewdness he usually prided himself on were now shattered to smithereens.

"Steve, calm down..."

Cook swallowed dryly, his voice trembling and off-key.

"Calm down? How do you expect me to calm down!"

Steve lunged at the conference table, pressing his hands firmly on the surface, staring at Cook.

"That was our Slide-to-unlock! It was our trump card to change the world!"

He squeezed a roar like a trapped beast from his throat.

"Now it's all their patent! The millions of machines we've built have all become infringing knock-offs!"

The senior vice presidents nearby huddled in the corner, not daring to breathe.

A hardware executive mustered the courage to mutter softly.

"Boss, actually we could remove Slide-to-unlock and replace it with a password..."

"Is your head full of shit!"

Steve grabbed the laser pointer on the table and smashed it directly onto the executive's forehead.

"Didn't you understand the monster he pulled out at the end!"

Steve pointed to the frozen fingerprint groove on the screen, his eyes filled with deep despair.

"Fingerprint recognition! That's a miniaturized biometric module that even the US military hasn't popularized yet!"

"He actually jammed this kind of dimensionality-reduction strike technology into a mobile phone!"

The entire conference room fell into a deathly silence.

The sunlight outside penetrated the floor-to-ceiling windows but could not dispel the bone-chilling cold in the room.

They knew all too well what this meant.

Once the first-generation iPhone was released with its backward password lock and old-fashioned plastic chin.

The whole world would point at Apple and laugh, calling it nothing more than an expensive piece of industrial waste.

Steve slumped into the only intact chair.

He covered his face with his hands, his thin shoulders slumping in defeat.

Ten years.

The ambition he had been biding his time for for a full ten years.

Had just been trampled into the mud by a Chinese youth in his early twenties.

Cook stood up and walked over to his side.

"Steve, the launch event in three days... Wall Street capital is watching."

Cook bit his lower lip, cold sweat dripping down his chin onto his suit collar.

"Our invitations have already been sent to global media. What should we do now?"

Steve lowered his hands.

The face that had originally been full of confidence now seemed to have aged ten years.

He looked at Lu Jingming's arrogant smile on the big screen, his teeth gnashing together.

A flash of desperate madness flickered in his eyes.

"Go tell the PR department."

Steve's voice was terrifyingly hoarse.

Cook bent down, staring at him nervously.

"What notice should we send? Are we going to bite the bullet and go ahead?"

Steve clenched his fists tightly, his knuckles turning white.

"Screw that! Going on stage now is just making ourselves the laughingstock of the world!"

He stared intensely into Cook's eyes, squeezing a sentence through his teeth.

"Send an urgent email to global media, saying that I've suddenly fallen ill and the launch event is postponed indefinitely!"